Stu's Rusty Bucket

Monday, March 31, 2008

Financial Meltdown

I read this article on CNN Careers vanish after subprime ‘free fall’, its a wonderful tale of woe of the family of Kent and Mysti Cope who live in the so impoverished Orange County in California.

Lets take some quotes.....

He has been out of work since August when he was laid off

OK, He lost his job and has not found one in… 7 or 8 months.....

Today, they’re trying to get by on his unemployment benefits of about $450 a week, which covers only about an eighth of the basic payments they owe every month.

For Mysti, 37, all her efforts to find work since she lost her job last May have been futile.

His wife has no job either… and hasn’t had one for 11 months…

Their home equity line, mortgage, health and life insurance premiums alone cost about $10,000 a month. Still, they are trying to hang onto what they call their dream home with a view of the Pacific Ocean

Awesome! Keeping the dream alive, a mansion on the coast…

“We’ve used up most of our reserves, cashed in her 401K,” said Kent. “We’re going Mach 1 into a wall. When we run into it, then we’ve got to decide what to do next.”

This is the “we have no plan going forward” routine, also known as “we are waiting for something magical to happen and money to fall into our laps!!”

And they’ve made cutbacks: trading in Kent’s Corvette for a Suburban and getting rid of the gardener,

Awesome, they switched from a gas guzzling corvette to a.. gas guzzling huge ass SUV!

Since he lost his job, Kent has gotten a real estate license and is trying to start a business selling the rapidly increasing inventory of foreclosed homes in Orange County, Calif. Mysti is trying to build an online business selling jewelry and beachwear, some of which she designs herself.

I know!! Lets get a job selling houses.. that don’t sell in a market that is thrashing around and wallowing in its death throes! Awesome decision there Kent. You go Mysti (Is that her porn actress name or something?), just think how many sea shell necklaces and self designed bikini’s you need to sell to make that 10k minimum a month.

“The media has somewhat tarnished the subprime industry and all the employees, and portrayed them as being dishonest,” she said. “We’re not dishonest. Not everybody was a bad borrower. Not every company was a bad lender.”

Yes yes, its all the fault of the media Mysti, thats why you cant get a job.

Must be tough living in Orange County, CA and needing to make 10k a month to pay your mortgage and health insurance.

They obviously didn’t create any kind of safety net with there 2million+ income (they both had a six figure+ income each)… I mean.. really.. you have a combined two million plus income and you don’t push jack shit into savings and we are supposed to sympathise how tough life is for folks living in Orange County CA?

Cry me a river.

Using Skills

So I know what my frame limiter was… I had sped time up to test some time triggers, which in essence converted it from 1000 ticks a second to 250. Hence the dropping by 1/4… Putting this back to 1000 ticks brought me back to 16/17 frames a second…

I double tasked the use option, so now when using an item you can toggle to using a skill! Now I can hunt in forests for food.

When using the hunting skill, it scans the tiles around the player, different tiles give different weights to what game can be found. Forests are best, then woodland then grassland. Each tile type has a multiplier, and a bonus is applied if your enclosed in all forest. The scan is a 49 tile block (3x3 around the player). This is calculated into a chance of finding game, making that chance then applies your hunting skill to see if you actually brought down and bagged that game. Passing that, gives a random chance for game type, the rarest gives the most meat, the most common, the least meat, (There are only 3 types of game).

Without building big, what I would have liked to implement would be a reference underneath so you couldn’t hunt more than once in a set area without reducing the amount of game there. IE you couldn’t farm a set of tiles indefinitely without exhausting them, and over time they would replenish… but thats not code I am willing to spend on something I’m trying hard not to bloat unnecessarily…

Monday, March 24, 2008

Hacking side effects

I was hacking on a bug last night when I kept getting some odd behaviour in my map code… Turns out in my coding spree last night I fixed a very very old bug that I had coded a workaround for a very long time ago, and in fixing the root cause broke the work around…

So tonight, depending on time, I need to do some cleanup to remove said workaround. yay!

Looking at the solution, makes me wonder why I didn’t do it right from the beginning.. At least it ts properly fixed now.

I need to address a big bottleneck somewhere. I am currently getting about 4 frames per second.. which is horrendously poor and I cant quite see why. I ran the profiler but didn’t really see anything… humm..

I have a suspicion, based on messing around with the intro code… will have to branch the code and test this week.

Friday, March 21, 2008

Random name generation

Ive been poking with some random name generation stuff. Nothing uber fancy or anything.

First thing I did was to collect data of the top 100 boys and girls names over several years. Various web sites have lists of these things so its a pretty easy cut and paste to mine them.

I then used a ruby script to collate, sort and remove dupes.

This gave me 196 (of 500) total unique boys names and 162 (of 500) total unique girls names. You can see most are duplicates. This is also of course very English/American centric I should add.

The next task was to break down the names into c/v/cc/vv markers (consonant, vowel etc) of the english speach.

Some examples;

vcvcvccvc => alexander == (v, c, v, c, v, cc, v, c)  => (a, l, e, x, a, nd, e, r)
vcccvc => andrew == (v, cc, c, v, c)  => (a, nd, r, e, w)
vccvc => angel == (v, cc, v, c)  => (a, ng, e, l)
vcccvcc => anthony == (v, cc, c, v, cc)  => (a, nt, h, o, ny)
vccvcvv => antonio == (v, cc, v, c, vv)  => (a, nt, o, n, io)
vcccvc => ashton == (v, cc, c, v, c)  => (a, sh, t, o, n)
vvccvc => austin == (vv, cc, v, c)  => (au, st, i, n)

cvccvcv => barbara == (c, v, cc, v, c, v)  => (b, a, rb, a, r, a)
cvccc => betty == (c, v, cc, c)  => (b, e, tt, y)
cvcvccc => beverly == (c, v, c, v, cc, c)  => (b, e, v, e, rl, y)
ccvvccv => brianna == (cc, vv, cc, v)  => (br, ia, nn, a)
ccvccvcc => brittany == (cc, v, cc, v, cc)  => (br, i, tt, a, ny)
ccvvcv => brooke == (cc, vv, c, v)  => (br, oo, k, e)
ccvvcccc => brooklyn == (cc, vv, cc, cc)  => (br, oo, kl, yn)
cvcvccv => cadence == (c, v, c, v, cc, v)  => (c, a, d, e, nc, e)
cvcccc => camryn == (c, v, cc, cc)  => (c, a, mr, yn)
cvccc => carly == (c, v, cc, c)  => (c, a, rl, y)
cvcvc => carol == (c, v, c, v, c)  => (c, a, r, o, l)
cvcvcvcv => caroline == (c, v, c, v, c, v, c, v)  => (c, a, r, o, l, i, n, e)

Of the 196 boys names this is what I got;

ccvcc = 4
ccvccvc = 7
ccvcvc = 4
cvc = 3
cvcc = 9
cvccc = 5
cvcccvc = 3
cvccvc = 21
cvccvcc = 6
cvccvvc = 3
cvcv = 4
cvcvc = 20
cvcvcc = 7
cvcvvc = 5
cvvc = 6
vcvc = 6
vvcvc = 3

Girls names were more varied and this is the output of that 162;

ccvccvc = 4
cvcc = 5
cvccc = 8
cvccv = 7
cvccvc = 8
cvccvcc = 4
cvccvcv = 4
cvccvcvv = 3
cvccvv = 4
cvcv = 4
cvcvc = 10
cvcvccc = 4
cvcvccv = 7
cvcvcv = 3
cvcvcvcv = 3
cvcvv = 4
cvvc = 3
cvvcv = 4
cvvcvc = 4
vccv = 3
vcvcv = 4
vcvcvv = 3

Using another script to use the above tables I randomly generated some names, for example;

pattern = cvcvc   : pupet
pattern = ccvvcc  : stoush
pattern = cvcvcvc : ronafut
pattern = cvcvcvc : nodibol
pattern = cvcvc   : tunen
pattern = cvcvcvc : lejacas
pattern = cvccvcc : kolfift
pattern = ccvvc   : fraes
pattern = cvccvcc : hangold
pattern = ccvvcc  : gruath
pattern = ccvvcc  : skeenk
pattern = ccvvcc  : thouft
pattern = cvccvc  : tolfaj
pattern = cvccvcc : sontunt
pattern = cvcvvc  : toboum
pattern = ccvvc   : skaed
pattern = cvcvcvc : lekajel
pattern = cvccvcc : fathort
pattern = cvcvvc  : gekuat
pattern = cvccvc  : mankos

Mmm nothing of any real value or even remotely close to existing names from the original list (I was only testing against patterns of 5 or more letters)

I should note that I weeded out a lot of things, For example there are no ‘q’ or ‘qu’ pairings and letters like ‘z’ and ‘x’ have been removed. Consonant pairings are restricted to things like ‘st’,’ch’,’dr’,’sh’ etc and vowel pairings to ‘ae’,’ou’ etc…

Needs a lot more work. I think what I need to do is weight the combinations and make a dictionary of the first consonant/vowel/combos and then the rest of the combos.

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Resizing windows and cleaning up the house

I’ve spread my self around last night, doing minor work on both CnC and Fishguts.

In CnC I built the game to resize the SDL window, and it works quite well, I’m very surprised, and it only took about 3 lines of C code to make it work. One suckage thing is that SDL clears the buffer so if you resize and hold the mouse down you get a black window until the game redraws the window, but you dont get that message until after you release the mouse button…

In Fishguts news, I’ve been tidying up my constants, the game uses a lot of constants in the C code and int he Lua code, and basically I have duplicate on the Lua side. I spent last night cleaning a lot up by having them set by the C code when a new Lua State is created, this stops me having to load the same constants in at the top of a script in an include file… so that is pretty nice.

Joy dislocated her shoulder so I’ve been doing all the baby caring stuff on my own lately which has killed any productivity but thats ok, its what marriage is about, taking care of each other. We are hoping its not a torn rotator cuff, so I might be doing only minor work on CnC + Fishguts for a few more weeks.

Monday, March 17, 2008

More on Combat maps

The internal debate right now is over combat maps.

1 - Do I blow up the existing map into the combat map, doing say every tile x3
2 - Do I load pre-made combat maps

Doing 1 is easy and hard at the same time.  It reveals the map layout (bad in caves/dungeons, but doesn’t really matter in towns or overland). The biggest downside is, it magnifies the map. The town maps use a simple tile scale. A door is 1 tile, etc. Suddenly you go into combat and the door is 3 tiles and a room might be 9x9 tiles. It might not sound bad but gives the wrong scale to the map. It sounds a lot more pedantic than it is.

One thing I remember doing in Pool of Radiance and Azure Bonds, when your in combat you can see the layout of the dungeon around you, which can be handy (you don’t see doors tho). The no door thing kinda bothered me, that suddenly in combat they all disappeared, but at the same time, I understood that this is what you get with the break between the map your playing and the combat.

Doing number 2 is really simple. I can pre-draw several combat maps, you know the plain grass combat map, the ship to shore type map, the cave map. This is the easiest method, but the downside is, what kind of maps do you have in towns? How do you represent the surroundings in the dungeon, if you have come down a crowded narrow corridor on all sides, you hit the combat map and its a nice open map with nothing like what you are really standing in..

I am leaning toward exploding the maps by 3 times right now. I may do some form of anti-aliasing so things are not so blocky in transitions.

That leaves randomness. Well except for town maps, all outdoor maps will have a random element, you know, downed tree’s, logs, rocks, etc. Dungeons and caves will have rocks, puddles and the like.

The dilemma there is putting a tree on the map… This is 2D, so you cant walk ‘behind’ the tree. The tree is in effect an obstacle. It wont obstruct view, and you can hide behind it, but should it obstruct missile weapons and magic? Magic is inherently.. magical by nature so you can explain that away. And hiding behind a rock should cover you from missile weapons…

There are a lot of edge cases. Its easy to see why in Ultima III, combat was just a plain grid of tiles, all grass or all floor or something, and your placed on one side, with one group of all-same enemies on the other. The smallest increase in complexity opens up such a can of worms.

Combat

Now that I finally have a working PSP backend playing nicely for the last week, I nutted out the flow and pseudo code for the combat engine. Looking at the top level flow of 25 lines is nice. It looks so much more do-able than the initial impression.

What is it really, but another abuse of the tile engine utilising different sized tiles (1x1, 1x2, 2x1, 2x2).

Some of the top level stuff is really basic (initialise the loot list to be empty), to the hard (determine placement of enemy parties on map)…

Some things are only as hard as you make them for youself. Right now I am still debating if I will ‘blow’ up and enlarge the current map into the combat map, or load a predefined map based on the square the party is standing on and the square the enemy is standing on (thus allowing ship to shore etc)…

I’ll keep mulling the top level and low level descriptions for a while so I can go in and implement it all at once and not have to do huge backtracks because I overlooked something silly or important

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

PSP working

OK I believe the PSP port is working as is meant to be right now Its kinda cool see’ing it on the PSP (since its a more mainstream device than the GP2X)… Still need a hacked firmware to run it so it will never be that awesome since Sony will never open it up… ohwell..

Back to working on the combat engine.......

Monday, March 10, 2008

Feel the PSP Love

I made a test PSP drop available and mentioned it on the qj.net forums.. I still have some quirks to work out with HOME key and doing a game exit… It seems I can always get one or the other to work as expected but not both together… sigh…

It playrs a lot better than last nights build so thats good!

Sunday, March 09, 2008

PSP Update

As an addendum to the previous entry today, I managed to play Fishguts on the PSP! Pretty sweet. Its only about 95% as I need to change some of the button handling.

Also the game doesn’t quit correctly, which is odd since all the callbacks are setup…

So anyway, it was a pretty cool feeling seeing it fire up on the PSP

Unfortunately you need a CFW (Custom Firmware) to play it…

PSP Code Base

I think this week will be spent bringing the PSP backend up to speed to where I can run Fishguts without any problems, or at least it should match GP2X functionality.

I’m hoping to just wrap SDL with psp function calls and a few callbacks for Sony’s kernel routines.

I dont think it will be too hard. and I readly have the toolchain built from the last attempt that I gave up on after I built the toolchain! Talk about getting nowhere.

Anyway, its time to start testing the actual PSP code, since the PSP technically has half the memory of the GP2X, eveo tho its mostly the same (since the top 32mb in the GP2X has other priorities, caching etc. and you need a mem hack to enable it, but since I dont...The GP2X is pushing the same memory limits as I’ll be pushing in the PSP....)

Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Key configs for roguelikes

Ive been alternating my time between Cracks and Crevices and Fishguts. From CnC’s last release one of the more common findings, people seemed to ignore the readme.txt files and not make use of configuring the game.

So I’ve been hacking the last few days on having an ingame key editor. From the main screen when you load up it will tell you if you have any unassigned keys (which should be a good indication to someone that they need to configure them).

You can redefine existing keys or reset to default. I will also had a quick defualt to setup for using VI keys, Cursor, WASD or NumPad. Since diagonals are important, anything but the numpad is a bit of a handicap, but there are still diehard VI keymap people in the roguelike world (and those people probably don’t like that I’ve used graphical ascii over ‘real’ terminal ascii)…

Hopefully this will take care of the often not-configured comments.

The flipside, I didn’t get any complaints about the graphical window size but I think I’m going to add a window size selection as well.