Splinter of Chaos

Geese, all i was trying to do was give some background on why the IRC people were upset! But i didn't do it in the right way, so i made my bed and it's time to lie down. I just hope to quench this fire quick so we can stay on-topic and get off this DRM-wannabe discussion. I knew there'd be a little whiplash, but i didn't expect every subsequent post to have something about it. Plus, i haven't had anything to add since my second post, so i'm trying to get out of the discussion, myself.

so I've no idea why archive formats are a political topic here.

Data hiding is the political topic. Whether or not one agrees with my opinion. Most people think it isn't because it's the norm. People with GNU influences, especially ones ties to open-source and free software ideologies will feel one way about the issue.

Splinter of Chaos, the reason I didn't respond in a PM is that it wouldn't add anything to the discussion if it was behind closed doors. My post wasn't intended as a personal attack, I was merely stating my opinion on the matter and attempting to bring an alternate viewpoint to the table.

I see. I respect adding to the conversation. What made me feel that way was that you started your post by saying my name and didn't write anything on-topic until the end. That and the fact i felt victim to a straw man attack.

and Splinter of Chaos
I was offended especially when my indie game is going to cost me upwards of $50k in artist fees (seriously thinking of different artists) as well as royalties
but me raging back at you will provide what? make other people reading the thread think im a childish idiot that thinks capslocking you to death will prove something?
thats why i more or less ignored you and just corrected your supposition that i was slinging the word Nazi around instead of it having been used on me
ive got APIs to investigate and code to comment and debug i dont have time to participate in a forum flame war

I'm really sorry to hear that! You should have at least said i offended you, but perhaps it seemed deliberate. You don't have to "rag" on someone to let them know they hurt you. I understood originally that it was the IRC people who said nazi; i was trying to make a comment on them in sympathy. The real crux of my argument was really just the last part, which seemed to have been ignored:"And don't think that by hiding those files, you don't have to worry about copyright. You have do it either way, you're protected either way, why bother? "

All i was really trying to say is that you need to worry about copyright no matter what. Someone could stream the audio out of your game using a legal and free program and then use it in their game. Or a hacker could decrypt your file. You can make it harder on the hacker, but if it's worth to do, they will. Even EA cannot thwart hackers.

I'm gonna stop watching this discussion and won't dare start any more fires here. Re-reading my second post, the language really was pretty harsh and it really didn't help me state my opinion peacefully. Sorry for upsetting you, Computercodemonkey, and for derailing the discussion, and for not having had much useful to say on it.

Splinter of Chaos, I'd hardly equate the OP's attempt to safeguard the non-licensed use of his game assets to EA or other big software company's DRM.

That's not what i said at all. I said it that the OP was using the same form of reasoning: I don't want people doing X, so i'll doing something that inadvertently prevents Y and Z. I was merely explaining why i thought it was reasonable that people on the IRC, and possibly others, would be disturbed by the OP's choice. I was not equating the OP and EA, but was relating them. If i came out harsh on the OP, that wasn't my intent and i apologize, but s/he didn't seem offended.

I disagree strongly with the statement you made that anything installed on a user's computer becomes their property and they can do whatever they want with it.

You don't have to agree. Besides, i was speaking little of the fact it's installed and more of how the art assets and stuff are actually on the harddrive, and the user should have access, like how hackers certainly will. It being installed is irrelevant. But there's no reason for you to agree, It's just an opinion.

When it comes down to it, the law isn't on your side when it comes to taking other people's work without just compensation.

I never said anything to the contrary! I said that there are perfectly legal and legitimate uses of the assets that don't imply stealing someone else's works (in much different words). For example, what if i wanted to make a picture in the game my desktop background? Does that infringe on the developer's ability to make money?

*sigh* I knew i'd have to make a post like this if i said that shit... That post was so directed at me that i wonder why you didn't just PM your list of complaints.

You don't need a System Development Kit to open a zip file.

http://www.google.co...250l493l2-2l2l0

That's not the library, but the first link is an example using SDL and zlib. Not being my specialty or interest, i don't know about encryption or opening a password protected zip. On the other hand, the program 7-zip is open source and you could try and figure out how they do it.

but my point is im making a commercial game and since im having to pay people for art nd sound i should have the right to lock it up so it doesn't get ripped for people to put in crappy flash games

You might not realize it, but that's a political statement. Users have rights too (my political statement). Whatever you payed your artist, Lady Ga Ga's label payed a lot more, but that wouldn't stop me from using an mp3 of hers (for comedic affect, i assure you!) in a free non-profit project that only a few people would see.

The logic you're using is the same that DRM-big cats use all the time: that one use of our product that we don't want is bad so all legitimate uses should be disabled as well. With EA, it's making backup copies, which is perfectly legal, but they fear you might distribute them. You're so concerned that someone might use what you payed for in other games for free that you're entirely ignoring millions of other legitimate and legal uses that users have a right to! The law enforces EA's right to prevent people from making copies of their games by letting them use invasive and destructive software. The law does not enforce the rights of users. Users get very upset when their rights are violated. I'm only giving you this long winded rant so you understand why people are (very rightly so) disturbed. Not to change your opinion.

As for protecting the files from being used in other works: It's called copyright, or preferably creative commons, a more flexible copyright. There's nothing wrong with letting people use those files for personal use. You have to make it legally clear that they can't be used any other way. Even AAA titles like Oblivion and Fallout don't go through any measures to thwart users from copying the art files, but i bet you'd get in trouble if you used their resources in your commercial game.

And don't think that by hiding those files, you don't have to worry about copyright. You have do it either way, you're protected either way, why bother?

(Note: i'm not a good person to take legal advice from. This is more a topic for the business section of the forums.)

I suppose the question of your intents is to be expected. For most games, this would make things unnecessary complex since you could otherwise just load the file you need and not even have to deal with this "problem". Or maybe you think this would make it easier to load it all at once? But this also means that if someone liked the music in your game (for an example), they wouldn't be able to copy it. It could only be heard from in your game, when the player is in that specific part where the music is played.

IMO: if it's on the user's computer, the he or she has a right to copy and modify it and hiding it from the user is a violation of their rights. Maybe that's why they went all DRM-people-who-killed-millions-of-ethnic-minorities. (In case you can't tell, i'm a little offended by the casual use of "Nazi" to refer to people one doesn't agree with.)

But it's not anyone's job to pry into why you want to do this.

Why don't you just compress it to a zip file?

Lets say as the player advances, they are focusing on being a great marksman(whatever skill/stat combo that may be)  eventually the player would max out and be an excellent marksman.

Now we have a situation....how do you keep the player from just sniping off every single NPC in the game?  More specifically, without making NPC's Invincible, how do you design a system that allows the player to feel like his work has been worth it, but there is still a chance for misses?

Weren't the guns back then somewhat inaccurate, anyway? Especially at long distances?

If you need a consistent level of accuracy, you need a constant delta time. If more time has elapsed than one dt (or max dt if you don't need consistency), you have to update the physics/collision more than once. Nothing seems wrong with your collision code itself.

An alternative is to not do collision detection based on an object's state (current position, velocity, etc.) but rather its path over time. This would require saving your previous position and using a more complicated collision function, but since your game seems to be tile-based, maybe that wouldn't be all that hard.

An article to read: http://gafferongames...-your-timestep/

It's about having a constant dt, but even if you don't need or want that, you might find it helpful.

The centralization of power which government is based on is detrimental to the general populous, We have hierarchy in society to prevent what you're suggesting. An open source government would be closer to my anarchist ideals, but they're ideals, not practicalities. Even if the government was open source, might there not still be forces of domination that subvert the general will and pursue their own interests?

I don't think we can change the government, but i think people can become more politically active, find better news sources (because TV/paper news is shit), and best of all: GET PISSED.

Of course, even in that article you linked, it talks about limiting the level of participation of citizens. So in other words, they'd let us decide what color the carpet of the white house should be while they decide whether we go to war or not.

I think what you illuminate fairly well here is that fighting is not about purely physical attributes. I've been watching Dragon Ball recently (never saw it as a kid) and something that's kinda hilarious about the show how obsessive it is with power and strength, and how ignorant it is of technique. The characters become stronger most often by doing insane manual labor or nearly dying and then suddenly they're also better fighters. Hell, the main character goes to compete in a tournament where the best fighters in the world meet, does pretty well (no spoilers), and i can't even remember him being involved in a real fight before that.

When you think about it, we instinctively believe in this type of fallacy. Our beliefs about nature are survival of the fittest, alpha male, lions are kings because no one's higher on the food chain, and things like that. I can't think of many examples in American society.

Happy's in the lobby fighting one security guard for like, 5 minutes, rather poorly while Black Widow goes through the compound and kicks like every dude in the nuts along the way while striking sexy poses.  I really hate depictions like this because I feel they are unfair to both genders.

Don't you love that the only viable form of a woman fighting is cheap shots, a symbol of weakness among men? It's as if a kick to the balls is justified if and only if it's a woman doing it because she's not strong and would be defenseless otherwise.

I think, if you're making something humanoid, it's pretty hard to make it totally gender neutral.  For animals, it's pretty easy, but humans are amazingly good at recognizing the human form and picking up on subtle clues.and categorizing things as being male or female.  Really one of the few ways to make something look gender neutral is to give it a child-like appearance, which is also tough to do for a monstrous humanoid.

Ironic to the ease of making gender neutral animals, the people at Wolfire talked on their blog about female characters in overgrowth, noting the challenges of having differences in genders without over-sexualization. I don't have much to say on it, but we've spent so much time talking about negative examples. I'm glad i was reminded of a positive one.

Your question is something i've asked myself several times as well. These are my considerations: Am i getting anything out of working on this project? Am i learning as a programmer/designer/artist? What does this project mean for my future work (i.e. code reuse)?


There are also professional considerations like: Is it innovative? Will people enjoy it over other games? Is it functional and with no game-ending bugs? Do i receive positive feedback?

Since you seem to think you're "wasting time", i imagine the professional considerations mean nothing to you as you're not planning on distributing it.

PS: You might not have realized this, but life is long. I mean like really long; it's humbling how long it is. A week is a long time when you pay attention, but the difference between that and life is like an elephant and a mouse! You have time to waste.

Holy poly, this thread is still going on? I thought i left it like a month ago!

If there is a god he's an asshole.  If you had the power to do anything and loved everyone wouldn't you just make everyone happy all the time?

People always forget that they're working with relative terms, though i don't blame you in this case, but: If everyone was always happy, then there'd be no sadness, no depression, these concepts would simply not exist. If everyone is always the same emotion then every emotion except happiness must not exist. If only one emotion exists then the concept of emotion must not exist since there'd be no need and happiness must not exist. Now that we've contradicted our ourselves, i think that makes this a paradox.

Death is the opposite of life, but without life, there is no death. Think of sadness as the gift that makes happiness meaningful; and death is what makes life meaningful, though harder to consider a gift, it is.

What happens when you play Zelda and you try to move diagonally? In some games the sideways animation will be used, and never the towards or away one. Other games might have the towards or away one used if the player was, the frame before, walking towards or away. Though i can't remember what Zelda does.

So, you have acknowledge that both buttons were pressed, but you prioritize one over the other for the sake of animation.

But this means you can't just assign the animation in the if statement. You need a look at the bigger picture to know what buttons were pressed. For example:

xInput = yInput = 0
if left input
    xInput -= SOME_CONST
if right input
    xInput += SOME_CONST

... ditto for yInput ...

if xInput != 0
    use sideways animation
else if yInput != 0
    use forward/away animation

...

By the way, if you're moving 10 pixels to the right, you might say your speed is 10 pixels. If you move 10 pixels to the right and also move upwards 10 pixels, your speed is greater than 10 isn't it? Another advantage to collecting the input instead of moving the sprite directly based off input is being able to correct the speed of the sprite, if it matters to do so.

My time wasn't wasted if it helped you, which is the whole point of a forum.