7 day rl 3rd day

Lots of progress. Have almost all the item types I want in the game, All the enemy mechanics I want, and the gimmick firmly in place. Now comes the horribly filling of content and figuring out how to balance/make this fun. Not much else to say, happily surprised at progress so far.

And a screenshot for giggles

Minor update

Worked on some tools that may or may not make it to Legend but have finally got a working a* path finding formula going. Maybe could update with something sometime soon but not much worth showing.

Field of View

Reworking the basic display parts of my game as well as storage ideas for maps. What I currently have is far too cumbersome to work though what I am making may not be too efficent. Will work on it later but results are promising. Though side tracked by trying to figure out the ever elusive field of vision formula I always mess up. Completely pointless to anything I'm working on but I still want to get it licked if I ever use it in the future.

Currently working with something called the Bresenham's line algorithm. It's working for revealing all the squares I want revealed but I'm doing something wrong in pruning the blocked ones. Still working on it and learning from it and also may have something simpler to upgrade legends engine. Would just need some readjusting to work with the current generator though.

success

Quick update, figured out why Legend wasn't working right. Simple fix that only works in the current context of the generator but it's a start. Now to get the locked doors to work properly along with return doors to previous hallways.

slow progress update.

Some progress that don't seem like progress is the standard at the moment. Legends and my other half played with testing grounds for things have hit some programing roadblocks. I have an idea of what's wrong with both but just not the time to sit down and really work it.

That said I am making progress on it. Legend has the very basic dungeon generation down, it's just the changing rooms that is odd at the moment. Best described as walking into the next corridor telports you back to starting room and the doorways aren't refreshing right. It took a while to figure that out as nothing made sense in my debug map and I couldn't walk through some doorways which were in reality walls. Still progress, I have hopes yet. If all else fails I'll just have to work on the items a bit to get them down.

Slain hydra

Short update for this. In my last post I mentioned the problem I had with Legends preliminary generation. Now that problem is gone, small little bug as I expected and should have avoided but how it goes. So now that that's solved I have to figure out how to translate the layout into the actual room data which will be interesting.

In other news I'm reading through a copy of Programing AI by Example by Mat Buckland. It's getting me some AI techniques and such though I'm having to look into dreaded math. We'll see how this pans out. I've been playing with a more old style roguelike set up just to cut teeth that won't have any impact on Legend but it helps get the bad practice out.

Break time is fun time

Family friendly entertainment

As I get breaks at work and bring a thumb drive to have music I also bring code to work on. Last night I got to the point where things could hit things and mobs would move around (after much bad AI work) so I added the bad idea of giblets to the code.

Doesn't do anything but it's possibly going to come up more later. Enemies that drop bombs on death for instance or maybe just good old fashioned key dropping. The random gib tile is a thing given by the on death variable I put in the character so it really could be anything. Function passing in python (with default value editing) is quickly becoming my favorite way to make objects. Next up I'll try going about some actual attack and defense things and get towards the final screen sizes. After that tackle dungeon screens with a hard coded maze.

Revenge of the math

Some things just come back and bite you. The past few days I've felt the sting of things I've forgoten or ignored.

I'm horrid at math. Supposedly this is rare in computer science things but I just am. Through school I've generally programmed a calculator, which surprisingly I was allowed to get away with as somehow I knew the things by being able to program them, and just avoided those classes. College I jumped to a related degree that just plain had less math.

Last few days we needed some more graphical things set up. That required lines drawn between nearly the shortest points of some lines and some points, in other words everything I've been avoiding. The crash course has went alright, as this is not completely needed to be automated some corner cutting is needed but it is sad I've spent a lot of the past two days failing at math instead of being stuck on a programing problem. But I suppose that's life.

Still kicking post trip

Oh boy I haven't put anything up here in a while. I do have half an excuse though. Last week I was a timezone and a few states away from training and this week I have had work to deal with. The trip was interesting and we arrived in a below zero blizzard. Warmed up later though, other than that nothing to say beyond being somewhere else will ruin your ability to game as much as missing a flight home. That was an interesting 16 hours. For now though I still need to recover some more and get used to being in my native time zone and native work load.

Busy past few days.

Well it looks like Combat project is being delayed but this time not of my own laziness entirely this time. I had gone in for an interview about a week ago and was calling in to see if I was passed up and told to come in and talk, figured it was a very formal and nice "well this is what we didn't like" thing. Long story short is that I manged to squeek into the place and will possibly be working in about a weeks time.

I'm posting this here because I do not know what I will be doing with this blog. I was having this as something to work on regularly while unemployed and now that I'm getting employed I do not know if I'll have time for it. I may end up cutting back on posts do to work but we'll see. I'll try to finish up Combat test and maybe a few other musings though but we'll see. For now I have to get prepared for some of the job things, buy a few more articles of clothing as the dress code is a little higher than I thought it would be. Either way it's an exciting time right now, I may actually get to program in a professional degree and python was actually the thing that got me in the door.

further delay on anything interesting

It seems I won't have anything interesting today to offer either. After some poking around I got a quick interview to show up to. While this all well and good I have little current programing examples. To remedy this all day I have been producing some newer examples of my competence in coding.

Namely some multithreading and server client code. Then combining the two. It's going along decently well as this is territory I have covered quite a bit in my schooling days but I have never done it in python so there is a few language hurdles to overcoming though hopefully it'll help out in the end. I may attempt to get some SQL examples done but I don't think that will happen if I want sleep.

ai brain problems

Took yesterday off to play some games and check some job things. Though today I have been hitting the code hard for the past few hours. In those few hours I've set up all the variables and have been starting to test the ai defense switching in response to getting hit with attacks that punish it for the defense it's in.

variables variables everywhere and I'm this close to needing to watch all of them

The above image is all the default values, I'll be making a monster creator method to tune them to values needed. As it stands it's both due to me trying to do too much at once and not planning correctly. There are probably quite a few things I could reduce or find a more elegant solution to implement but it's eluding me. Though I will say that I did discover a bug in my previous tests as I was only using the default randumb AI pool on accident and that was sorted out.

I'm unsure what it is at the moment due to my AI being a mess of variables. Sorta stumped and more than a bit frustrated though I'm slowly worming my way through it. Not much else to say beyond tomorrow I'll try to think up things more interesting to say. The situation at hand is taxing me a bit and I have some mundane things I was going to work on as well as this that are leaving me a bit brain dead for writing an interesting post.  So nothing interesting till tommorow.

To AI and beyond

Well finally figured out what my problem was. After getting tired of looking for the print statements manually I just used find function to scroll through them out. It seems I had made a debug method inside the charcter class to display all the pools and this is where the debug spam was coming from, for some reason I could not see the debug in character_debug_pool_list() unless it was commented out.

So that is taken care of for now. Now I am working on a more inteligent AI system. Currently in a text file is some mental sorting going on about what variables I should have and what basic procedures I should go through. This may develop into it's own class but I'm not sure yet.

The basic idea is to let it "see" that someone is blocking then possibly use armor breaker later to maximize damage on the player. The same is true for the other punisher moves. This leaves dice pool manipulation up in the air, but I'm not sure if I'll even be having that for most monsters. So far it's getting organized and looks alright but I'll have to start testing it.

Beyond that is actual demo. I can simply set up "choose from this list of monsters to fight" and have that sort of demo. It'll work but it seems a little cheap. I should at least try to turn it into a simple game of sorts, maybe even have some leveling up as it is a RPG but that is for later. Though thoughts on it is ever X levels gain another dice to roll and maybe just standard +1 hp per level. Maybe even throw a weapon or two in there for increased damage.

game night

Today's post was mostly delayed by watching some friends stream games and run my own. I run a silly fantasy Mutants and Masterminds game that has been going on for a very long time now. It's a fun little game that is getting towards the end of ti's lifespan.

For a change of plot driven pace I decided to have a little dungeon crawl through a very splatter house themed session. This was roughly 3 sessions ago that this started. I filled a house with undead things and mid bosses who've been easily dispatched. While fun I expected this to be at most 2 sessions, even after many sessions in the game and realizing how slow combat can be online this caught me by suprise.

The general hope was to finish it up this month take a month off to finish up some lose ends in my next game and then start that. That deadline is being delayed. Not that this is a bad things, at the moment I'm trying out a few ideas in system for what I'm calling mid boss enemies that I've described before, and variations on it. They go down fast or get weakened more easily then the usually created monsters in the game. Some work in game, some are just hand wave for interesting sake but either way it's a learning experience. Just wish it was a little faster but we're having fun with it.

AI concerns and clean up.

Entering in the punisher move for bonus against parry and thinking about AI while generally cleaning it up. Not much to say about it so I'll dive into what I can discuss.

The current thought is how is the AI going to have and use edge abilities. For the most part they are specialized and require some "thought" behind them in use. One thought is that it can "cheat" and just have a timer to see if you stayed in a defensive position for x turns. It's simple and effective but unsatisfying. I don't want to make this too complex so I decided having some random dice maxes based on what type it is. Give it a chance to suprise a player while having a tendancy to lean towards one type.

Beyond that I think I'll have the AIs picking pools be very simple, possibly stupidly so. At the moment I have little idea on what is the best strategy for going about an turn though some ideas have been thought of. It's a start at least.

Weekend with cats

Just a short post. I haven't done much to note today beyond get a quick call to house sit and take care of some cats. Taking a few hours to coordinate the efforts and go over a few things that need to take care of and I'm here. It's not much of a problem for me as that with the renovation of some bridges it takes longer to get to said house.

Though to make this more relevant I am going to be working on Combat Tester a bit. Going to include the first series of Edge abilities. First being the armor break one and then maybe a bit of dice pool manipulation on the opponents side. The main problem I have at the moment with the dice pool manipulation is when it goes off. I am trying to keep it open for future developments of including multiple player controlled characters and enemies.

High heat and goalposts

Living in an area known for cold weather and white outs does leave you quite vulnerable to heat waves. Also having no reliable mode of transportation exacerbates things. The past weekend was the start of the heatwave up here so it's been a bit of suffering, combined with the fact I did a little leg work for job hunting I'm quite beat today. So short post but I have done something more than make a post about hot weather.



Soldiering on though I started putting in the ground work for the "edge" system. While not thrilled with my first draft of it I'll work on it and see if anything else shakes loose. I have it set up in the ability to accumulate "edge" that can be spent as a free action for effect. At the moment it's just a trivial check of activation but it's enough to show me bugs aren't popping up at the moment. I know they are somewhere deep in the recesses of my code but they haven't been crawling on the floors yet.

My first goal is to put in some of the opportunity skills that can make fighting blocking or guarding foes easier. With that I'm going to have to change up AI a bit, so seeing enemy X does not mean "drop at least X points into edge and spam armor break". I had the thought of taking some of my AI programing ideas and applying it for this but it would be far too early and complex. After that I want some dice pool manipulation, I have some rough ideas that I don't know if they are overpowered or not, but that's what testing is for.