Stu's Rusty Bucket

Monday, September 24, 2007

Project Management

I have just installed RedMine on my box, its a Rails app thats a bug tracker/roadmap/issues/wiki/forum/repository etc.

Its all pretty cool. I’ve got it running out of sqlite3 because I didnt want to mess with a full db server just for testing.

I really like it a lot. I’ve ran into a couple of odd issues and it supports quite a few SCM’s but not bzr unfortunately.

This is a project I’ll defiantly be keeping an eye on.

This is very slick and sweet.

** Edit **
99% of my problems stemmed from testing with SQLite3. I switched to mysql and they all went away. Kinda pissed me off a bit that every other Database Adapter besides MySQL is a second class citizen in rails (I’m A FirebirdSQL fan).

So now its even sweeter. I think its much better than Trac for what its worth.

Monday, September 17, 2007

Personal Finance

Ive added a slew of personal finance + frugality blogs to my Google Reader and I’m conviced to do a few things tonight.

* I need to get into the attic above the kitchen and see what the insulation is like and really check out the insluation in the other floor of the house.

* Get that plastic gallon milk jug into the three cisterns we have (bricks are bad they can crumble and break down over time...).

* Replace the huge 80gallon electric hot water system with a on-demand hot water system…

OK, So I’m kinda dreaming on the last one but I think it would be totally worth it.

First I need to work out how much the current system costs us and how long it would take to pay off replacing it. Not an easy task.

Then its on-demand electric vs on-demand gas. If we went gas we would have to get a bigger gas tank, but with electric we could just replace the existing tank and screw the new on-demand onto the wall.

I also know there is little to no insulation between the basement and upstairs floors, partly because its a floating ceiling, and partly because of the 10 degree difference in summer and the arctic conditions in the winter

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Shops are good

I implemented a version of the previous entry on shop code and re-using the npc interaction code.

Worked quite well, the screens need to be jazzed up a little but they are good to go.

Implementing a shop is now a single line of code whenever I need it.

WorkMyShop("FASHIONABLE APPAREL",
	{"LEATHER JERKIN", "LEATHER ARMOUR", "WIZARDS CLOAK"},
	it_Armour, BuyItem, SellItem)

You pass in the name of the shop, a list of what it sells (if its blank, it will list all items of type X), the type of shop and because lua is functional you pass the buy/sell routines in with it, I have this because there is a slight difference when dealing with food, so with a minor tweak you can now sell food back to the store if your so inclined.

Its nice to limit what a shop can sell, since not every shop should sell every single item, that would be boring.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Fishguts Anniversary

Hmm today marks a year since I first blogged on Fishguts design. Weird. When I look at what I have working, I think, it took a year to get this far??? But I also realise Ive become a dad, had my parents over and lots of other things have interrupted life. Then I also realise I only do an hour or so here and there on it.

But still…

A year and this is all I have to show?

The first post, by the way, is here.

I can actually see the light on this project tho, and all the minor incremental fixes and touches I make, it gets a little bit better each time.

Fishguts : ToDo List 20090912

A rough todo list;

* Re-work the “work flow” for shops
* Selling Items
* Make Inventory screen non-static, make it selectable with “Use” action
* Do Oracle / Pub code (The “How much do you offer...” code)
* Peer at Gem
* Wandering monsters (The code is already there with the shopkeepers). Really need to add a couple onto the maps and see how they behave.
* Training Halls for leveling up

The last big stint after all these small things will be the combat code, roughly;

* Quick Targeting of monsters as well as arbitrary targeting
* Melee + Ranged combat
* Magic

Shop code has turned into a small nightmare. There are lots of things that are closely related but not, and requires slightly different implementations.

I have the following kind of shops
* Food / Weapons / Armour / etc (the standard shop type)
* Oracle / Pub The “How much do you pay/offer” type deal.
* Training Hall

I have had to write a common ‘widget’ that is shared, which is the pick list / item list. Talking to NPC requires a scrolling list of keywords, shops require a scrolling list of items, etc.

I am thinking of changing my design for the oracle + pub type deal.

Initially it was going to be you offer X$ and get a response back. Now I think for oracles I’ll have different things like

== Marvin the Mystic ===
Select your desire
    10$ Palm Reading 
    50$ Aura Reading
   100$ Tea Leaf reading
   500$ Tarot Cards
  1000$ Bones

And variations on the theme, which gets the pick list reused again.

If I wanted to go ‘ugly’ I could re-use the framework for Talking as its fairly arbitrary and very easy to re-use, thus any ‘new’ shop could be done instantly.

Below is pretty rough but should be close to compiling I think. The only downside right now is there is no ‘multiple’s so you can only buy a qty of 1 each time, but that could be rectified by a change to the talk code to add a quantity field to the data… Then where qrt is > 1, the user could be prompted for how many to buy… that would work.

   1:-- Creating Buy/Sell from talk code
   2:function InitShopScreen(tblItems)
   3:    ClearTalkList()
   4:
   5:    local key,val
   6:    for key,val in pairs(tblItems) do
   7:        AddToTalkList(val)
   8:    end
   9:end
  10:
  11:function DoShopBuy()
  12:    InitShopScreen({"KNIFE", "AXE"})
  13:    
  14:    local id, kw
  15:    id = 0
  16:    while id ~= -1
  17:        id, kw = GetTalkInput()
  18:        
  19:        if id ~= -1 then
  20:            id = GetItemIndexFromName(kw)
  21:            if GetPlayerGold() >= GetItemCost(id) then
  22:                AddToInventory(id)
  23:                SetPlayerGold( GetPlayerGold() - GetItemCost(id) )
  24:                MsgBox("YOU BOUGHT : " .. GetItemName(id), " OK ", "")
  25:            else
  26:                MsgBox("YOU DONT HAVE ENOUGH CASH!", " OK ", "")
  27:            end
  28:        end
  29:    end
  30:end
  31:
  32:function DoShopSell()
  33:    local i, id, kw
  34:    
  35:    id = 0
  36:    while id ~= -1
  37:        ClearTalkList()
  38:    
  39:        for i=1..G_MAX_INVENTORY_ITEMS do
  40:            local idx
  41:            
  42:            idx = GetInvnetoryItemIndex(i)
  43:            
  44:            if idx ~= -1 then
  45:                AddToTalkList( GetItemName(idx) )
  46:            end
  47:        end
  48:        
  49:        id, kw = GetTalkInput()
  50:        if id ~= -1 then
  51:            RemoveFromInventory(id)
  52:            
  53:            id = GetItemIndexFromName(id)
  54:            SetPlayerGold( GetPlayerGold() + (GetItemCost(id)/2) )
  55:            
  56:            MsgBox("SOLD FOR " .. GetItemCost(id)/2, " OK ", "")
  57:        end
  58:    end
  59:end
  60:
  61:function DoShop()
  62:    local id, kw
  63:    
  64:    id = 0
  65:    while id ~= -1
  66:        InitShopScreen( { "BUY", "SELL" })
  67:        
  68:        id, kw = GetTalkInput()
  69:        if kw == "BUY" then DoShopBuy() end
  70:        elseif kw == "SELL" then DoShopSell() end
  71:    end
  72:end

Going to have to rethink this train of thought. I’m kinda liking the idea of reusing my talk code and cutting out all the other special shop code.... Might have to branch my code and see how implementation goes.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

FPGA Programming

Ive been eyeing off a Nexys-2 from Digilent systems for a while. I think it would be an awesome opporutinity to do something like CoCo3 in FPGA. I think CoCo3 would be a lot easier to implement (A coco2 would be MUCH easier than a CoCo3) than say a TI99. The only downside is the GIME chip in the coco3 (which is what really separates a CoCo2 from a 3).

The Nexys2 looks like a really nice board, and one thing it does over a lot of its other cheap competitors, is have a 12bit VGA dac. Most other Spartan3 boards seem to have 1bit dacs for 8 colours. What good is 8 colors?

Xess have a nice board, the XSA-3S1000 which does good VGA but lacks anything in the way of inputs (it has a ps2 port).

The Xess board has 32mb dram, the Digilent has 16mb.

Clearly the Nexys-2 kicks its butt on all but gates.

Hmm. Altera have a nice Cyclone II dev board that includes sound out and SD/MMC slot… 240k ram bits and 20k logic elements…

Wondering if its enough but its sure the nicest board for price yet!

Monday, September 10, 2007

Sporting Clays

Sporting Clays, its like golf with a shotgun.

I wonder if that means I need to buy plaid pants and long socks?

I still need to work the action on my Over/Under some more. Still stiff, so I need to clean off the receiver, forearm and hinge pin and re-grease and work it, work it, work it!

Maybe over the coming weeks I can go back out to the Glorious 12th range and do some POI testing and some skeet again...?

I want to take Joy with me so she can have a crack too but would need someone to look after the little boy.... We will see....

Saturday, September 08, 2007

Tracking the Player

Did some minor work tonight, and got the NPC tiles animating, they will flip frames each second (regardless if the player moves 10 times in a second, the animation doesnt map to the player movement ticks).

Also got NPC’s tracking. Merchants will now track the player across the shopfront and serve you wherever you hit the counter at, and since NPCs and not the same as Events, the event attached to the NPC also has to move accordingly.

When NPC’s are added/created their start frame is randomised (zero or one) so when you have a line of menacing town guards, they are not all waving their arms in synchronisation (yeah I learnt right off it looks bad! lol).

Thursday, September 06, 2007

Inventory

Knocked up a little inventory script tonight. All it does is cycle through the inventory list and print out the quantity and name of items.

Nothing pretty but it works. Buying items also inserts them into the inventory. Its smart enough that when you add the same item more than once it stacks it.

I’m considering adding a dont-stack flag, so you cant stack 999 super heavy duty iron plate mail armour. This way I can flag things that dont stack.... to not stack..

But that opens the whole can of worms.

Do we or dont we stack potions of healing? why or why not? if we can stack arrows, can we not stack potions? that would be a huge hindrance if we couldnt (for fighter types who have no magic).

OK, so we stack potions… so why cant we stack swords?

I can argue for and against.

I think in the long run, the more I think about it, all items will stack regardless.

Monday, September 03, 2007

Shopping

I did some work on shops tonight. You cant sell yet, but you can buy, and only in single items, which really only affects food.

The screens need to be prettied up.

Just need to sync up my item script with my spreadsheet.

Now I need to work on an inventory script and selling items.