Stu's Rusty Bucket

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Date set for this years 7 Day Roguelike Challenge

So the week has been chosen and its March 8 - March 16.

I had plans and ideas but really I dont forsee any time to implement anything. I might keep jotting down ideas and plans and we will see how things pan out.

The initial cut is titled “Den of Iniquity”, in it you will play a thief and there will really be only 1 main map, which would be a large sprawling city complete with gardens and walled areas. There would be a more traiditional roguelike map underneath being the sewers that link the city, and how you can get in and out of certain places.

The aim is to rob as many houses as you can. Each place would have a gold drop. But also in each place might be some wandering NPC’s, guards, townsfolk etc.

If you kill anyone on the street, the guards will be alerted and come looking (you can still escape). You need to remain unnoticed (aka nobody enters your FOV) for a set period of time for the guards to go out of hunt-you-down mode.

The two maps layers will be created in paint program and a generic bitmap. Different ‘colours’ will represent the areas that can contain a treasure and I’ll not a rectangle of co-ords and say for colour X, pick a co-ord inside this rectangle, if it matches colour X, place a treasure here. Go on to next colour.

This way I can randomly place booty and loot on the map with relative easy. I can then make several rooms the same colour so it could be any any end of the house or on upper levels.

Advancement will be via the thieves guild hidden in the sewers, and will being more hitpoints, increased skill in lockpick etc. You will still need to buy lockpicks, maybe scrolls of unlock or disarm traps as well as better equipment. Gaining each level of advancement will require beating one of the Guilds tests (ie: spring JoJo from the towns prison, which would require you to pick the lock and escape, which would also mean probably having to kill a guard or two), etc.

I was planning on using Cracks and Crevices as the base of the game, I think a game like this would be nice to have CnC’s directional LOS and timing.

The real task will be creating the maps and populating the towns.

The win condition will be finding the 10 treasures scattered around the place.

Keeping in Sync

Moved several things over to git now and its nice. I even made a git repo for my web pages with a post-update hook that does an update on the master so whenever I push the master to my repo it auto updates the website. Pretty cool. Took me an age to figure out why it kept telling my “.” was not a git repository (GIT sets an environment variable for the repo) and I had to unset the GIT_DIR and now its working ok.

Monday, January 28, 2008

Targeting Opponents

Two thirds of the magic system are in place right now, well what I consider two thirds.

1 - You can equip spellbooks and scrolls, and select / hotkey the spell you want to cast
2 - You can target monsters in your FOV. Targeting is a ‘free’ move that doesn’t cost you any time, you just have to make it within the move-time allotted period or you ‘pass’ a turn. In game play ‘Easy’ mode that should be too much of a problem.

The last part is the actual casting, which should be pretty straight forward, since spells are just a collection of attributes that need some code backed behind them.

Right now I am thinking that spells will move in 6 cell chunks per turn. ie: I cast a magic missile at a Troll who is 8 squares away from me. The moment I cast it, it traverses 6 square, then everyone gets a turn, if the troll is smart he side steps, and the magic continues on past.

But maybe just to get this release out the door, magic will instantly traverse from caster to target.

Friday, January 25, 2008

Magic! Shazam Again

Spent a little time on CnC last night, working on getting the magic system going.

First issue was you couldnt equip the spellbook, so I moved books and scrolls out of the miscellaneous item enumeration and created a itm_BookOrScroll enumeration, and added its flag to the wield item routine.

The thinking is, you need to have the scroll or spellbook readied in one of your hands to cast from it.

There are two quick keys for casting a spell, currently its ‘C’ for cast spell which applies to a targetted monster, or directly in front of you if nothing is targetted, and secondly ‘X’ for casting the spell on yourself.

Casting will be a one or two step process, the ‘V’ key (I’m keeping things close together but you can redefine al the key assignments), will be ‘Select Spell’. If you havnt a spell selected, when you cast you will be give a list of spells in whatever is readied in your hands and you pick and it casts. Using V/Select Spell, you can bind a spell to the casting and each time you cast it will use that spell. Its usefull to tie something like a fireball spell to it so you can go on the attack without using too many keystrokes.

Im debating of using the number keys to quick bind up to 10 spells so you just press the number rather than C to cast… Not too sure of that yet so we will see how the current system plays.

Once this code is down, I can re-use a lot of it for missile weapons, so I should get those as mostly a bonus, since it relies on the same targetting code, and the ‘A’ttack key is already implemented, I just need to add a check to see if the weapon your holding is a melee or ranged weapon. (But what to do if one is holding a dagger and a sling?.. mayhap if there is a monster directly in front of you I pick the dagger else I pick the sling...... must think about that one).

Noticed my auto-pickup code wasnt working last night too.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Git and Cracks and Crevices, 7 Day Roguelikes blah blah blah

I’m slowly migrating my development work from bazaar to git as my version control system of choice. The first time I tried git I did not like it, but the newer versions are much nicer and so far, I’m not looking back.

I had to muck with repository permissions to get gitweb working correctly. meh. http://bloodycactus.com/git gives you a web view of the repo/commit info etc.

Its very… disconcerting to do a commit AND push have it return instantly where bazaar would just… work its magic and come back after a minute or two. The speed difference is truly amazing, and for the most part I have kept the exact same work flow, all I needed to add was a push step after I commit. Obviously bazaar was pushing the entire file over sftp and git is only pushing the deltas but even for small files thats a huge difference.

It would be nice if when I did a commit, like bazaar, it auto gpg signed my commit.

Right now I have a public read-only git repository for one of my roguelikes and write permissions for me using gitosis, making Cracks and Crevices my test project, which you can pull from

git clone git://bloodycactus.com/cnc.git

On to other game development news, I’ve made my redmine install available publicly now too (here). This puts the bug and issue tracker, wiki, etc all open to the public in a read only mode.

Since I am keeping all the design notes in the wiki for Fishguts, I made its user status private (it has the walkthrough and all the other import bits in it, and I cant restrict what pages are public and non-public)… I think what I really need is just to have a secondary private project whereby the wiki is all I use in it so all the issues and other bits are public sans the wiki.

Hmm I need to think of an idea for this years 7 Day Roguelike (7DRL) competition. I can reuse the framework of CnC, just need to re-write it.

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Fixes to the house

Things I want to do to the house

Basement
- Pull of the half-high wood finish around the basement + repaint that half of the room
- Rehang basement bathroom doors (the bathroom door and the door to the furnace)

Master Bedroom
- Hang joys full length mirror on bathroom door (mirror mastic should be ok)

Master Bathroom
- Rip out plastic shower and tile bathroom + proper shower door
- Put new exhaust/fan/light in bathroom

Hallway Bathroom
- Rip out plastic tub/shower thing + replace with real tub + tile
- Attach overflow pipe (thats currently not!)

Garage
- Replace 80 gallon electric hot water tank with smaller tank or gas tank

Garden
- 4 rows of raised beds with proper soil (about 3ft tall)

Decking
- Sand and refinish front + back deck
- Replace broken plank in back deck

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Magic! Shazam

Started the last piece of the 0.4 release schedule puzzle last night.  Basic magic/spell engine code.

When a player starts and he buys their first spellbook, Brilhasti will throw in two beginner spells (I haven’t decided which ones yet, probably some basic magic missile type spell and some random one).

I added data to the actor for known spells, I just need to add something to spellbooks/scrolls so they know what they contain. (You have to ready a spellbook to be able to cast from it). There will be two keys for spell casting, ‘c’ to cast directly in front of you, and ‘t’ to target a spell to cast. Targeting will be slower since things still happen in semi real-time and while your trying to target a monster. Targeting will be automatic, ‘t’ will cycle through monsters in your current field of vision.

Targeting will also be used for missile weapons like slings and archery, ‘t’ to select target and ‘a’ to attack.

Balancing is needle point right now, as the player at the start is fairly evenly matched with the start monsters that will be encountered. One just has to hope one does not run into one of the specials right near the start ^_^;;

I have to play through a lot more to see what the balance is like for beginning players who are trying to focus on magic over melee weaponry. Right now the beginning strategy is more to start with melee weapons and once you have survived a bit, graduate to using spells when you have a good melee weapon (not forgetting that bulkier/bigger weapons and armour have an affect on mana regeneration....).

Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Ebay Score 1955 Gillette Diplomat

I dropped a bid on what was supposed to be a 1955 Gillette Aristocrat DE razor, I only bid $1 over the current bid and managed to win the auction, so I was a bit surprised. Turns out it was not an Executive but the more rare version called a Diplomat. Its not truly collectable since it didnt come in its original case.

I will probably give it a whirl tonight, rumour via the SMF forum has it that its a more aggresive shaver than a red-tip super speed!! So its going to be very interesting to see what its like since my go-to razor is a 1939 Gillette Tech fat-handle which is supposed to be the mildest of the Gillette razors.

The photo of the head closed shows it needs a bit of polishing but all its gold plating is intact.

Pictures after the jump of the ‘diplomat’

Thursday, January 03, 2008

2008 Resolutions

Some resolutions for 2008, these I hope are more down to earth and attainable type goals.

* Get more vegetables into my diet (this kinda hinges on my wife choosing to eat more than green beans on occasion...)
* Spend more time with my boy
* Finish Fishguts
* Get a few more releases of Cracks and Crevices out and move development along
* Get my traditional razor technique down much more solidly that what it is.
* Ride the bike more