Bay 12 Games Forum

Also guys new to FTB minecraft, when you open the launcher initally, there's an option to change how much ram you can allocate to the program.  If you don't give it a fair amount of ram it tends to freeze up as it erases, and write information rapidly to try and keep the game loaded.  It can also just crash flat out if it doesn't have enough.

There are also some additional Java parameters that can sometimes help if FTB tends to crash even with a large RAM allocation - namely -XX:MaxPermSize=128M

Not always necessary, and YMMV and so on and so forth, but helped me to get FTB to be more stable on my machine, at least.  That was a few versions ago, though, so may not still be valid.

Edit: having said that, just reading the last few pages have made me want to get back up to speed with FTB and join in.  Is the server generally open to all (provided you obey the golden rule of "Don't be a dick"?) 

Hmm, I may have to take this challenge at some point, I've been meaning to revitalise my reading habit. 

You might enjoy Megatraveller 1 and Megatraveller 2 if you haven't seen them before.  Very dated now, and very much RPGs rather than spaceship management (as befits their origins), but enjoyable if you can get past the rough exterior.

Also, Traveller and its ilk had one of my favourite character generating approaches ever, and the two games above replicate it to some extent.  You watch/control your characters living their lives prior to the game beginning, with bonuses and maluses and skills and attributes etc changing accordingly.  It's one of the few games where your characters can die before the game even starts.

Edit: I recall Whale's Voyage (Let's Play) does something similar.  Again, though, RPG focus mainly.

So, I'm still nibbling around the edge of Python (which I've used a little bit previously).  I've moved away from libtcod and started using PyGame instead.  I've managed to get some sprites on screen from a sprite sheet, woo. 

I'm running into the (very broad) problem of how to structure my code.  I have an idea of what I want the general game flow to be like (start program, title screen, select new game, generate new game world, main game loop, call up main menu, save game, close menu, continue playing, call up main menu, load game, etc), but I'm coming unstuck over the best/most intuitive way to structure things.

I'm not entirely sure of the best way to deal with an openable/closable main menu that's available both outside of the main 'game' loop (i.e. when you first start the program) but can also be accessed from within it (i.e. by hitting Esc in-game, or whatever).  I'm wondering if I should be setting up my display engine as simply an entirely different class to my game engine, and calling it from there or wherever...and use it to distinguish between whether to display a menu, the normal game screen, the generate-a-new-world screen, etc.  But that starts to sound very complicated and spaghetti-like, and I'm wondering if there's a simple structural solution that my brain's choosing to ignore? 

Interested in how other people have structured their overall program flow!

On flight (or, rather, on Z-levels): any early thoughts on how falling damage (both giving and receiving) might work?  While I love the innate quirkiness of it, the 'DF model' of falling from any height but landing on a kitten is survivable is a little bit...odd.    Wonderful for plotting escapes from high towers if you don't like cats, though.

Edit: sensibleness (it's a word).

0.53 is junk and not representative of 0.6 at all unfortunately.

In the (very) short time I've played 0.53, it's quite pleasant running around and following some of the basic story missions.  Couple of minor bugs and glitches encountered, but nothing I wouldn't expect (died during a side mission - defending a position from a horde of OH MY GOD HUGE creatures - and upon reviving was unable to either continue the mission or to reject it, leaving me with a mission entry in my journal).  Hitboxes on trees seem to be a bit woolly, but I assume that's because it's expecting you to target the centre of the (full tree's) hitbox, rather than the trunk (which might be off to one side of that centre).  Controls in general quite good.  Digging windy little tunnels can get a bit camera-twitchy, but that's what I was trying to test, so as expected! 

Even just as a prototype, I'm enjoying this - thank you for letting people see progress this early, it's much appreciated. 

The Good

I love the music.  Seriously, I could've quite happily sat on the title screen listening to the music.  The mild jukebox functionality available in the options menu is a nice touch.

Graphical style is quite consistent, even in the prototype - nothing appears massively out of place with the aesthetic.  It's pleasantly retro while still being sharp and smooth enough to feel modern.

I can already see the potential for quite some depth of gameplay here, which is a HUGE plus to me.  I accept that the prototype is (necessarily) very limited in content, but I can see a lot of structure already in place to build stuff on, which is positive.  I like the idea of wheels-within-wheels, lots of relatively simple systems being able to interact with each other to form something emergent (e.g. operative traits affecting relationships, which can affect mission outcomes, which can affect relationships and traits, etc).

I love the news ticker.  It's a nicely sardonic sense of humour you've got going there mixed in with some slightly straighter flavour text, I approve.  Is the intention to eventually have news items generated and woven into the ticker based on your/other corps' actions, too (e.g. "Corp X suffers loss of Asset Y in mysterious criminal raid" type stuff)?

The Bad

Not a lot - it is, after all, a prototype, so most of what I would normally classify as 'bad' is simply 'early days'!    With that said:

The interface can be a little overwhelming when you're trying to navigate many items at once.  Given how much data you're trying to display, it's relatively clean, but it took me a little while to realise e.g. that the objectives when planning a mission are a pick-list, not a full list.  It would be nice to have a little more visual display for some items (e.g. an operative's profile might be nice to have a dossier-type presentation, rather than just the text box it is currently).  I accept that that's an 'early days' item, though!

Some menu items display on three lines, while the boxes they appear in are only large enough for two, leading to overlap (e.g. a mission in progress, when you dig down to the Challenges display, sometimes displays the name of the challenge, the name of the assigned operative if there is one, and then a time counter).  This might need either larger boxes or a slightly downsized font for that part of the display.

On the Intel menu, when I 'spend' my intel to uncover a corp's asset(s), it doesn't tell me on that page which corp/company they belong to - I need to dig down in the Corp menu and look through its companies to find out where they are.  Not a major issue, but would be nice if it was visible on the Intel screen as well.

A more general point: the buttons in the menus are big and visible, which is good.  The headings for each menu item are less visible, which may not be...I tend to reflexively see the buttons as menu headings, when they actually appear at the bottom of their menu section.  Spacing might help - at the moment, there's no space gap between menu sections (e.g. in the Corporate overview of my corp, the Operative list runs straight into the Intel section which runs straight into the Missions section, with no clear boundary between the two other than the great big buttons and some all-caps text).  That might just be me, though - my eye just sees it as all one run of text with some buttons, rather than distinct sections.

Again, this is mostly just look-and-feel type stuff, which I accept is going to evolve as development goes on!    Overall, as a pre-alpha prototype, I'm impressed with what I've seen.

Keep it up! 

Edit: one more 'early days' item I just spotted: I've seen a few operatives popping up with identical names (first and second).  A larger name list might help make this less common, but you might want to check against existing operative names and regenerate if needed - I got confused between my two Olivia Zods! 

Quote from: Lectorog on June 25, 2013, 05:27:17 pm

Your Twitter link is broken. Is that the only development feed you have?

Just sit and think "What company would name themselves 'Joy-Toilet'"?

I am so going to start up a luxury bathroom business and call it this.