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[Sar]

Sometimes it randomly freezes when choosing a custom seed text

Oh? At what stage is it stopping? I mean - is it white with text in the middle of the screen, or with the open-file dialog up, or what?

There's been an annoying bug for ages where periodically it'll freeze partway through startup (only ever happens during initialization, never in gameplay) but I've never been able to replicate it without the debugger attached, and never been able to replicate it while stepping through code...

while other times it makes the window where I have the shortcut randomly switch to My Documents or Recently Changed Files. (On Vista, btw.) 

Now that's pretty weird!

Did you originally have music or sound, cause I ain't hearing anything.

Not yet, no.

So all that happens is the enemy ships come endless at you? They don't really pose much of a threat and rarily speak, so it unfortunately got boring fairly quickly.

As to threat: it should get harder as the stage progresses, in theory, with more complex and faster attacks. One problem I'm still undecided about is that generally speaking, stages are too long, or at least take too long to get interesting, because you don't really need that many characters of the source text to determine where to spawn which enemies, and I'm trying to use all of it. So one solution is to make stages a fixed length (or at least a maximum length) and then just discard any of the source text which hasn't been used yet, but that seems like cheating. Also, I suspect different people would have differing ideas about how long 'too long' is...

[Noyb]

Oh? At what stage is it stopping? I mean - is it white with text in the middle of the screen, or with the open-file dialog up, or what?

There's been an annoying bug for ages where periodically it'll freeze partway through startup (only ever happens during initialization, never in gameplay) but I've never been able to replicate it without the debugger attached, and never been able to replicate it while stepping through code...

It happens immediately after choosing the text in the open-file dialog. The dialog box disappears, the game window opens, but doesn't render anything (it shows my desktop through it in Vista. clicking on it turns the render area black and tells me that the program is not responding). If I see text on the screen almost immediately, it never freezes.

I'm pretty sure it's not complexity of the file, since it loaded the entire plaintext of Dracula in just a few seconds for a playable level...then froze the next time I tried it. It has both loaded correctly and frozen on the same files.

By the way, is the entire game supposed to quit when you die? Would it be possible to have it restart the level instead, quitting on ESC or Alt-F4?

while other times it makes the window where I have the shortcut randomly switch to My Documents or Recently Changed Files. (On Vista, btw.) 

Now that's pretty weird!

It's also changing that directory to My Music as well. Weird.

Edit: Playing Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil was trippy. Enemies were shouting "Be still, you pessimistic mole!" and "Become mediocre!" 

[AdamButcher]

I love this idea, but am having a couple of problems (like many others).

1) I don't know how to make it select a poem that isn't Raven.txt. The only way I can get it to read another poem is to paste one intoe Raven.txt. All other methods seem to make it fault just as it says "Reading Input File".

2)The enemies only quote things in quotes I take? What of poems with no speech? Shouldn't they just quote whole lines/sentences?

3)It's a real shame you haven't been able to get sound, music and varying (themed) backgrounds in time.

Still really nicely programmed. And some poems are well challenge- try "Dead Before Death" by Christina Rossetti.

[Sar]

It happens immediately after choosing the text in the open-file dialog. The dialog box disappears, the game window opens, but doesn't render anything (it shows my desktop through it in Vista. clicking on it turns the render area black and tells me that the program is not responding). If I see text on the screen almost immediately, it never freezes.

Damn; that sounds just like the issue I've been having, although it's the first time I've heard of it occurring outside of the IDE. :/ I'll look into it some more, but it probably won't be a priority for the deadline since there's all the game-nicety stuff to do before then as well...

By the way, is the entire game supposed to quit when you die? Would it be possible to have it restart the level instead, quitting on ESC or Alt-F4?

Yeah; basically, the game consists a load of nested states, and when you die it quits out of two states. One of these is the 'handle player death' state, and one of them is the 'game-stage' state which contains that. Ordinarily this would quite back to the menu state which sits right at the top, but I've not written a menu yet. ;-) That's for tonight.

It's also changing that directory to My Music as well. Weird.

Have you opened any files from that folder? The only directory-changing stuff I'm doing is changing the application's 'current directory' so that it can still find game assets after you've loaded a text file from a different dir; I wouldn't have expected it to be even possible to affect the instance of Explorer which the app was launched from...

Enemies were shouting "Be still, you pessimistic mole!" and "Become mediocre!" 

Awesome. ;-)

For a long while I was testing it with Full-Life Consequences, mostly 'cause it turned out to have a nice tall and wide game arena, and at the time - I've since changed some of the generation - the stage opened with a few seconds' pause, followed by a single guy charging right down the middle yelling "ITS TIME TO END THIS ONES AND FOR ALL!" ;-)

1) I don't know how to make it select a poem that isn't Raven.txt. The only way I can get it to read another poem is to paste one intoe Raven.txt. All other methods seem to make it fault just as it says "Reading Input File".

The interface for this will be improved before I mark it as 'finished'; are you starting the app with the '-O' commandline argument (a temporary hack) and getting the same freezing issue that Noyb was describing?

2)The enemies only quote things in quotes I take? What of poems with no speech? Shouldn't they just quote whole lines/sentences?

Yep, just stuff in quotes. I guess it wouldn't be too hard to check whether it's managed to glean any quotes and take some likely-looking lines if it hasn't, but it's a whole lot harder to detect sentences that make sense on their own from free text, which is why I'd not done it previously. I expect some of the time to get some pretty weird utterances when grabbing stuff which isn't dialogue!

3)It's a real shame you haven't been able to get sound, music and varying (themed) backgrounds in time.

(As it goes, I should be able to get some sounds done this evening, and at the very least drop a combat theme from a previous game in so it's not totally silent the whole game.)

[Gainsworthy]

I also don't know how to use non-raven quotes.

Could you make the game slightly more gratifying? I'm one of those hyped up individuals who needs to see and hear the demise of his foes. The enemy ships are snazzy, but they just vanish! Into the aether! 

Um, also, how much of this is procedurally generated? Think I'd enjoy it more with a little descriptor.

I guess this is still the demo though. I'd love to see this with some more polish!

[Hideous]

My enemies don't ever seem to actually say anything

I open my files with that -O argument, by the way.


I even tried it with The Raven, and the enemies never utter a word.

[Sar]

My enemies don't ever seem to actually say anything

Do they still not say anything when you don't shoot them? The ones that talk start talking after they've been deployed for 1 second, so it's feasible that you could be killing them too fast... in the copy of The Raven which was supplied, enemies nine and eleven should have something to say...


That said, I think I do need to adjust the balance of how frequently the enemies say things; originally my choice-generator had a bit of a bias towards lower numbers, which got taken into account when I balanced stuff... then I noticed this and fixed it, and now things which were picked at the low end of the spectrum don't happen as often as they should.

I also don't know how to use non-raven quotes.

Open the game with the commandline parameter '-O'. An easy way to do this is to create a shortcut to the executable (drag the executable to where you want to create the shortcut while holding Alt), then right-click that, choose 'Properties', then on the 'Shortcut' tab go to the end of the text in the 'Target' box and append "-O" without the quotes, outside of the quotes which are already there.

Could you make the game slightly more gratifying? I'm one of those hyped up individuals who needs to see and hear the demise of his foes. The enemy ships are snazzy, but they just vanish! Into the aether! 

This is a good point. The game needs explosions. And explosion sound effects. This can be done. ;-)

Um, also, how much of this is procedurally generated? Think I'd enjoy it more with a little descriptor.

Basically, it 'randomly' generates the levels for the most part, except instead of using actual random numbers, it reads the text file bit by bit until it has enough bits to make up a number within the range requested. So for example, at the beginning it thinks "Should this be a dense Touhou-esque game with a tiny player collision radius, or should this be a sparse R-type-esque game with a large collision radius?"; this is a 1-bit decision, so I ask for a number between 0 and 1, the number-feeder picks a single bit out of the feed and returns that as the result.

There's quite a bit of structure to the randomness, as well - for example, each enemy it generates has a grade (how good it is) and as the game progresses it should be throwing enemies of progressively higher grades at you; unfortunately one problem right now is that the stages are too long and it's pretty hard to get far enough to see the grade 4 and 5 enemies where they start firing homing and re-vectoring missiles at you...

[Hideous]

Enemies 9 and 11. Okay, I'll try that.


EDIT:

Enemy 9 was quiet. Enemy 11 did say something though .


You really need to make them speak more often.

[Sar]

So, Compendium is finished. Or at least, finished enough for now.

As per first post in thread:

You'll need .NET2.0 (not included), some text files containing poetry or short stories (two included) and to be able to press the arrow keys (to move) and the Z key (to fire) in order to play.

All controls are configurable in config.xml

COMPENDIUM 1.0 (~6.2MB)

I'll release the classes I used for the number-feeding and text analysis later, in case anyone's interested in that part. Right now I'm too annoyed 'cause I've only been trying to post this for about two hours... lousy ISP caching forum errors and refusing to let me post. :/

[moi]

Not an easy concept but nicely done nonetheless.
The game would need more variety in backgrounds, ennemis, pattern, strategies, ship capacities, etc.. and that would be an interesting game (I know the compo delay wasn't sufficient for all that)
Due to the PCG aspect, maybe a time attack style of gameplay would be appropriate (instead of infinite play) ?

Also : I don't know how feasible this would be, but it would be cool if the game could use parts from the text to add a background story or sthg.

[William Broom]

WAYWAYWAY too hard for me, but still a cool idea.

[Hideous]

I have no idea how to open a file other than the Raven with this :/

[Sar]

I have no idea how to open a file other than the Raven with this :/

At the title screeen, up/left and down/right will cycle through options; the speech bubble above the player ship will change. Hit fire (Z, by default) on "Choose a New Story" and it should let you select a new text file to source the game from.

[Daniel Benmergui]

I love the amiga-style artwork and music .

As for the gameplay... nothing much happens... enemies will only rarely shout out any Raven quotes, which was dissapointing .

I really liked the idea of enemy poetry quoting though.

Thanks, Sar!

[zradick]

Very nice! I particularly liked the music.
The ship design was interesting as well.  Kind of an anime style but without being overboard.
Cheers,
--Zack