So I finally got custom firmware installed on my PSP slim -- I'm surprised it took me so long (a whole five days, including waiting for my battery to arrive). Here is how I did it, in case you also have a PSP and want to install firmware on it, but don't want to go Googling through half-complete forum tutorials written by the largely illiterate.
Since I live in The Canada, this was legal for me to do. Poor Americans.
Anyway, now that I've done it I've been playing SNES and PS1 games. I could probably try setting up a development environment and testing out SDL, though. Maybe even finally deliver on that "CSRPG2 on PSP" scam that I had going way at the start of this journal.
If you guys have a PSP, make sure to modify it -- you can still buy commercial games and feel good about it, but you can also get a lot of software which delivers on the promise of the machine, particularly PSPRadio and a Remote Desktop client.
Scary Observation
This journal has been around for almost two years now. It's lasted longer than some peoples' entire film careers.
Link of the Moment
This guy has too much free time on his hands and not enough memory.
After I posted my previous sad rant, I spent a bit of time making the game nicer.
One thing that's bothered me is switching between targets; it's hard to know who you have selected and why. At the risk of offending AnonymousPosterChild further, I added another GUI overlay.
Additionally, NPCs who are leaving the system are now tagged as (Leaving) so you won't try to attack them.
I also added an upgrade item that gives your ship "advanced radar," so now you can see on your radar who is a buddy, who is a star system, and who is trying to kill you.
Here is a YouTube clip of the current build, because HopeDagger asked for it. I've actually made a few fixes since then to the HUD, but nothing that you'll really notice.
Interesting features:
Note how utterly uncontrollable this game is, even after I've been working on it for nearly a year and a half. It's depressing that the fundamentals are so broken and I still can't figure out how to make it better.
Stuff is still pretty barren.
The "destroyed ship" lightning ball emits a really annoying noise which I luckily dampened with the soundtrack.
Twitter integration is disabled in the Windows version since libcurl's internal zlib keeps trying to conflict with the one that SDL_image expects. I don't know if I'll have this fixed for release; the Twitter stuff is a gimmick feature that nobody will use.
The mouse controller is a real pain in the ass; I kept bumping it accidentally and sending the ship into a tailspin. I still do this occasionally on the Mac build and it drives me insane. I am going to go disable it right now.
Windows Movie Maker crashed at least 50 times trying to put this simple clip together. Microsoft seriously must have monkeys in whatever department bolted that code together.
I hope you at least enjoy this look; I'm going to take a bit of time to sit and really think if I want to officially release this and have it attached to my reputation, or just cut my losses, push it out as a "prototype game"/learning experience and then get to work on Afterglow. I know which one I'd prefer.
Edit: I'm strongly tending towards shelving the game, because there's nothing special here; I burned a year figuring out the quaternion math; while it works perfectly, it turns out humans can't really deal with rotation in 6DOF and I can't figure out how to fix it other than with nasty hacks. It makes the game virtually uncontrollable, as does the acceleration control system I've picked.
I've spent tons of time working around this problem by giving the player consistently more powerful "noob weapons," but even the ECM attack is impossible to pull off smoothly against even an idle, neutral ship.
Realistically, I should've shelved this in the first couple months of development. I think what I was looking for was a chance to redeem myself for what I did wrong with Sunrise, and I did that, at least. There's almost a game here -- but I've spent so much time working on the broken fundamentals there's no substance to redeem it. I was in denial and trying to convince myself that if I just poured effort into it and forced myself to keep going, the basic gameplay situation would be fixed.
The trading, combat, cargo, upgrade and other shop features are remarkably weak and are missing features even found in Elite. The only component of the game that works reasonably well is the data layer.
There's still so much front end work to do -- the new game configuration, key binding and preferences menus, polish of everything to make sure things fit up properly. All to configure a clearly broken game. I don't really have content, either -- two chassis models donated by Napkins, and a handful of systems with uninteresting differences.
I just don't think I'm going to be able to fix the problems with this game. It's probably better to go on to something else and maybe come back to space RPGs later... next time definitely on a 2D plane. I want to do Afterglow, and I have to do it -- I think I can top Glow and maybe even get some exposure.
Perhaps I'll feel differently in the morning. It stings to get rid of this much work because the very basic feel is so utterly wrong.
The ECM attack is one of the ways that poor players can survive combat in Novarunner. Simply close to within a few meters of your opponent, and unleash the ECM attack. It will kill their throttle and stun them for 15 seconds, allowing you to either get away or chip away a substantial amount of their hull. Naturally, since it's so open to abuse, the base price for it is $30,000.
Implementing the ECM attack system required me to implement an "upgrade" system. You can purchase upgrades at any shop and install them either in flight or in the equipment manager aboard a station. Most upgrades are simple survival tools, such as "refill my shield" or "repair my hull." However, you can buy some upgrades which permanently alter your ship's stats, making it take more damage or go faster. The player can make the ship their own through obsessive upgrades, and rice their space Honda Civic to the level that it can surpass even the high-end ships on sale in boutique outlets.
I'm considering implementing paint-job upgrades that do things like change the shader that is used to render the ship. Stuff for personalization, to improve replay value.
Upgrades are permanent, and do not affect the trade-in value of your ship when you decide to toss it for a higher-end machine.
I'd like to deliver a big old cockpunch to whoever it is running the spambot that overwrote one of my bugs with Xanax spam. Thanks to you, I've had to go in and fiddle with the phpBugTracker permissions system, and try to remember what the long-closed bug you fucked up was.
If I ever catch any sort of spammer in person I'm going to kill them outright. There won't be a jury in the land that'll convict me.
Runner-Up
I also got this spam, which seriously nobody can possibly be dumb enough to fall for:
Quote:
Dear Friend
Please make a hotel reservation for me and tell me the nearest airport to you and await for my arrival.This is a transaction of $11m (eleven million USD) from a genuine source and duly certified.It is my inheritance with full legal right.
I trust that with you I will be able to invest on the right business to maximize profit and grow my money.I am not resident in your country,pls be my partner,receive me well and 20% of the total fund is for you.Trust me.
Yeah, okay, I reserve hotel rooms for total strangers all the time. I just can't figure out what the scam is -- at least for the 419 bullshit they get to shoot you in the kneecaps and kidnap you, but chances are they might look suspicious dragging your ass out of the First World Marriott. I especially love how he caps it off with "Trust me."
Thanks to the late Christmas gift of GDNet being down, I was able to get some actual work done yesterday.
AI now respects world limits, and turns around when it hits it.
AI will no longer leave the system if it is engaged in combat.
AI has an idle state.
Homing rounds actually work at speed now; there was a bit of work behind the scenes, but they now actively track the target instead of just heading to their location dumbly.
It's actually starting to look like a game. Now if I can just get roll-assist in to take care of that control issue we can start actually talking release.
It always makes me happy when I can make a little change to make a lot of work easier on myself.
One of the problems with Novarunner's data model is that I kept having to copy and paste chunks of XML when I wanted to include an item in a ship's inventory:
In other news, I'm working on dealing with bugs that implementing "system limits" has caused; now I have to make AI ships stop and intelligently turn around once they hit the end of the world.
Merry Christmas. Hope you all get motivation under your tree.
I patched up a boatload of bugs here; when I added in "universe limits" to keep the player from flying away forever, I accidentally broke cinema scenes and the AI, which assumed that there were no limits.
Vignettes are fixed (they just disable player collision) and AI is slowly being unbroken (when they hit the universe levels, they just kill their thrusters, pull a 180 and then start hammering for the system centre again). Additionally, I've added a few new features here and there, which sped up the game. The NPCs in the system you're currently in change out when you dock with a station (to give the illusion that time has passed).
I'm considering making a massive overhaul of the HUD to make it mouse driven (currently, the mouse is just a hyperactive yaw/pitch controller which I never use). If I can do that it should clean up a lot of the game, but will also mean that I would have to go back and overhaul several features to make the game suck less. Joystick control would also go out the window in this instance, since I've only maintained the current UI to support the 360 pad.
I also don't want to delay the game any further, even though a large part of my irritation with it originates in the UI.
Iodine
Added collision detection code intended for Afterglow, and added unit tests with Tut to support it. Tut is so much nicer to work with than the CPlusTest framework that Apple hands out (and integrates into Xcode).
Now that I have unit testing, I should go back and cover the Propane Injector base classes that Iodine uses; that way I could potentially avoid an embarassing situation such as the vector negation bug from a month back.
Afterglow
Map editor fixes right now, and integrated the collision detection code mentioned above.
Work & School
I seriously spaced on the date for some stuff for the internship office, but luckily they're giving me a reprieve because Christmas is crunch time. Woop!
It's also really nice getting paid to learn Direct3D.
So, NPC spaceships enter and leave the system that you are currently in. It's a bit hyperactive, but it looks pretty good in practice, even though the code is hairy as all hell.
Next up is getting the NPCs to perform some emulation of human behaviour, and then to start adding some hostile NPCs and maybe even police NPCs that will attack you if they see you getting your pirate on.
Maybe once I have a game going, I can start dropping some content and polish in here and we can get this bastard finished in a few weeks. Would you guys like that?
I sure would. I'm sick of this game.
Other, Less Sexy Games
I started playing Tabula Rasa on my three day trial, but then got sick of it. I just don't like how damage feels so disconnected in MMOs (lag-related?).
The subscription cost is also a bit batty ($15/mo), and their user interface and assorted front-end tools seem distinctly hostile. On the plus side, there aren't many other people playing, so my interaction with them has been altogether quite pleasant.
My question is... wouldn't it have been cheaper to make this a single-player game? You could tell the same foofy story, in a smaller world, without having to worry about all that garbage or going head to head with WoW.
Link of the Day
Buy this tea boy. It's adorable. I'd buy it myself to give out for Non-Denominational Holiday Season, but they don't ship it to Canada.
I don't feel very productive still, but I managed to get some UI trivialities out of the way.
Novarunner
The HUD now indicates to you which weapon you are switching to, and also grays out the ammo count of the unselected weapon to make it more obvious what gun you are about to fire.
The star map also now displays the names of stations in it, which should make it easier to find where you have to drop your latest stash of space porno and vodak.
There seems to be a strange bug somewhere in my renderer that I am still endeavoring to track down. When I figure that out, life should be good.
Afterglow
Not much is going on other than plot and mission design refactoring. Design is surprisingly hard, especially when there's so much you want to deliver.
I've also been fiddling in my mind with a few game ideas for the games course next year (Winter '09). I want to do something that goes beyond the traditional pattern of what I've made so far. Right now it's down to either a "hard sci-fi*" RPG in the JRPG style (hard, and lots of content required, which means "probably not") or a post-apocalyptic buggy-driving, loot-swiping capitalism RPG (easier content wise, much harder technically). Or maybe neither. I'll have to talk it over with my partner; something completely out of left field like a fighting game might go over really well with my style.
* What I like to call "bullshit 1950s fantasies," where AI actually is possible and humans are waited on hand and foot by robots while fighting off evil aliens. This is in direct opposition to Glow, which draws a pretty straight line from "here's where we are now" to "here's what it would be like if we had ten years more of what we have right now". What can I say? I'm a pessimist. However, I don't like political science courses, so if you can read Nietzsche you're already too smart for Afterglow. Try a comic book.
Ever had one of those days where you have tons of progress, except not?
Novarunner
I implemented delivery quests, and they work pretty well (except it gives you delivery quests for the station you are currently in, resulting in instant success).
Right now there's only two star stations, so deliveries are kind of easy. I hope to start actually adding data soon.
In the meantime, enjoy the quest status screen with some actual data in it.
In the current implementation, all delivery items are 0 mass and worth $0, so I'm not terribly worried about players accidentally selling off their quest items (though it can happen, which is why we have that big ol' Abort button).
I wonder if playing videogames would restore my motivation; I haven't had my 360 connected to the net in several months, even though I have a few achievements to record.
Current line count (for those of you keeping track at home):
Game: 15,803
Game + heavily modified PI v0.9: 25,819
Afterglow
The Afterglow map format has textures now (and per-vertex texture transform matrices), and I'm considering ditching the ability to make rooms with floors at different heights (internally, "z-rooms"); this was mostly because I don't want to implement cut brushes and "intelligent" wall builders, but also because it will really screw up players to try and aim "up" in a top-down game. Ever played Machine Hunter?
Levels would still be polygonal (now with circular player collision as opposed to AABB), and all the existing gameplay would carry across, but I'd just be missing things like a jump button, holes in the ground and (possibly) elevators.
I also determined it's really hard to make one of my planned levels (Colombian jungle datastore theft) in the top-down "style," so I've been refactoring my "wants" document and trying not to break the "mythos" document. This is kind of hard, because that level in particular was going to be the showcase in my mind of how the game's shooting attributes go down (with another level in my thoughts as the showcase for the new strategic defensive capabilities, such as implants and talents). I'll probably end up replacing it with a similar "outdoor" level but it seems unlikely I'll be implementing a ton of leafy vegetation.
Questy Sightings
I posted about this on my front page this afternoon, but surprisingly Dr. Questy is in the new Tig Duels for Extraordinary Gentlemen title. They even rigged up a custom attribute for his monocle (as opposed to everyone else's artificial monocle). How awesome is that?
Novarunner is now smart enough to randomly generate quests for you to peruse in the bar. However, there's not a lot of data in the game right now, so the quests it comes up with are rather repetitive.
On the plus side, someone really has it in for the S.S. Spawned Actor.
I'm still pretty burned out on Novarunner at the moment (other than fixing some bugs and improving the UI), so here's a screenshot of the Afterglow 3D map testbed.
The UI in several shops has a little bar indicating how "full" your cargo bay is, so at least you can have a visual indicator that doesn't involve doing mental subtraction.
Homing projectiles better "lead" your target, though they can be pretty stupid at times.
More bug checking in the utility classes behind the UI.
I'm still feeling pretty unmotivated. I'm hoping I can spool it back up.
In car news (since you all seem to love it so much), I am strongly considering getting a Subaru Impreza Sport 5-door. It's roughly the same price as the Civic DX-G, but with all-wheel drive and opulent borgeoisie gadgets (heated seats, auto-dimming heated mirrors, power locks*). In the US, it's called the Subaru Impreza Outback Sport**, and it's missing a bunch of features (such as the WRX rally-blue paint). Now that Subaru has announced their Canadian dollar compensation program, it looks pretty likely I'll pick it up before the end of the month.
* Yeah, some models of the Civic don't have power locks. For $19K.
** Americans, why do you allow car companies to merge distinct brands just because one of them looks kind of sort of like the other? You don't let Ford get away with making the Taurus crossov.. oh wait, you did.
So I tinkered a bit more with Novarunner; namely the ships are now drawn out of juicy VBOs instead of in immediate mode (hurr). Doesn't provide much of a framerate improvement with only a few ships on screen, but when you're drawing 10-20 ships the framerate is constant, which was a big worry of mine.
Now you're sitting there, probably with Cheeto-stained fingers in a dank silverfish-infested basement, licking rainwater off of the windowsill and glaring at the screen because I haven't told you anything about my gameplay progress. You're practically hissing at this point, I presume.
Well, there is some good news; I tightened up the ship AI so it's reasonably more intelligent, and made the homing missiles use prediction for attacking moving targets. They're still not perfect, but they'll hit a moving ship slightly more accurately for massive damage.
I still need to implement the "ship transfer" system -- that is, when a ship has its engine charged up, it "jumps out" and is swapped a few seconds later for a new AI-created ship from the spawn table. This is harder to coordinate than you'd think, and I need to think about whether or not to limit the number of ships that can be in the system at once.
In other news, this entire weekend was pretty unproductive, which you would've noticed if I was on your Steam friends list and you got to see me bounce between four or five different vidjagames. I'm hoping to finish the game by Christmas -- all of the remaining bugs are pretty minor and content generation should go OK.
Posted - 12/30/2007 10:20:18 PM
Posted - 12/30/2007 12:05:28 PM
I don't know if I'll have this fixed for release; the Twitter stuff is a gimmick feature that nobody will use.
Posted - 12/28/2007 5:10:16 PM
Posted - 12/28/2007 11:06:16 AM
Posted - 12/27/2007 3:35:38 AM
Posted - 12/6/2007 4:38:31 PM
Posted - 12/3/2007 10:20:00 AM