PixlCoop : a preverts perviewToday I have discovered that mario has enough spare pixl material in the nose area that we can build him a penis out of it. Also he has no buttons, just windows cut in his overalls designed explicitly to expose his bare nipples. so here is a little test build of another cunning plan Click here to play! you can drag pixls around, woohoo, now for the coop part... Click here to post a comment a question of perspectiveJust a small amount of numbers to think about as the IGF and GDC fills up my news feeds. Number of votes, by people interested in the indie games scene cast on the IGF website From http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2008/02/2008_igf_awards_topped_by_cray.php but I've seen it mentioned elsewhere about 3,500 this is across all games in the audience vote. The currently highest scoring game on newgrounds. Note that newgrounds is not even a predominantly games site, at least half of the site is animations. from http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/417513 45,019 this is for just one game but it is a newish game so its voting period is similar to the IGF Cost to submit a game to the IGF 100bux+++, cost to submit a game to newgrounds 0bux. I make no conclusions (I mean I don't even believe in voting) I'm just pointing out some numbers here. Click here to post a comment how to really make a successful flash gamestep 1 read http://blog.onemorelevel.com/2008/02/17/how-to-make-a-successful-flash-game/ Unfortunately this is not how to make a successful game, this is how to make a good game. There is a big big difference. Gamers, en mass, are morons (uwe boll proves this time and time again), if you just go to http://www.onemorelevel.com and check the top games they break most of these rules, yet they are the most successful, no? I'm sorry but these rules are largely irrelevant to success. For real tips I would suggest you read this instead. http://www.tomrobinson.com/resource/klf.htm Converting this wisdom to the realm of flash games is an exercise left up to the reader. Click here to post a comment The thing is, I'm not that big a fan of portal.http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5768612774562258953&hl=en It's not that portal is bad, it's not, it is well made. It's just that, well it is simply a mediocre straight forward puzzle trawl. Although that is actually a step up compared to many of the other hyped games out there. What most impresses me in a puzzle level based game is when at part of the way through a new technique becomes necessary and understood, something that was actually always there, that suddenly makes how you solved many of the previous levels feel like the wrong solution now that you really know what you are doing. If that can happen multiple times it's even better. Multiple paths to a goal is an important thing in interactive media, otherwise you might as well be watching FMV which only plays whilst you are holding down the space bar. The act of simon says game play has become very popular in the gaming mainstream recently. Portal is not that far removed from these titles, although you are not told what buttons to press explicitly the levels are however designed such that there is really only one true path, a mostly obvious one, which is much the same thing. They can be fun to play through, but sooner or later it just feels like a chore to keep going. Portal tries to solve this problem by simply ending sooner rather than later. Checking portal out after being bombarded with the hype was as horrible an experience as the first time I played geometry wars, for which I also had such high hopes and high hype. The experience consisted of constantly grasping for this apparently hidden game gem that I had been assured was there totally dashed at every turn by the plodding mediocrity of the actual game I encountered. Please note I am not talking, sound or pretty pictures or even story here. These are the obvious qualities of video games that are easy to judge and comment on. I'm talking about the actual game part of a game and how you can interact with it. The hard to grasp multidimensional soul of a game that separates it from every other form of media, that's the part I'm most interested in. If you want the other things I suggest your time is better spent if you listen to music, watch movies or read books. PS: If you just want a time waster I would suggest knitting. Click here to post a comment WetDike updateUpdated a lot of the generic code in WetDike, for comms and so on. It's been slowly updated over time and this is the last change to bring it in line with everything else. WetDike was the first game to be running this system so it had early edition code before I rewrote it to be more generic. Obviously I haven't wanted to fiddle with it since for fear of breaking it. (For some reason beta has become the name of this simple signal system between the server and flash clients.) The main useful change is that your high scores for the last ten days are now easy to find so if you miss a day you can go back and play it again to bump up your rank. http://wetdike.wetgenes.com Click here to post a comment bogtroll testEver wanted to run your own toilet? Well one day you will be able to heres a pre beta test of like clicking and walking around and stuff hold down the button for a few seconds to open up the menu on objects that highlight. You can use the urinal / cubicals and sink but not much else  click here to check it out Also the music player, mouse over topright icon, now has some embedded links to http://grabb.it playlists. Which is finally a useable replacement for webjay that yahoo bought and killed, much like a country singer would a tame bear. Click here to post a comment preserving spectrum adverts for the futuresI noticed this on the internets and decided it needed to be saved. behold a bank that wants to appeal to people in the uk who where kids in the 80s  Clicky to play the flash. Which all just reminds me that matthew smith is still failing to lead a "productive" life One day some ed wood character will find him and together they will create some of the worst games in history. If we are lucky. Click here to post a comment fuck his shitboatsome points #1 I do not like passage, it stinks like a gawd damn hippy #2 I dislike squidi even more, he is a strange little talentless whiner. #3 therefore I must defend the honor of passage The comment by Ghede here is exactly why, the squidi chap needs to have his shit boat fucked I'm sure its not an isolated opinion, this is exactly the sort of mentality the moronity displays on you tube. On the one hand we have someone who has done nothing other than write reviews of games that do not exist. Apparently this person now owns every game that is in anyway similar to these reviews for the rest of time. I've seen this idea championed in a few places. On the other hand we have someone who has actually created something using their own sweat blood and tears. Which of these two people does the moronity decide to support? so I say again fuck his shitboat Now I am reminded that the reason I do not post here is I have nothing positive to say, still, somebody needs to fuck his shitboat. BTW I would happily forgive squidi if he didn't feel that these people where ripping him off (fuck his shitboat). Click here to post a comment Behold, a little animation / technology test for MagicShed.Because I haven't posted for a while  Click to view a magic magic shed. This is just a small test showing the avatars in a forced 3d flash environment. Its all done very very simply and as you can see the animation frame rate has been set way way way low. But I think it still works well. Use the curser keys to move around.The main thing to remember here is the avatar contact sheets, pages of 800x600.png files are generated direct from my avatar editor and can be hosted anywhere (eg Photobucket). My theory is you can glue this sort of thing together as a mush and just make each user responsible for their image bandwidth, via somewhere like photobucket. It's just one less thing for me to worry about. MagicShed is and will be an online gardening simulator game about a MagicShed that transports you to a wonderful new world of flying allotments where all your vegetable fantasies can come true. As far as I can tell browser based web games are obsessed with pimping hoes, I intend to take this obsession to the max and also let you pimp spades and watering cans. MagicShed is in no way related to cosgrove hall except of course in understanding that "heads on wheels" is one of the great animation lessons of our time :) Click here to post a comment WetPlay source and framework now available on source forge.Because the world needs another flash mp3 player.  I've packaged up all the source for WetPlay and the tools needed to turn the source into a swf into a single simple zip file. Unzip on a windows machine run the supplied bake.bat (this just calls a Lua build process) and a swf will be produced.WetPlay is actually intended as a simple sound manager for use in my swf games although most of the functionality I want doesn't exist yet :). It still makes a mighty fine stand alone mp3/xspf player so here it is. Although lacking in documentation I'm a great believer in just providing something that builds easily and letting people fiddle with it, most people don't know what the hell they are doing anyway so documentations doesn't help :). The source is available to do with as you like under The MIT License which seems to be the most easy to read OS license that explicitly says do what you want but don't claim to have written it and please don't sue me, which is copyleft with a reasonable demand for attribution. Its also worth noting that this is probably a good example of a framework for building a swf file using mtasc/swfmill, this is all I use with just notepad++ for an editor and firebug as a way of printing debug information under firefox. The other major part of the package is my XPP swiss army build tool that contains the lua interpreter and lots of junk wired into it for processing gfx text and data files. Next step is to GPL this tool up properly which has been my plan for ages. Here it is really just being used as a simple text preprocessor for all the .as files. For instance any line in a .as file beginning with # is actually lua code that generates action script. There is a simple gadget system included, called gizmos for your feeding after midnight pleasure. Obviously you need to do some gadget type stuff in an mp3 player and this means you need an open source gadget system, the source lives under the class/com/wetgenes hierarchy and requires its own build step which is available there. Although thrown together for this application it is still reasonably extensible, I mean it does buttons and scrolly text thingies what more do you need? Visit http://wetsrc.sf.net/ for downloads, or at the moment, annoying redirections to downloads. Click here to post a comment EsTension : One word, capital E, capital T. So called because I have rocks in my head and find the number of people that cant spell extension amusing. I might as well also admit that I belong to the David Cronenberg school of game naming and throw capital letters into things for no apparent reason. Apart from that it is a corruption of surface tension, the ground was originally going to be a sort of jelly thing that didn't work out.This was thrown together for the experimental gameplay compo, I figured I'd do something the next time one came around and it did, so I did, pretty much everything I do is experimental so its not really that different. I almost manage to stay within the lines of the theme. By almost I mean I only drew on the wall with my crayons 70% of the time. Took about a week, over a 14 day period, ended up spending 1 week in bed sweating with some icky cold cough thing unable to think straight in the middle of development. Plenty of bits of code where stolen and reworked from my other little projects but the concept and the game was put together within that time frame. It's built using mtasc and swfmill and the source is visible on my svn repo .Plan was to have these attractor things in space, that got bigger when shot causing more attraction and making it harder to shoot them without crashing. When they got to a big enough point they then went boom and you got to start on the next one. Which is exactly what is here, the water was added because I like water and I knows how to model it as cellular automata without breaking the CPU bank. It also seems like a nice refuel mechanic, I wanted you to have to pop down to the surface and refuel every now and again. The system is actually non closed, you gain more water from refueling than you use so the environment could fill up with water if you where very very bored. The hearts are very circular, partially because I kind of just took an apple and colored it red but mostly because I want to use simple circular collision so the gfx must form themselves into a circle or fall out of sync with the collision model. A heart shape is not very circular but I was aiming at the experimental game play compo thing so it really had to be hearts or I would lose even more of the tenuous link with the theme :) The game, such as it is doesn't work that well, but I do think it does work. I am however really happy with how the control system, keeping the ship in the center of the screen with scale in-out, and the landing in water to refuel turned out well. This is in essence a mouse based version of the Joust control system forced to mate in an unholy union with Gravitar. ( Kinda like a Swanana and a Rashberry. ) The fact that flash has the oomph to handle the 1 dimensional cellular water system was also a pleasant discovery. I wasn't sure it could loop through enough cells for it to feel semi fluid but it turned out good. It still takes a lot of ooomph for something very simple and I would rather model water in 2d cells, but it does work and for something running in flash it feels like a miracle. This is as finished as it is going to get, I shall now dismantle it and transform it into something else, possibly a giant robot. Actually I feel like turning it into something similar to Spawn of Evil, in method and madness and antagonists. Click here to post a comment Advent Island Version 0.5 Advent Island is a beta version of a new swf game which is available to play now! This is just a reworking of my fathers little adventure game from javascript into the unnameable horror that is flash. I don't think I have broken anything, but I have re jiggled things a little bit including adding a score, you should be able to get around 2000 points for a finished game. This is a retro style text adventure of island escape with random backgrounds provided by ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} turnheron. Enjoy, or unjoy and remember it is still some way from being finished, beta just means it is playable.Click here to post a comment Reviews and links to some fun new games related webby 2.0 sites.A few new places have popped up recently and are worth pointing people at.  www.kongregate.com I like this place muchly. Possibly because it was found after searching through tons of retarded CMS based flash hosting sites when I was looking for places to upload flash games to. You may notice the game on left, chat on right layout which is exactly what I'm doing for my own site :) I'm waiting for them to come through with some developer APIs so there can be some site integrated games on there. Still it is the nicest, most open and easiest to use flash game portal/hub site I know of. www.greatgamesexperiment.com Still hidden behind a beta wall but beta approval is easy to come by. It's really annoying that there isn't a site thats prepared to provide information about any game be it console/pc/flash or free/indie/commercial. www.mobygames.com for instance is OK for major commercial releases but useless for any other type. www.the-underdogs.info is great for old PC classics. The large corporate owned review sites are pretty much useless at everything. Hopefully the open coop editing style of www.greatgamesexperiment.com will make it the place to look for game information... www.projectwonderful.com This is just a simple ad marketplace. People sign up, inject codes into their sites and advertisers can then pay to display. Now I have some plans (in effect) to try and use this to provide in game ads but thats not why I'm listing it here. The reason it's here is that it is a rather fun game to go wander the web essentially performing graffiti upon other peoples pages. Sites can force adverts to be approved, but most don't bother so the act is usually instantaneous vandalism. Seriously, drop 5bux into an account here, make whatever retarded images you feel like and plaster them around the wicky wide web promoting *anything*. That's cheap web 2.0 interactive entertainment right there. Gwan, deface almost every page of my website with personally directed insults about the size of my penis, only 1 cent a day. On a more serious note anyone hosting these ads also implicitly provides visitor stats to the site for display to the public, this beats alexa stats any day of the week.Yes I am only linking direct to my stuff on all the sites mentioned above, you can find your own way to their home pages :) Click here to post a comment Why replays need to be a super secret and how auditing works.You may have seen the "hidden" auditing menu option in my game WetDike You may also have noticed that it doesn't do anything. Well it doesn't do anything for you, it is a magical score verification mode that only works for myself or other deputized users. When turned on the game switches into a special mode that constantly pulls other peoples replays from the server and plays them to work out and submit what the score for that replay is. The server can then compare this to the claimed score and delete or flag as bogus any cheats where the score and the replay do not match.  This may be slight overkill right now but it means that anyone attempting to submit a fake score, which is a very easy thing to do, also has to submit a fake replay, which is somewhat harder. Like all things security related it isn't 100% fool proof, but it seems like the best solution to the problem and gives a very reasonable security return for a simple and cheap mechanic. At the moment there are about 15,000 worth of replays/scores stored and verified which is fine for just me to audit but the system allows for more people to be deputized and perform the same task should the game become too popular for me to audit on my home machines. There is also the simple option of only bothering to audit suspicious and randomly selected scores, non audited scores are considered innocent until proven guilty.It also makes a nice little screen saver for me as cards move around and sort themselves automatically. Initially I planed this to be a simple peer review, such that anyone could enable this mode and verify everyone else's games. However I decided against this as making replays public would allow any unscrupulous users to take someone else's replay and claim it as their own. By making the replays secret, only trusted users ever see them and this possibility of abuse is reduced considerably. You do of course have to trust me, not something I would normally recommend but it is unavoidable :) This could of course also be run server side but it is easier to do it within the client and removes the CPU hosting problem. Any machine that I or that other people I trust have can sit there auditing scores for as long as is necessary without costing me hosting. After all everyone always has plenty of spare machine cycles they can donate :) This may seem overkill for a solitaire game but it is also a test drive of system I intend to work with much more complicated games and situations. Multi player games for instance would have (much larger) replays recorded locally and could be audited if any playing parties felt the other players where cheating. Since most people don't cheat and the act of auditing can be passed on to prominent trusted players, its a simple system that scales well and can police its self without causing me undue grief. I am reasonably confident that doing this I can easily keep the high score tables pure enough to actually matter to anyone that wants to compete for them. Which is not that bad an achievement. Click here to post a comment Review: Spawn of evil.This post also exists on my wiki here -> http://XIXs.com/wiki/Main/SpawnOfEvil Spawn of EvilWorld of Spectrum Details To run in browser, via World of Spectrum Emulator To run the game instructions in a browser, via World of Spectrum Emulator Yes, this is old, very old, almost a quarter of a century when I write this. So if you play it, please remember its age... Remember that a spectrum has the fraction of the power of your mobile phone, hell it has a fraction of the power of the oldest mobile phone you can remember. This game does however have a style of game play that I haven't seen copied since and I really look for these things. The only related game I can think of is Gribblys Day Out which was similar in that it contained evolving antagonists but lacks the hunting/farming style and is almost as old. A place where it would fit in perfectly is in a hunting section in a harvest moon style game. So it isn't that it doesn't have the opportunity to be re-used. Although claiming to be a 3d space action save the universe game, in actual fact the game play is 100% two dimensional. It's also not really a save the universe game, since doing that is actually very very easy and takes roughly 10 seconds. It is more of a farming or game warden - hunting simulation. What you actually do is seek to control a breeding population of "animals" Points are awarded for kills but you need to maintain a breeding population in order to continue the game. When you have killed everything you haven't so much won as just finished. Keeping the population high will cause you problems as they will start to attack, keeping it low will mean you run out of things to shoot. So, as with most things, balance is what matters. This is actually described in the strategy guide like so... The antagonists come in 4 flavours. Stage 1 PULSOID is plankton like, small and harmless. Stage 2 CYCLOID is worth going after but you only have a 50% chance of killing it due to its ability to deceive. Stage 3 ALIEN is the real danger, the only stage that can damage you. Worth killing but you need to be careful. The main aim of each of these 3 flavors of antagonist is to breed this is done by entering a breeding point with a partner these two then merge and out pops a higher level antagonist. Once you see one antagonist enter a breeding point you can hang around for another one to turn up as sooner or later that's what is going to happen. They are of course slightly wise to this and may decide to do a runner rather than walk direct into your sights. It does however mean that the prey will at least be heading in your direction even if it doesn't end up an easy kill. Stage 4 EGG is the breeder, the queen, if you have more than one of these then you have lost control of the breeding cycle. If you have none then you will need to let another one be created or you will run out of prey. You move up/down left/right and shoot these prey. The main skill comes in matching velocity with your target and edging them into your sights before shooting. Random firing tends to get you nowhere. The game is viewed in one of two modes, normal and scanner. Scanner gives you an overview of almost all the universe and helps you find targets but you will need to return to the normal view to actually shoot them. I could go on but really if you have read this far the best thing to do is go play the damn thing. All you have to do is click. RIGHT HERE But remember the author, a Mr Don Priestly referrers to this game as too smart for its own good and it probably still is. Click here to post a comment More Random Than Random.Well, actually less random to be honest. Although such things as the Mersenne Twister generate mighty fine random numbers they are over kill for most game uses. For instance I once tracked down a mistaken use of the Merzenine Twister as being the culprit of occasional frame drops in a GBA game.  My personal design belief is that reducing the randomness of games is better than producing randomness. Something that appears to be random which is later found out to be controllable by the player is the apex of good game design. The Two equal digits trick in Bubble Bobble is a perfect example. (I lust for a remake of Joust with the level/bonus style of Bubble Bobble, one day, maybe, one day.) So, as I believe that half an eye is more useful than no eye at all. A very simple pseudo random numbers sequences could actually be considered more amiable to game play than real random numbers. I use and recommend the random number sequence as used in ZX Spectrum Basic, see attached screenshot for the first few terms of the 65k long sequence and a small Spectrum basic program to print them out. Just type it into an emulator using a strange combination of archaic key strokes, I used to have to do that all the time as a kid and it never harmed me :) This is the first random number sequence I remember coming into contact with as a child and much time of my innocent youth was spent in marvel at the ability of the computer to pick a random dice roll. An amazing thing, I mean, how do the dice fit in the little box and why don't they rattle when I shake it? *Rant On* The idea of my games invoking a hidden reference to a youthful obsession as the same number mantra is repeated over and over again subtly influencing the outcome of every user interaction is not significant in any way. It is neither an act of art or of that crazy chaos magick. I mean, games are incapable of being or containing art, no sir, I read it in the dead media, written by an expert, it must be true. Maybe one day I will stop wasting my time and instead contribute to society with some socially acceptable modern art. *Rant Off* Behold this random number generator magnificent in its simplicity. rnd_num = ( ( ( rnd_num + 1 ) * 75 ) - 1 ) % 65537 rinse and repeat rnd_num is obviously the seed input and the output, the range is 0 to 65535 That's all you need to know, it even translates nicely into assembler as you can do a cheap %65537 trick. It is the difference between the low 16bits and the high 16bits. eg 0x00130013 has a %65537 of : 0x0013 - 0x0013 == 0x0000 0x00190040 has a %65537 of : 0x0040 - 0x0019 == 0x0027 Next time you need a random number for your game you might want to consider this simple and cheap sequence. Click here to post a comment Euler 2.0, Velocity Verlet in game physics.I wasn't happy with my springs behaviour, using a simple euler update, yes I know use a smarter integrator such as RK4 but that still feels over complicated and expensive. Maybe not on a super PC but remember my last few games have been GBA titles and KISS is always a good plan.  After some googling I found this, http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=374930 which talks of velocity verlet http://xbeams.chem.yale.edu/~batista/vaa/node60.html and supplies this nice simple code example pos += vel + 0.5f * oldImpulse / mass; vel += (oldImpulse + Impulse) / (2 * mass); oldImpulse = Impulse; I'll rewrite that so its a little bit more descriptive. new_force = gravity + springs + magik + friction ; // as you wish new_acc = ( new_force / mass ) ; vel += new_acc / 2 ; pos += vel ; vel += old_acc / 2 ; old_acc = new_acc; Basically this is blending the new force and the old force (which is actually from 2 frames ago, due to the order of the variables). This has the effect of blurring or filtering the force you apply to each frame. Apart from that it's obviously the same as basic Euler. This makes for a more stable simulation when dealing with varying forces, think about what happens if you try applying +1 and -1 as an alternating force (The sort of behaviour you will get from a tight spring). The force applied will flatten out to 0 at a 4 frame frequency. Remember in games I don't really care about accuracy I care about the simulation not getting into a chaotic state. (: unless I want it to :) and this helps with dampening down changes in force. The small cost is as well as position and velocity you need to store a force per object, but its not a big a price to pay for increased stability over basic Euler style updates. Note this only makes any difference if you are mucking around with changing forces every frame, eg springs / attractors etc. It has the same easy to control properties as Euler when it comes to collision and from playing about with tests it actually looks noticeably better. So I'm thinking two thumbs up and I'll probably be using it by default in the future. Click here to post a comment Lua to ActionScript, forgive me the deep geek talk.I've been thinking about the best way to share game code between flash and a compiled executable.  The obvious one is to run an action script interpreter, but AS is kinda spit spit ptwooey. I wouldn't choose to use it unless forced and I'm already running Lua.So, I'm going to use Lua and a translator from Lua into action script. Which is looking easier than I thought it would. The two share a lot of basic design but most importantly The magical coding pixies have already done most of the hard work. There is a gentle based Lua to JS converter by a mister Asger Ottar Alstrup available on luaforge.net http://luaforge.net/projects/lua2js/ Which mostly works :) So we just hack on that and see where we end up. My hacky version is now living here. https://trac.xixs.com/wet/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/browser/pc/_src/lua2as Note that ActionScript is JavaScript is ECMAScript so the slight name change is just an indication that this is my working version and that I'm doing my best to break it and also focusing on AS rather than JS. I've got the thing building and am fiddling around with ways of structuring the Lua code so that it remains both valid as lua and convertible to working AS. I figure new can just be a (fake) table of functions so new.Array(24) in Lua becomes new Array(24); in Action script It is simple to handle new.thingy() in lua (the member reference can just be treated as a parameter) and it reads well. The implicit this in AS can be simply handled too. If the first named parameter of a lua function is called "this" it gets commented out when translated. Then both lua or js can refer to this and mostly get what they expect. None of this is 100% perfect but it is enough to be able to get stuff working. For instance my rotating DNA is now available in lua or JS flavours. https://trac.xixs.com/wet/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/browser/pc/bin/lua/class/wetDNA.lua https://trac.xixs.com/wet/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/browser/swf/class/com/wetgenes/wetDNA.as For now ignore the fact that I'm not dealing with the draw functions or actually running the Lua code :) This is just a test. What this means is that although I'm going to keep working on flash games I will be focusing on doing it in Lua rather than action script and pretty soon they will also magically turn into downloadable games. The ultimate plan is that I can provided either a seamless web based client or a download and run client with both running off of much the same Lua code. The downloaded client obviously can also have extra bells and whistles. Both of them communicate with the same server. I might get around to looking at hacking mtasc about so it can read in Lua direct, but maybe not :) I suspect that creating a version of mtasc with all of the typing and type checking disabled might be worthwhile though. Click here to post a comment The idle dead.Or narcolepsy online as I like to call one of my other great plans for world domination.  One of the major components of any online game is offline players, in fact fairly obviously the majority of your player base will be offline at any given time. Many games ignore this, with offline avatars disappearing in a puff of smoke when their god logs off. Other games, the more real time things like planetarion / travian punish you for being offline by being attacked while you 'sleep'. Some players are not only offline but possibly never coming back, these idle dead players have some use to active players. Generally a small amount of unguarded resources for them to steal.However I think abuse of the idle dead should be built into the game design, since as is the case with real zombies. The dead always outnumber the living, they may not be smarter but if you push them in the right direction they have their uses. I like the idea of trying to fit the story around the game mechanics, rather than apply a story that really has no relevance to what you actually spend your time doing. For instance in diablo you are not fighting great evil you are looting and generally hunting for shiny things, if you didn't know that the great evil where the ones holding most of these shiny things the local townsfolk would be shit out of luck. Given the profiteering the local townsfolk perform I would shed no tears for them. Que my alternative storyline involving spiv demons posing as local townsfolk and creating dungeons full of shiny things stored in pinatas with teeth and claws. Then feeding bright young adventurers into this meat grinder as a black market racket. They sell you the means to (possibly) survive/harvest and buy the shiny things back off of you for next to nothing if you make it out alive. Any one with an ounce of intelligence must be able to see through the badly formed and inconsistent lies of the diablo universe and into this ultimate truth that lays beneath. So yeah, narcolypsy online, the pitch. Everyone in the game has narcolypsy, when you log off you are asleep but your avatar remains and can be posed and moved for humorous effect. When you log back in again you will often find yourself placed in a very public new and exciting position. The more active the player, the greater the game to be had in doing something to their sleeping corpse and the more their friends will want to protect them from this abuse. Imagine raids where the purpose is to steal the actual body of one of your rival guilds top members and abuse and display it in your guild hall until they wake up. Stacking sleeping noobs would of course be a popular sport. However I am never going to make that. So instead I finally got around to adding zombie love slaves into LardGuns, since the lardguns player base is synced direct with forum subscribers I always planed that a number of 'players' would in fact just be zombies. These players can now be controlled by the active players, meaning you can tell a zombie to attack another player and they will keep doing it till someone else tells them not to. Not just attack you can esentially force any turn for any player, active players will shrug this off as a mild anoyance but the idle dead will just continue in whatever direction you push them. In theory seeing your likeness used and abused like this will encourage inactive players to pay more attention. Well the ones that don't like the idea of being used as zombie love slaves anyway. Click here to post a comment Card zoningSo I have this half finished version of klondike see, and I figured I would say, look what the world needs more of, solitaire games to waste your time on.  But that isn't a very interesting thing to talk about.so instead Let me tell you about a simple way of mind reading users in the context of klondike. Mind reading is what user interfaces need to do, when you know what the user is doing and thinking, you can think ahead, you can make it easier to click the button they probably want to click and harder to click the others. This is where user interface design comes in, the most used button on your dvd player tends to be the biggest. With computer software interfaces of course we can make this dynamic. In klondike we spend time sorting cards from one pile to another, after picking up a card we can weight where you want it to go and pick the most likely destination. Not all moves are legal so illegal ones are obviously discarded first. I've broken the possible destinations down into 3 levels. Level 1, the least likely so should be the smallest area, this is where you picked up the cards from, if you started dragging some cards you probably intend them to go somewhere else but you still need to be able to put them back here so it cant be removed completely. Level 2, the normal level, normal weighting for all other moves.. Level 3, the most important, this is used for the four stacks you are aiming to get all the cards on to win. Mostly this is needed for putting the cards away at the end, double click is the standard short cut for this but I want it to have smarter dragging instead. So 3 category's, I want to do this using only current positional information and not to try and take mouse velocity into account as well and I reckon position is enough. So we need some maths to work out a score for each destination. So, based on the x,y distance between where you are now and were you could end up. Level 1 distance cubed Level 2 distance squared Level 3 distance Work out this weight for each valid destination and pick the lowest, that one is probably what the user wants. We also need to tweak the numbers a little bit so that the other areas become bigger and level 3 doesn't always beat level 1 but this is the basic concept. Here's some example code, actionscript (ECMAScript) version with tweaks. https://trac.xixs.com/wet/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/browser/swf/wetdike/src/WetTable.as?rev=302#L215 and you can just play the game here to see it in action... http://www.wetgenes.com/index.php/Game/WetDikePlay Just pick a card up that can be put in multiple places and wave it around to see how it weights each destination. Click here to post a comment avatar generator screeniesAt last we have some proof that it's possible to generate avatars on www.WetGenes.com, Crazy I know. But now there are umpteen (umpteen==42) screen shots of avatar editor interface goodness and a running commentary of the creation courtesy of miss shi Click to behold teh all new WavyToot orial  Schweeet. I've also done some behind the scenes tinkering and pushed all of the site into subversion, makes it somewhat easier to edit and publish. I can run all of the site locally and make sure I don't break nuffin first. Always a good plan. It was half like that before but now its *everything* also http://www.wetgenes.com/data is now a mirror of https://trac.xixs.com/wet/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/browser/builds/data and I made the ssl cert slightly less annoying. This is all slightly complicated by the fact that data can be generated by the site as well as offline, the wiki (pmwiki) for instance creates lots of page files. So does the forum but to a lesser extent. This means I need to check in from the site so the changes are available locally. svn add * --force is my new best friend :) shame it picks up all the ignored config files as well, these have to be reverted before checkin. This means I should get around to fixing lardguns up RSN since its easier than it was to integrate it well into the rest of the site. Click here to post a comment April 2.0I'm never really that sure what I'm doing, but, after weighing up the options To that end the top right of WetGenes will now contain a random avatar/pose and a link to download the latest WetTest which contains the avatar generator. Also I think I'll pimp the WavyAvatars page so it look less gehy. That seems to be one of the main entry points for people coming in from google. Technically lookin at the avatar generator I have I'm still impressed by it, even in its rough form, but its hard to get people to download and look at the damn thing. I think I'll try uploading it on tucows or anywhere else I can find (sugestions?), should get some more hits. The main thing I win over other avatar generators is the ability to produce different poses and animations from a single description. Unfortunately the animation output isn't working so well, I need to update it to spit out a single animated gif. So I think that will be my main focus next time I go near the code. So yes, I'm thinking about avatars :) Click here to post a comment Hive7 makes me want to tart up my avatar generator.Played around with hive7 a bit today, basically it's The Palace but running in a browser, dhtml stylee.  Which makes perfect sense, that's really all the palace was/is and user extendible jscript/flash widgets is a more sensible platform that anyone can add to.The palace was one of the first and most avatar centric place on the internets of yore. So this interests me muchly. Mostly hive7 reminds me that I need to tart up my avatars, switch to a blender friendly modelling/animation technique and spit out animated gifs from the editor. I've been meaning to do this for some time but having some where they could be used is giving me an extra bit of impetus. Although this is more than just a start page builder I suspect this is going to beat out other start page WEB2 type things for one simple reason, not only can you build but you can invite a few friends to your homepage and interact with them. Start pages are never going to be high traffic, so they fit in perfectly to the handful of people visiting a page that hive7 needs in order to work. They have one primary user, the owner, being able to publish them like this and have friends visibly appear/visit them is going to appeal to the same people that post screen captures of their desktops. Which I understand is a big group :) Here's shi's start page for instance http://www.hive7.com/shi.not and an attempt at throwing some flash games in by myself, unfortunately this doesn't work, the site steals all the inputs but I'm sure it will be fixable. I mean, apart from just squirting your own scripts in grease monkey will give you even more power. http://www.hive7.com/wetgenes We really should build a little door to link between these two pages :) Although this place is obviously a mush, it could also have a real game built on top if it as easily as you can do that on any part of the internet. I shall have to have a think about what will work best game wise. Click here to post a comment Evil edge publishing Injection super plan.Edge publishing and another example of why you want to make sure that I'm fighting on your side.  One of the problems with producing small chunks of web content that you want to be displayed on other peoples pages is that many of the people who own these other sites don't want you to be doing that.This is perfectly reasonable, it's an insecure thing to do, but, the people who own these pages also tend to sublet space to users. They reduce what these users can change but still they let them have some free reign. Personal profiles/pages or even just forum posts are examples of the sort of thing I'm talking about. It's unlikely you are going to get the owners to change the rules they apply to these users, but, to succeed at edge publishing you really really want to have these users post and view your stuff everywhere they can. So. I had this evil idea. Rather than attempting to change the mind of the publishers, which will not happen and rightly so, you change the mind of the viewer, which is simple and mailable and easily led. How? Well exactly the same way that grease monkey works, you just push a simple extension/plugin to people who view these pages that injects some jscript and adjusts the content for them, and them alone. If you don't have this plugin you see a bitmap/text/whatever that displays what sort of thing you are missing and links to the actual content. The content also encourages the viewer to install the injector extension for their convenience so they don't have to click in the future. If you do have the plugin some magic ids/names trigger it and it injects what you want into the page replacing the old safe content. If your content is good enough, you might easily take over other peoples sites where the content is provided by users, largely against their owners will. If it isn't, well people are still posting links to your stuff which is all you could have hoped for before. It's a no lose situation. I'm going to point this idea to bunchball, maybe they will go for it. Yes it is evil. So am I. Bwahahahahahahaha. Boink! Click here to post a comment MicePadsBecause google loves teh text. Recently I played around with a touch pad pointing device, haven't really been near the things for years and didn't expect any actual change to them. But technically they have, not in hardware, but in software. The initial drivers for the thing where pretty awful but switching to the default generic ones from the manufacturer opened up some more interesting settings. Game related? You betcha. A shark bites shit, it bites shit because it has a huge mouth full of sharp teeth and thats what it has so thats what it uses. Pick up a hammer and everything starts looking like a nail. So the interface tools are very very important. Right now I think most people still have real mice, but this is changing, laptops are dirt cheap, it is hard to recommend a real computer to anyone when a cheap laptop will do everything they need. This changes things, less users are going to be bothered to plug in a mouse, instead opting to 'put up' with the pointing device that they have close to hand. So a game designer needs to understand that the PC input landscape is changing. From touch pads it is only a small step to full screen tablet input with even less urge to plug in a real mouse, this is obviously where we are heading. After that? who knows :) But mice are still best? Well I'm not so sure, keeping a surface to move the mouse on is sure annoying if you want mobility besides look at the number of people who put up with bad pad controls just so they can sit in front of the TV and play FPS games. So really it doesn't matter, this is where things are going. The Nintendo DualScreen will almost certainly get used as a controller for their new revolution gaming system, the DS is a small touch pad you can hold in your hand, so this is also very relevant to how that will be used to control new Nintendo games. For starters I was concerned about the lack of scroll wheel, much of my time spent browsing the webby webby woo seems to be in a trance like state slowly stroking the magic wheel to bring new information on screen as I scan over my news feeds of pointlessly interesting junk. I can spend days like this so taking away my scroll wheel makes me antsy, having to move the mouse pointer over to a scroll bar all the time is just so uncivilized. It turns out touch pads can be even better than scroll wheels, standard use actually makes a fairly minimal use of the space, generally when it comes to movement you start on the opposite side of the pad and stroke down in the direction you want to go, so the movements you make are left-right across the middle, top-down across the middle and the two diagonals again across the middle. This means that any stroke that doesn't go across the middle is actually an anomaly and can be used for other things.  So, my new scroll wheel is just the far right hand side of the touch pad, if I stick to this area I can stroke up and down and have super smooth browser scrolling, hell yeah, whats more is there are another 3 edges that we can use. The bottom edge is obviously used for left-right scrolling but we have two more side, free, to use for other special actions. This is all the same sort of concept as mouse gestures, abnormal acts can be used for specials, on Wizball on the C64, the smart bomb was activated by wiggling the joystick, thats the first time I remember encountering that kind of control. Sure its possible to mistake valid movement for these special actions but mostly it does exactly what you want when you want it. So what about buttons? Well some more zones and we can easily have 5 tap buttons, yup, 5 buttons which is the most real mice tend to have. A tap in the center is left click, top right is right click then top left, bottom left bottom right for the other three buttons. All of these areas are really easy to hit and highly intuitive. The bottom left and bottom right area taps take me backwards and forwards in FireFox for instance. This is all without going near the buttons also attached to the pad (or NDS), just using the pad alone, we have mouse movement, 4 scroll wheels and 5 buttons. Which is all pretty damn cool, but you don't need to know that because it will all get taken care of in the windows device driver, right? Wrong! For starters the events are unlikely to be mapped at a low enough level if you pull input in from DX and like I said, I actually had to go looking for the driver with this useful functionality in it. An average user would stick with the crap that comes installed and never go there, so actually this needs to be implemented in the game input handler, for the most compatibility. Obviously you also need to do this if you have your eyes on possible revolution ports using the NDS as a controller so its not all pointless extra work. Since I want mouse pad users to have this sort of ease of use, I will have to implement it myself. I'll add this all to into my DX input library some time soon... Least I think I will, I need to check that most pads give decent absolute values into DX and run some tests but I bet it will all work out. Click here to post a comment |
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
||||||
