Blade Edge

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

I had my laptop with me last nite while I was hanging out with some friends and booted it up to show off the game. I played with one of them who does nothing but play console games (Playstation freak). He never plays PC games. As I already knew, figuring out how to play the game seems harder than it really is. He was confused a lot in the beginning but as he played more and more he began to understand, and wanted to keep playing to learn more. This is the draw I’m hoping will attract others as well, especially the casual gamer. GC is great in that you can play as a casual gamer or a hardcore strategist. In the end he really enjoyed the game. It’s just one person but for someone who doesn’t play games on a PC and doesn’t play games anything like GC, the fact that he enjoyed it so much is a good sign. Looking forward to the demo this weekend.

Still haven’t started recovering my lost progress – it’s not as bad as I initially thought, but it will still set me back a few days. Ugh. Backups are going to my damn server every single day *sigh*

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Well, I was prepping the release version of GC to ship out to the team. I went to copy all my directories into the Release folder where I do final packaging seperate from the development folder and I accidentally click dragged instead of right-click dragged. So I started moving files until Windows asked me if I wanted to move a system file (thumbs.db). That’s when I canceled, but I forgot that doesn’t return any files already moved. So then I actually copied them over. Now I can’t distribute any source files so I use a batch command file (del /s *.cs) to remove all the source files and leave the compiled source files (.dso). However it seems that in the move Windows managed to move all my source files/folders into the Release directory.

Yea.

The cruelty is that as far as I can tell, the source files were pretty much the only things that were moved before I canceled the operation. Someone up there definetly doesn’t like me.

I have backups… from my last release a week ago. I was going to back up this release as well… after I packaged it. And here I was afraid of drive failure at the start of the year. Yeesh

So I’m not totally screwed, but having to redo a week’s worth of work… well. Yea.

And forget the data recovery, tried some freeware apps and couldn’t get anything worthwhile Oh well, hopefully this weekend I’ll be able to reclaim my lost time – at least I know what I’m doing, even if I have to do it all over again *sigh*

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

w00t! Marathon coding session!

So GC is officially ready for its second internal release, right on schedule – even a few days early. Huzzah!

Tonight I worked on a bunch of stuff. I got the special systems working in Imperialism mode, so now that’s completely checked off. Next I got Blitzkreig up and running. That was a little tougher than I thought it would be, but I also managed to discover and clean up a few bugs in the game-/turn-timer code. I also shortened the animation that plays before a planet explodes from 1s to 0.5s to make explosions happen faster. Looks muuuch better. Then I disabled some buttons in the Mini Conquest setup menu that controlled the AI settings for a player, which aren’t implemented yet. I also enabled the Special System Density buttons in the menu and implemented it in the game. Now you can select 4 Density modes: Default mode leaves the map alone – any pre-placed special systems remain on the map. None mode wipes the map of any pre-placed special systems. Low mode wipes any pre-placed systems and generates random special systems in random locations across 10% of the map. Medium mode is 30% and High mode is 50%. Then, I added bindings to the Esc key in all the menus so you didn’t have to click the Return buttons if you didn’t want to. Finally, I used TorqueDB and exposed the image datablock creation for particle effect image maps so my artist can add image maps to the game for use with the particle engine.

There still remains an issue that I need to resolve, which is the game sometimes running in a resolution other than 1024×768 on other machines. To do that I’ll have to test it on another computer, which I can’t do until I package and upload it, which will take to long, it’s almost 6am and I wanna go to bed 😛

But that’s the deal. GC has hit release #2, which will be demoed this weekend. Release #3 will feature AI and be demoed at GDC. On track and on sched. Awesome.

k nite

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Well it’s been a busy week but I finally found some time today to get back to GC. I’ve been working for almost 3 straight hours now (4-7, I posted this later :P) and I finally have the basic Imperialism gameplay nailed down and functional. W00t! Like I said in my last entry I had wanted to wait till I had illustrations to help explain the concepts, now I do. So here we go!

Aiight this is the start of an Imperialism game. Since this is the first time a player is placing his peice, he can select any spot on the board (unless the map already has territories shaded)

Okay the two players have staked out their initial territory. From now on they can place their peices only in systems marked by their color

Here they’ve grubbed up the entire board. Note that their percentage scores are still at 0 – they haven’t started taking over one another yet. At this point Blue is trying to take out 9 of Red’s systems and Red is trying to take out 7 of Blue. It would seem that Red has the advantage but poor strategy can doom anyone

Blue strikes first, taking out 2 of Red’s systems. That nets him a gain of 2/9 = 22.2%. Since Red hasn’t taken over any of Blue’s systems, that mean Blue just advanced 2 systems into his territory. Now Red has 9 Blue systems to overcome. My how the tables have turned.

Red strikes back and takes over one of Blue. That means Blue has a gain into Red of 1/9 = 11.1%, as does Red into Blue. If Red were to take over another 2 of Blue’s planets, Blue’s gain would drop to 0, plus he’d lose a system to Red, so now he’d be fighting to overcome 10 Red systems.

Uh oh – Red isn’t looking too good…

And the proof is in the pudding. Despite the constant back-and-forth taking over of territory, when Blue’s finally wiped out Red his score is 100% (the victory condition was set for 100%)

Now it’s important to remember that in this game mode you’re not looking to conquer a certain percentage of the map, but a certain percentage of all other player’s combined territory. To illustrate this have a look at this shot

Here you see Red has cornered Blue. Note how some of the systems are not controlled by anyone.

Red takes out Blue (revenge!) and if you look at his score it is at 100%, because he has taken over 100% of his opponents territory.

Sooooo that’s the deal folks. Like I said earlier this is still basic implementation. I haven’t started taking into account controlling special systems yet. It’s nothing different just I have to insert some more code in order to get them to cooperate properly in this game mode.

After this I’ll be implementing the Blitzkreig game mode, which is easy because it’s just one of the 4 other game modes except you have a 2 min game timer and 5 sec turn timer. So when the game actually starts although you have Blitzkreig mode selected, internally the game will function as one of the other 4 game types with the game and turn timer restrictions (i.e. Domination and Equilibrium won’t have planet counts).

GC is being demoed this weekend at the NJ IGDA chapter meeting, so I expect to have these last two game modes implemented by then. After that it’s time to work on the AI. I expect to have the AI up and running by GDC. After that… well I have ideas but we’ll see. That’s far enough ahead for me right now.

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Okay so I tested out the scoring with special systems like I said I was going to yesterday. Man am I glad I did, uncovered two bugs that would have ruined play immediately for anyone testing. One bug added on points when planets exploded into systems that didn’t exist (off the map), while another didn’t give proper points for placing a planet in space dust and nebula special systems. So that’s all cleaned up now.

After that I started work on the Imperialism game type. In this mode you can’t place planets willy-nilly about the board – you can only do it in your territory, which is defined by map tiles shaded your color. The victory condition is to control either 25%, 50%, 75% or 100% of the board. However when I finally sat back and thought about it – a small map contains 16 systems (tiles). 25% of that is 4 systems. When you place a planet, you gain control of that system plus the 4 adjacent to it, which means the first player who places a planet wins the game, which would always be Player 1. Doh! So then I thought well maybe I could have the game limit the victory options depending on map size. Large maps, which have 81 systems, could support the full range of victory options, whereas small maps would only allow 75% and 100%.

But then I thought again and realized that to control 25% of a large map, which is roughly 20 systems, all players would have to do is place planets on the board until they controlled however many percent – and 25% or 50% could possibly be acheived without any of the players actually fighting each other! Well that certainly doesn’t make much sense now does it? Booooorrrinng.

So I finally thought up of a solution – instead of controlling, say, 25% of the map a player must control 25% of all other player’s territory. This forces players to attack each other.

Confusing? A little – took me many an hour to puzzle it all out but I think I finally got it. Here’s an example. You have a 4 player game (map size does not matter, that’s the cool thing, but for this example we’ll say we’re on a large 9×9 map). Blue has control of 16 systems. Red has control of 7 systems. Yellow has control of 25 systems. Green has control of 12 systems. It’s Blue’s turn, which means he needs to make a dent in 44 systems. Let’s say he’s already taken over 12%. He manages to take over 3 of Yellow’s planets and 2 of Red’s. That’s 11% worth of damage that gets added to his control percentage while 7% is taken from Yellow’s control and 4% is taken from Red’s. No player can fall below 0% however. So now Blue controls 23%. But next turn Red (looking to make a dent in 74 systems) takes Blue down a notch by taking over 4 of his planets and 3 of Green’s. That’s 9% of damage – 5% from Blue and 4% from Green.

And so it goes. The basic idea is that players are attacking each other, which is the whole point of the game, and so it’s all good. I’m not sure how much that explaination helped – you’re not trying to go after the strong guys like in Equilibrium for the most points, here you’re just looking to take over as many planets as possible faster than anyone else in order to reach that percentage goal.

So yea that’s as far as I got since I had friends over for a movie nite – watched Van Wilder. God I forgot how hilarious that movie really is. Good stuff good stuff.

So tomorrow I’ll implement this scheme and see how it turns out actually playing it. Should be intersting.

Till then…

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Okay so today I finished debugging and implementing the two new game modes Domination and Equilibrium. Both work awesome, although they aren’t fully fully tested – like I didn’t use any special systems in the testing of Equilibrium, so there may still be some scoring issues there. I probably should have tested that myself since it would be hard during a game to actually see whether the right amount of points are being tallied. I’ll do it tomorrow – already shut down Codeweaver and all that crap and don’t feel like loading it all back up again. *makes note on whiteboard* I love having this thing, use it so much. Speaking of scoring, I placed the values for each score event in the game in the database so that during play testing my designer or whoever else can change the score values in the DB text file without having to bug me about changing them in code. Yey. I also did what I said I was going to do yesterday, which was change the victory condition in Domination mode to count only systems, not total planets. Easily reversible tho should the team cry foul on that design decision on my behalf.

In addition to the two new game modes I added a graceful handling of maps being deleted outside the game, or getting corrupted. The DB holds the name and size of every map created in/for the game. When you cycle through maps in the games mini-conquest setup menu you’re actually cycling through database entries, not the actual map files themselves. There fore the game can’t tell if a map file has been deleted until it tries to load it from disk. In the event that it can’t load the map it displays an error dialog and then asks if the user would like to delete the map, which removes its DB entry so you can’t select it anymore. The user can say no in case he actually moved the map file somplace and forgot to put it back – or something like that. I plan to add a Delete button in the Game Editor that lets the user delete maps on their own as well. But that’s not high on my list of priorities.

So if I keep up this pace I’ll pretty much have my feature-complete game by the weekend. No shit? Craziness. I thought for sure it would take me longer to get to where I am now. Guess that says something for T2D. All I have left to do is Imperialism mode and Blitzkreig mode. Imperialism will be more work than Blitzkreig, because all Blitzkreig is is one of the other 4 modes with a 2min game timer and 5sec turn timer set by default. After that I get to start thinking about how the hell I’m going to do the AI for this game. I have some ideas but I’ll need to experiment.

K enough for now, off to bed with me…

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W00t, got the turn timer working to satisfaction and have the code all in for two additional game modes: Domination mode has each player placing 15, 30, 45 or 60 planets on the board per game and then declaring a winner based on who has the most planets on the board at the end of the game. Although really I think it should be who controls the most systems (map squares) because then people aren’t just plopping down pieces atop each other to build up their count. Hrm, you know what? I’m going to change it to just count systems, since it already counts systems controlled and planets placed separate. My designer might throw a fit but at least I’ll have it in there in case I somehow win the argument . The other mode, Equilibrium, tracks score based on discovering special systems, using special systems, placing planets and (most importantly) taking over other player’s planets. It’s called Equilibrium because when you take over another player’s planets you take away points from them. The more points they have the more you take away. This forces people, or at least gives motivation, to go after the higher-scoring players. The player with the most points after placing so many planets (same counts as for Domination) wins. Of course in both game modes if one person manages to eliminate all other people on the board than they win by Conquest, which is a default win scenario in all the game types.

But I still have some debugging to do with the game play code in regards to the new game types. After that it’s Imperialism and then Blitzkreig and I’ll be well on my way to being set. Looking good for that mid-Feb milestone…

See yas

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Tonight I spent time on GC fixing bugs, cleaning up code and adding in the game timer feature. Well, the bug fixing arose as a result of the code cleanup really. I wasn’t liking the way I was accessing record fields from TorquDB so I wrapped it in a function to make it easier to read from a code point of view. In the process of updating the code base to use the new function I broke a few things, like the planets palette in the game editor, but cleaned that up easy enough. It’s much easier to read the DB access now and much easier for me to remember how to extract stuff from the DB. So that’s good.

The only other improvement was the game timer, which is available in Conquest mode for 5, 10, 15 or 30 minutes. Conquest games can go on for a loooong time if you’re playing a big map with 4 experienced players. There is an option for unlimited play time but it certainly wouldn’t be for the faint of heart. Anyways the timer works fine after a few glitches, like failing to even start, not counting down correctly, and showing times like 1:60 instead of 2:00. Right now the timer is only set to end the game if there are no actions in progress on the board. So if a bunch of planets are exploding when the timer runs out, the game will run until that chain reaction is over before ending. This is mainly for other game modes that score the player and gives the last player the ability to finish out his turn rather than get cut short and thus lose points he would have gained because the timer ran out. Whether it stays this way depends on play testing but that’s how it is now.

I identified two minor bugs in the editor as well – have them down on the whiteboard so I can take care of them tomorrow. Speaking of tomorrow, I’m going to add the turn timer next.

Sorry I got no pretty screens today – didn’t have time to take them and nothing spectacular anyhows.

Later.