Chaswick.net

I have a new video demonstrating a revamped look, some more demos involving rudimentary effects and AI, a debug mode which I hope I won’t need much of, and a message window prototype.  To talk about the AI for a moment, where before it was blind, deaf and dumb, now it isn’t (quite).  What I mean is that it has a “sense” (like sight, smell, sound, taste, feel, etc), which its brain consults before decisions are made.  And, yes, now you can see there is at least one decision being made, namely “Do I follow the yellow dots, or go around in a circle?”.  If there is a yellow dot in its square, the AI follows the trail, otherwise it goes in a circle.  It is not difficult to imagine an almost infinite variety of AIs which could be developed just based on this one “sense” and the simplistic “A or B” decision making process.

The debug mode I coded in because it was becoming clear I needed a quick way to consult what a given area of the level “looked like” in code.   The windowing system and display redesign kind of came out of that.  The display is essentially a copy of Nethack or ADOM.  The single yellow number “3″ is Chas’s primary stat.  Unlike some other games, I am planning to employ a good deal of information hiding and discovery in this game, and the idea is that this stat is all you start off “knowing” about yourself.

The movie is again in untimed mode, because I find that easier to test in.  Untimed mode means the game pauses indefinitely for user input, as opposed to a “real-time” game where game time elapses independent of user input.

The meaning of today’s post can be found in the number forty-two, across that is.  In today’s crossword puzzle it was the clue that gave me the final bit of trouble.  In its honor, I am linking the Wikipedia article on its counterpart answer.  The clue was “Boston entree”.  I particularly like the joke at the bottom of the page.  See, you learn something new every day!

I have a new scoring system that I believe could be applied across sports leagues to improve the “watchability” (I must have seen too many bud light commercials recently).  I am calling it the “plus one” system.  Essentially, it rewards teams that score first for scoring first.  My idea is that by rewarding teams that score first over teams that score second, a more aggressive attitude (which I believe fans in all sports like to see) is rewarded over a more defensive attitude.  This is accomplished through the “plus one” mechanic.

To illustrate the mechanic, take your favorite sport, and imagine a situation where the two competing teams are tied, but the score is non-zero.  In all sports I can think of, this tie is treated equally.  My idea is to add an invisible “plus one” to the score of the team which was the first to reach that number.  This rewards them for achieving the score first, and forces the other (losing) team to respond in a more aggressive manner than if the two teams were literally drawn.  And the “plus one” system works without altering the scoring, tactics, or play making of any game to which it is applied.

The system would affect the philosophy and attitude of the games, but in my opinion only to the benefit of the spectators, which are really the consumer of and fuel behind the sport anyway. And such a change in philosophies would most certainly affect the tactics and structure in the long run, but professional sports are dynamic anyways, and this would be no different in my opinion.  This is dynamism which the sport’s fans can really get behind.

So, I saw this article at Yahoo! news and I couldn’t resist doing some quick gimping.  For those who don’t know what an Apple storefront looks like:

And Microsoft’s version (It’s subtle):

Well, I managed to add a prototype for entity “brains”.  Plug a brain into the entity, and away we go…This BasicBrain (as I have so creatively named the class) sets up a movement queue that tells it to run around in a circle.  If for some reason it can’t move where it wants to this turn, it skips that movement.  This is a “feature” of the current game logic engine, which doesn’t yet notify entities of things like “couldn’t move;  @ blocking way”.  I expect to handle some of that when the combat engine work starts, which should be soon.

I also changed the way the curses color pairs were managed, putting them into a singleton color manager.  Check out the Pages link under MyRogueLike -> ScreenShots for a cool .swf video of the AI in action.  The game mode is set to untimed turns, so the movement may appear jerky as I input keys in odd intervals.  I am not the Cyan @ symbol.  Rest assured, I have not (yet) noticed any performance problems.  From the movie, you’d think I was making RoguePaint v.01!

I watched the Olympics, and I watched his one-one hundreth of a second victory, and I watched him make history shortly afterward.  He made news again recently, but this time for alleged pot use, backed up by from what I understand some incriminating photos.  First, some disclosure:  I am twenty eight, a sometimes drinker, may or may not have ever used pot, college graduate who thinks this entire thing is just ridiculous.  How ridiculous do I consider this?  About on the same level of allowing people to ingest a substance known to impair decision making (without consequence), and then putting penalties in place for when bad decisions happen shortly afterwards.

What is the difference between inhaling one substance and ingesting another?  In this case, it is that one is legal and one is not.  For some, this may be sufficient support to rule Micheal Phelps a fallen hero.  Fortunately, our justice system is sane and is built upon challenging unjust laws.  So, to me, a generally law abiding american citizen, the Micheal Phelps story simply demonstrates that the law he broke is on the face of it unjust.  He has not done anything to tarnish his image in my eyes.  Show me proof of him doping, and then I will cry and scream with you and lament the falling down of yet another american sports icon.

The latest screen shot represents many hours of blood sweat and tears spent hassling with std::sort() on vectors of pointers to objects, among other things.  Fortunately, it turns out I am not completely stupid.  Again, the screen shot does not show much in the way of difference, except for one obvious thing.  However, I was able to code in stats for entities, and also even begin working on effects. Currently the stats support permanent and temporary values, with the temporary values consisting of ordinal pairs where x is number of turns the temporary effect should last and y is what the effect is.  I anticipate in the future making the class a bit fuller in order to support various rates of degradation.

As you can see from the screen shot, entities (including the player) have statistics broken down by color.  The on screen avatar is displayed in the color of the highest statistic.  I prototyped a movement effect, which currently leaves the vacated square of a moving entity the color of that entities highest attribute, but I can envision other cool effects that can be done once I sort out how these effects will integrate.  The nice thing right now is the cell basically just asks for any effects, and it could theoretically treat those effects afterward much like it treats the entities.

My girlfriend’s family likes to go gambling.  And apparently, they don’t gamble unless the amount of money involved is significant to them.  I have discovered, from what they have told me, that in certain parts of Asia, it is common for people to gamble, at least more so than what I am used to here in the U.S.  To be fair, my parents both came from Ohio, so I think my exposure to casino gambling is less than the average American.

I have been taking them to the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino here in Tampa, which recently added “Vegas style’ slot machines and even more recently, “Vegas style” table games.  Personally, I only feel comfortable playing the slots, but I have discovered that the amount of money I will lose if I keep playing the slots (only ten or twenty bucks) every time I go there is significant.  The odds apparently favor my learning to play Blackjack (they have the real, 3:2 kind) if I want to hold on to my money longer, and stave off the boredom of walking around a smokey casino for three hours (on average) waiting for my passengers to finish.

I have found a great website for those interested in losing less money, and getting more fun out of, going to a casino when it cannot be avoided:  The Wizard of Odds.  It is really a fantastic site, and the material there is written by an actuary who lives and works in Vegas.  In my opinion, it is a goldmine of useful and reliable information, which is harder and harder to find on the web.

My one paragraph review on the Hard Rock follows.  First, disclosure;  I have been to Vegas (around ten years ago) and Atlantic City (around five), but I am not a gambler.  Things I don’t like;  The native american smoke shop and poor ventilation make for a very smokey environment (except for the poker room – no spectators allowed though), high table limits (15$ minimums at some blackjack tables are available but only in off peak times, expect to pay 25$), and somewhat poor customer service.

To elaborate briefly on the last point, every time I have gone I see a patron and a casino worker arguing over a payout (either at a ticket reimbursement machine or slot machine) and the casino workers are always taking a very defensive tone that borders on accusing the patron of cheating.  I don’t know if the patrons are cheating, I just know that the attitude of the casino in every case I have seen would make me very upset if I were a paying customer, and usually the amounts are small (20-50 dollars).

To elaborate further, I have seen the ticket cashout machine display “Incomplete payout” (establishing that the machine at least did malfunction) and stop working, a patron waiting at least 20 minutes for somebody to come to the machine, and then when I walked by again 15 minutes later, still talking to the staff with the staff point blank saying that unless the tapes show otherwise, she is not getting her money.  Again, I don’t know the whole situation, but it is apparent that either there are a lot of people trying to scam the casino, or the casino is willing to rub you the wrong way if you are unfortunate enough to get stuck at a malfunctioning machine.  Either way, not too great a situation.  I advise avoiding the machines (slot and otherwise) if you want to eliminate the possibility of a malfunction ruining your night (which it would, based on my observations).

Things I like:  You can play blackjack, mini baccarat, pai gow poker, slot machines (even a few two-cent ones), video poker, let em ride, texas hold ‘em (I believe it is 85$-15$ to get in, whatever that means), omaha hi-lo, seven card stud, and perhaps more.  I know for a fact that my girlfriend’s family would not be interested in going if not for the variety of table games.  It is also pretty empty when we go, typically arriving at midnight and leaving around 3 am (they work at a restaurant) and exceptionally easy to get in when parking in the South garage coming from the I-4 eastbound ramp.

Here’s another contest entry.  I was happy with the way the selection of the tiger turned out, as well as the splash of light across its face.  However, I wasn’t as happy with the lighter grays I was able to get, and tried to compensate by adding some extra shadows.  I didn’t do that well in the contest, but I think that was because people were looking for more outrageous mutations.

And the original:

I managed to get some more work done on the myRoguelike engine.  I implemented a user input model wherein all entities on the map are notified of user input and take appropriate action (currently just moving in the 8 compass directions).  I did the movement in a way that involves using the map to decide whether it is possible, not the entities (although may decide for themselves whether status effects, etc prevent them from moving).  I also implemented movement blocking, which is on by default, so that entities can block each other from moving over certain squares.  So far, it was pretty painless to implement the blocking and the extra inputs.  Because the map level coordinates the movement, it was also easy to set boundaries on movement to the restrictions of the level.  And since all entities (including the player) are treated the same, that movement should hopefully be a relatively bug free issue going forward.