Bay 12 Games Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.

Messages - JanusTwoface

Pages: 1 ... 6 7 [8] 9 10 ... 153
106
Other Games / Re: Maia - Space colony god game (Kickstarter!)
« on: November 01, 2012, 09:07:59 am »
This can only bode well for you:
https://twitter.com/indiegamescom/status/263932219192668160

(Retweeted by @notch)

107
Creative Projects / Re: A Sea of Stars (Chapter 19: Traitor, updated T/F)
« on: October 30, 2012, 11:57:52 am »
Chapter 19 - Traitor

108
Creative Projects / Re: NaNoWriMo 2012
« on: October 28, 2012, 11:12:09 pm »
Quote from: USEC_OFFICER on October 28, 2012, 08:38:37 pm
Quote from: Yoink on October 28, 2012, 08:17:45 pm
Went to a Kick-off Party yesterday. :)

I just need to get some notes written before the month actually starts...

Lucky bastard. I've barely know what my characters I'm going to have.

Started with nothing last year and let it grow organically. Definitely went in an interesting direction. And from the looks of it, that's what I'm going to end up doing again this year. :)

109
Other Games / Re: XCOM: Enemy Unknown (New by Firaxis)
« on: October 27, 2012, 01:17:23 pm »
Does anyone have / know of a particularly good Let's Play of this?

Unfortunately, I don't have the time to actually play at the moment, but I can always put it on my second monitor and watch it in the background.

110
DF Suggestions / Re: Pathfinding through the GPU
« on: October 27, 2012, 12:53:42 pm »
Direct link to the PDF for those without a subscription to view original link.

Previous threads that have talked about pathfinding in general (and IIRC GPU pathfinding in specific):
- Improving Pathfinding. (Computer sciency)
- Spin the pathfinding off to other threads.

I think the two biggest problems with this would be:

1) Who would do it?

Toady One doesn't know how to do it and hasn't really expressed any interest in either learning how to correctly do multithreading (at least at the moment) or in finding someone else to do it for him. The idea of getting other people to help with the code has been discussed fairly extensively before and it seems like a no go, at least at the moment.

2) Would it actually work?

The method they presented in the paper is pathfinding on a much simpler structure than DF has with all tiles either being passable or non-passable, only two dimensions, and no dynamic features. Would it be able to cope with constantly changing pathing data (flowing water for example) and three dimensional data? I'm guessing not. One of the biggest costs of GPU algorithms is constantly moving data between the CPU and GPU.

Also, could the maps that DF uses even fit in a GPU texture? Even a 2x2 region has roughly a million tiles in it (~ 96*96*100). The largest example in the paper had only 340 nodes with 2150 edges between them. This could be somewhat offset by using some form of hierarchical pathfinding (discussed before), but then you'd have to constantly swap the data on the GPU between levels which would kill any performance gains.

111
Creative Projects / Re: A Sea of Stars (Chapter 18: Daedalus, updated T/F)
« on: October 26, 2012, 10:35:53 am »
Chapter 18 - Daedalus

112
Creative Projects / Re: A Sea of Stars (Chapter 17: Darkness, updated T/F)
« on: October 23, 2012, 12:07:15 pm »
Chapter 17 - Darkness

113
Creative Projects / Re: A Sea of Stars (Chapter 16: Collision, updated T/F)
« on: October 19, 2012, 09:51:29 am »
Thanks!

Chapter 16 - Collision

114
Other Games / Re: X@COM - Where ASCII and X-COM Collide!
« on: October 19, 2012, 12:44:13 am »
Quote from: Kyzrati on October 19, 2012, 12:20:58 am
Scheme? How many people actually use that for game scripting? I haven't used scheme since back in college... Sure brings back memories: For a class project which was supposed to be a simple "walk around in a few rooms and interact with something" text adventure, I wrote a full-blown RPG with inventory, weapons, enemies, combat, and AI. It was checked over for about 1 minute by a TA in the lab :P
Well, I'm a grad student / teach classes at one of the universities that still uses it in both the introductory and many high level CS courses, so I get a pretty good dose of it each semester. Granted, I've only seen it used once for game scripting (Ypsilon Scheme and their pinball games) but it's got a nice overlap between code and data that could be really useful for just this purpose that really doesn't show up in any non-lisp-y language.

Might be fun to see how many people actually take the time to learn it for modding though. Hmm. That'd be a downside. At least with Lua you get the WoW and Civ V crowds, JavaScript gives you the web developers, and Python gives you Civ IV and probably the shallowest learning curve. Hmm.

115
Creative Projects / Re: NaNoWriMo 2012
« on: October 19, 2012, 12:42:06 am »
That'd be about right. Easier said than done though. I still haven't gone back and edited mine from last year. :-\ :)

116
Other Games / Re: X@COM - Where ASCII and X-COM Collide!
« on: October 19, 2012, 12:05:49 am »
Quote from: Kyzrati on October 18, 2012, 11:52:26 pm
I think full-on scripting is really cool (and obviously the most flexible from a user point of view), but I didn't want to go quite that far since it can be a lot of extra work for those gains. I really like what the Incursion guy did for his game, though.
I haven't had the time to look through the entire link just yet, but it looks like they wrote their own scripting language. Eesh. No wonder that made for a lot of extra work. :) Writing a full blown interpreter/compiler can be a lot of fun, but that's one heck of a rabbit hole for a game. More likely, I'd got for binding an already existing language (Lua or Scheme most likely) and exposing an interface to the engine.

Quote from: Kyzrati on October 18, 2012, 11:52:26 pm
One of these days I'll actually get time when I have a better working knowledge of Linux (I mostly use Windows) so I can actually port the source and you're not limited by your OS!
On my laptop at least I have Wine, so I'll give that a try at some point too.

117
Other Games / Re: X@COM - Where ASCII and X-COM Collide!
« on: October 18, 2012, 11:28:29 pm »
More of a reply than I was expecting. :)

I guess that the tabbed format doesn't make sense for the items/entites where every item/entity has every field. Then duplicating the extra tag names really doesn't make sense and just takes up space (although if you get enough of them there's the issues of duplicating the header information so you can still see it, but I guess that's just what you'd have to do.)

What I was more thinking about what your third paragraph, supporting some sensible way of merging and organizing data. At the moment, you seem to have exactly one file per kind of data, each with their own specific format. It would be nice if you could separate those out (more like the DF raws actually, although that format is even stranger than yours :) ) into say multiple files for special abilities, all of which would be loaded and parsed. Then you could mix and match files to get sub-mods, rather than dealing with moving around lines of individual files. Although it seems like you're thinking about that to, so power to you.

I guess part of the reason why I'm asking is that I'm wrestling with the same ideas in a few projects that I'm working on. I really like the idea of games that are basically just a strong core engine with a "default mod" that you can make do all sorts of wonderful things (a la DF or X@COM), but I'm still struggling with a data format. I'm not really sold on YAML, being personally more of a fan of JSON or S-Expression based files, but I've also toyed with the idea of pushing the configuration files all of the way to scripts, like Python/Lua or the like (similar to what Civ IV and V do). That might get really interesting. Who knows.

In any case, thanks for the explanation. One of these days I'll actually get time when I have a Windows machine (I mostly use Linux) so I can actually try out X@COM, but until then I'm really enjoying reading about your development blog at least. :) It really is an awesome idea for a game/engine and I can't wait to see what you and others do with it.

118
Other Games / Re: X@COM - Where ASCII and X-COM Collide!
« on: October 18, 2012, 02:06:13 pm »
So out of curiosity, why are you using your own format for the raws? It seems to me like it would be easier to use an existing framework, such as JSON/XML/YAML. Sure, you'd need a library to parse it, but then again on the flip side there are libraries to parse it. Also it potentially wouldn't be as difficult to read (at least for me, YMMV).

Spoiler: Sample: special_abilities.yaml (click to show/hide)

Okay, so it would actually make the files a fair bit bigger (because of retyping the column headers), but in exchange I'd say it would be easier to read/edit without scrolling off who knows where to the right.

119
Other Games / Re: Castle Story - Castle building RTS with mining and 'splosions. Prototype Naow
« on: October 18, 2012, 12:34:36 pm »
Quote from: Fikes on October 18, 2012, 11:31:29 am
Castle Story and Zomboid make me want to start an independent game publishing company. Great developers and game designers don't always make great business decisions.
Seems like an independent game publisher sort of defeats the point of being independent. :)

Although isn't Indie Fund something close to this?

120
DF Suggestions / Re: Website news posts suggestion
« on: October 18, 2012, 12:11:01 pm »
I guess it doesn't actually solve the problem you're talking about, but if you follow any other RSS feeds already, the DF update feed (linky) will give you a paragraph each day about what he's working on. It's short enough that it doesn't take much time out of your day but it helps a lot with remembering what's going on in each update.

Pages: 1 ... 6 7 [8] 9 10 ... 153