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Exceptional Journals (in no order): [Eliwood] [Steve Healy] [Ravuya] [Mark the Artist] [Scet] [Ysaneya] [Mayan Obsidian]
My Personal Website
| Monday, November 24, 2008 |
  Movin', movin', mooooovin'... | 
Posted - 11/24/2008 9:31:43 PM | Subversion strikes!
Many of you may be shocked, perhaps even appalled, to learn that Skirmish has not been under any form of source version control until very recently. To be entirely honest, I have merely been making backups of my entire development folder and storing them on a few different mediums. To date, I have from Skirmish_Dev1.zip up to Skirmish_Dev63.zip. 
Well, allow me to now put those fears to rest. After a painful amount -- sickening, really! -- of rearranging my folders, files, resources, scripts, and everything else, I now have Skirmish on Subversion. Huzzah! I was mainly putting the job off because I have hundreds upon hundreds of files in my Skirmish project directory that were hazardously strewn about without any sort of organization. Thanks go out to Rip-Off for pushing me over the edge and convincing me that this needed to be done.
I couldn't be happier with my choice to finally make the move. Netbeans has excellent integration with SVN, and managed to figure out both that my project was managed by it, and does nifty line-by-line highlighting of things I've changed or added in the current working revision. I've even begun doing self-code-reviews via diffs to look over my changes carefully before committing. I am utterly thrilled with this step up that my development professionalism has taken.
Website++
Another recent 'sin' of mine was that my website was previously entirely HTML, which meant that all of those pretty headers/sidebars were coded in on a per-page basis. This meant that any changes to those needed to be manually done to every page file on the website. What a pain!
I decided that using PHP was the easiest route. After creating a 'head.hml' and 'tail.html' file and filling them with the header/footer data (which includes the sidebars), it was just a matter of plugging in <? include 'head.html' ?> (page content!) <? include 'tail.html ?> and life suddenly became quite nice.
If you glanced at the site, you probably noticed the three boxes: 'players online', 'games hosted', and 'master server online/offline'. At the moment all three are just fixed text, but I will be using PHP to read in some raw dumps from the Master Server to populate them with real-time dynamic data. I'm really looking forward to further integrating the Master Server and the website together as the project moves forward.
The forum!
Last, but not least, is the Skirmish Online forum which is now operational. I'm using phpBB, which was a snap to install, and that I have been happy with in the past. Now I just need to get the user-count up! Feel free to join and help create the illusion that we're bustlingly busy!
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| Wednesday, November 19, 2008 |
| Webtime! | 
Posted - 11/19/2008 9:49:27 PM | Skirmish Hits the Web!
Now, I'm certainly no website designer. Let's get that down-pat on the table. However, Skirmish is getting closer and closer to the point that I would very much like to start advertising its existence to the world, and start reeling in players and other interested parties.
Recently, my only means of garnering interest has been through this very development journal. Which is swell when new people once and a while stumble upon it, or find this journal through my similarly-obscured personal website.
Well gosh darn, that's just no good. The site is looking a little minimalistic, but at long last Skirmish has a working website and domain:
(I don't think the DNS is 100% propagated, but it should work for most of you.)
No advertising beyond the existence of the website has occurred, and I'm probably going to keep it fairly low-profile until Skirmish is a little closer to being smoothly playable and a little more content-filled.
Oh, and please whack me with feedback about the site design/layout/colours, if you're that way inclined.
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| Wednesday, November 12, 2008 |
| Rocket Man | |
Posted - 11/12/2008 10:51:40 AM | These are screenshots from a few rounds of the "Rocket Man" game mode that I put together recently using the scripting system that I implemented.
 
Inspired by the Halo game mode, "Juggernaut", Rocket Man is a fairly simple game mode that places a single player in the possession of the Rocket Launcher. The Rocket Launcher is like any other, except there is only one, and its owner is given infinite ammo. This makes the Rocket Man a very formidable foe indeed. Since players can only gain points by killing other players while being the Rocket Man, everyone is constantly working together to bring down the Rocket Man and claim the coveted Rocket Launcher for themselves.
I'm convinced the Rocket Launcher is overpowered, but it's a hell of a lot of fun as-is.
The game mode required that I implement teams and player variables. Teams being no more than an object representing some properties (outfit colour, name, members, etc), and player variables being values that scripts can change that get propagated to all of the other players in the game. Examples of player variables are: current-team, under-glow (that cool red glow underneath the Rocket Man), radar-glow (whether the player's radar blip appears more brightly), and so forth.
Eventually there will be team variables and game variables that will also all be propagated from the host (via the game mode script) to all of the players as well. This will allow for a whole ton of interesting possibilities for game modes.
The take-home message of the day is: Skirmish is almost feeling like a real game! There's only a few more components remaining until I'm confident that I can start advertising it and build a community. Woop woop!
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| Script me away! | |
Posted - 11/9/2008 12:31:37 AM | Midterm Madness
Well, I think I can safely say that the midterm business is over. The week was full of late-nights, which mostly revolved around the 330 unsorted midterm papers that I had to sort, write down totals on, and enter into the school database. Groan! A multi-pass manual radix sort did the trick though -- it was amusing to apply CS concepts to menial labour.
Aside from a few stragglers who didn't pick up their midterm in lecture this week (who will prod me at my office throughout the following week), it should quiet down now at work until the final exam starts to loom closer.
Scripting
Rip-off made a wise comment on my last post about scripting which I took to heart. 'Why bother reinventing the wheel?' was really the gist of what it boils down to. Writing my own scripting language from the ground up will take at least a couple of months, and Scheme-like syntax is bound to scare away potential script'ers.
After some research, I opted for Jython, an implementation of Python for the Java platform. It can interface directly with Java classes in both directions, which means seamless interaction between my Java source and the scripts can occur. Better yet, integrating the interpreter into Skirmish proved to be trivial!
What about security? If Jython gives full interaction with Java classes, what's stopping people from doing nasty things with file i/o, or creating instances of my own internal classes and gunking thigs up? Well, the short version is that one can limit the accessible classes via stripping out users' "import" statements. The other problem of having users mess with objects they 'should' have (player instances, item/prop instances, etc) can be evaded by provided 'wrapper' or 'proxy' objects that allow limited and streamlined access to the real underlying internal classes. This should keep the security of nice and tight, but still give the right degree of freedom to game scripts.
Tangent Project?
As time goes by, I feel myself continually reminded that the last finished, polished, released game I've made was Membrane Massacre, which was all the way back in March '07. A whole year and a half has passed by and I still don't have a new completed game to show after all of this time.
It makes one want to finish a game. Skirmish will be finished -- surely! -- but the timeframe for it is a lot larger than any other project that I have undertaken. It makes one want to go on a little tangent for a month or two and finish a small/medium-sized game just to relive the fun of making those awesome non-behemoth games.
We'll see what happens. 
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"Good night, Monster Land."
"Good night, brave warrior."
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