1-19-2013

Not working on Ascii Wilderness and Im not sure when I will again.  I'm going to attempt a rewrite one of these days, after all I should have a central AI who controls the minds of all the critters and creatures.. I think a lot about game design these days.  A lot of what drives me crazy in today's games is item management (IE: skyrim), and clunky interface (IE: minecraft)..  I keep thinking back to Half Life (the original) and I remember how much fun you can have with 6-10 guns and no inventory page... 

I think realism has got to take a back seat in Ascii Wilderness.  Realism can lead to clunky issues  (likeovercrowded inventory with strange items, compulsive hoarding)...

We need to return to the arcade game, where playing was maximized and "managing" was minimized.  Whether you are playing a RTS game or a RPG game, "managing" can be fun or hell.  Fallout: New Vegas was one of the worst games for inventory management, while "DOOM 3" was great for inventory management - there wasnt any.. And guess what, it was basically just as good a game if not better for not hauling around a carpet bag of loot to sort through all the time trying to find an item with the right "buff".

In arcade games, playing is maximized and realism is minimized...  That means, fuck it - we don't need to count our arrows and bullets and hoard thousands of them - Just give a gun - and I don't need 30 kinds of ammunition - thanks Dead Island.

We are past the days when Link could find arrows and hearts all over the place.  Players want immersion but realism is not always the answer.  I guess I'm saying we need a return to the heart of the arcade game - fun.  And it's no fun to manage an inventory.

So I guess I'm back in the game design phase and hating modern games which have pretty graphics and crappy mechanics.  I mean dead island - really, the zombies get stronger as I get stronger and I the gun I just found does 1 point of damage more than the last one I found and now I have to discard my gun and power up a new weapon??

I have been playing cataclysm (roguelike) and a 2 dimensional map seems like a good idea (My 3 dimensional map poses all kinds of issues and im not a professional programmer)..

I'm not working on the code these days..  I originally started coding to see what I could do.. It turns out to be a lot but I have my limits.

I know when I get into the programming I have a TON of fun..  I guess I'm working on gaining some better direction before I go and start programming.. No one wants another dwarf fortress (LOL OMG no!)..

I think the virtue of most games is in their simplicity.. Where simplicity is really elegance.

I'd like to program again one day...  Programming is really joyous for me, especially with LUA.  I don't know when I'll start programming again, I guess I need a clearer vision for the game at this point.

busy

Sorry friends, neither the time nor the space for programming.  Someday... Someday...

Developement on hold

Hi everyone.  4500 hits!  Wow, thanks for the community interest!

Developement is currently on hold while I deal with life issues (marriage, family, mental health, finance, cats, etc).

Feel free to hijack the code and work on it yourself - that's why it's open source lua.

PS> someday I will take some programming classes and actually become a better programmer.

It only took me the whole summer of 2011 to devise a way for the deer to herd..  I still remember the golden moment when 7 or so were hearding... then two broke away and followed each other off into a different spot. *tears*.  It was like a father seeing his child's first steps.

Lol.

*playing "Cataclysm" roguelike by Whales..  V. good. Why did i buy oblivion???? I finally donated 10$ to whales.. since this game came out i have 300+ hours into it.

note: now known as "Cataclysm dark days ahead" with a new maintainer

above ground

Project is sidelined for the moment.  Working on sanity and emotional wellbeing instead.

Project is on the back burner.  Working hard at womens studies and social psychology at college presently.

1-10-2012 Captain's Log

Ok so this is my captains log on starship ridiculous.

I'm living with my brother for awhile.  Like I said, family having some problems with my wife and step daughter.

But he's a great programmer so I'm learning all about the heap, the stack, the cache, etc.

Sounds like he wants to help me optomize some of my code.  And I guess I was using way too many object-access-lookups when I was iterating over the map to draw things. and I understand now that's not a processer but a memory problem. And also I used my line of sight function more than was necessary and that I needed some kind of ray-casting for LOS not just the bresenham line algorithm anymore.  And really I shouldn't be having to write this weird funky graphics bullshit that only updates the current and affected squares of things. that's going to give me hell down the road. what i need is just a simple elegant drawing method that uses ray casting.

So I'm going to overhaul the code somewhat and go back to my old function "drawsurroundingswave" which uses a wavefront, and somehow add consciousness of wavefront direction to the function.. Luke explained, i guess, each square somehow remembers the slope of the line that intersects it and the players square, and it checks the next squares out for being "within a deviation of that line"... Only my brother will help me turn it into a ray-casting sort of thing.  Someday?

Right now I'm starting school and I signed up for a Women's Studies course.  It's exactly what I need.  The textbook is entitled Women: A multicultural perspective.