| Thursday, October 30, 2008 |
  Perlin Ants | 
Posted - 10/30/2008 9:29:47 AM | 
I took a short break from working on the game engine to play around with a mash-up of Perlin Noise-based landscapes, and Langton's Ants.
Click here for the single color version.
Click here for the three color version.
In other news, I figured out how to apply simple shading to the landscape in the tile game, and I should be able to post something sometime this weekend.
| |
| Tile Game Engine Update: Where Am I? | |
Posted - 10/27/2008 12:03:00 PM | 
Click here to play with the prototype.
This latest update includes an event which fires every time the player moves to a new tile on the world map. Right now it returns the x and y coordinates and the elevation (based on color) of the current tile. Using that information, I will be able to set up a random-ish encounters table which takes into account environment (e.g. elevation), and factors such as distance from civilization, latitude, and the like. But for right now the deciding factor will be elevation. The system will work something like this: Each creature in the creature library has, as two of its attributes, a minimum elevation and a maximum elevation. This ensures that critters will not appear in inappropriate places - nobody wants to fight a squid on top of a mountain. It just isn't done.
This is pulled from the design document:
<critter
name="Goblin"
id="goblin"
frequency=".05"
min_encounter_time=""
max_encounter_time=""
min_encounter_date=""
max_encounter_date=""
min_terrain=""
max_terrain=""
drops="a,b,c"
base_experience="10"
base_damage="1"
/>
There are attributes for time and date, which I am not currently using. If the particular game whcih I build with this engine requires it I can add times of the day and seasons, and adjust encounters accordingly. This will make things more complicated however; right now I am looking at a single variable - elevation - to sort out the encounter. Each additional factor doubles the amount of data to sort through before the fighting begins - Day or night? Spring or winter? Close to a city? In water or on land? Full moon? You get the idea.
In my 4E5 project (unfinished) I played around with having "sources" for different raw materials - salt, iron, wheat, and the like - the distance from which determined the likelihood of coming across a random deposit, and also helped set the buy/sell cost of the material while trading. This could also be determined by elevation, if I really want to go to town on the granularity of the game.
| |
| Another Week, Another Experiment | |
Posted - 10/20/2008 10:07:17 PM | 
Click here to see the live version. (When will we be able to embed Flash movies in our posts?!?)
This is a quick update to the tile-based game engine experiments of months past. This update includes the procedural generation of individual tile textures. Each texture is the same, but I have colored them to reflect the colors of each pixel in the world view. After the initial tile is created, I clone it 256 times - one for each color in the color map - and overlay the Perlin noise with the solid color. Voila! 256 colored tiles.
All in all, I would call it a great success. The next step will be to modify the way I color the tiles in order to make them more vibrant. I am sure there is a way of doing so which will not be too processor intensive.
Right now, I think it looks just a bit like Ultima IV.
| |
| Thursday, October 16, 2008 |
| Gyruss Clone - Against the Horde | |
Posted - 10/16/2008 8:08:05 AM | 
Click here to play with the prototype.
I have just updated the Gyruss clone to make it run more consistently across a wide variety of browser/platform combinations, and also to allow for more intense action if need be. I used this technique from 8-Bit Rocket, and in my linked prototype the game runs at a consistent ~30 frames per second. If you let it run for a minute, eventually there will be 100 enemies swirling around shooting at you. One caveat: I tried playing this on an old POS Mac OSX laptop, and it crashed the browser so severely that I had to give it the 3-finger salute to the the OS back.
I took a couple of weeks off of thinking about this thing to do some playing with various cellular automata experiments. The links to these are below:
Langtons's Ant
Langtons's Ant Hexagon pattern
Langtons's Ant 3d pattern
Random 2d cellular automata
Enjoy!
| |
|
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S | | | | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | | 17 | 18 | 19 | | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | | 28 | 29 | | 31 | |
OPTIONS
Track this Journal
ARCHIVES
November, 2009
March, 2009
January, 2009
November, 2008
October, 2008
September, 2008
August, 2008
July, 2008
February, 2008
December, 2007
November, 2007
October, 2007
September, 2007
July, 2007
June, 2007
March, 2007
February, 2007
January, 2007
December, 2006
August, 2006
July, 2006
June, 2006
|
