posted
I was thinking about a possible use for the player's credits. Maybe they could be spent to upgrade certain aspects of your ship. They could be used to increase weapon, armor or speed by a certain percent. Another idea could have them be used to increase max counts for weapons/items. They could even be used to increase the ship's health, or decrease the weapons reload/cooldown time.
posted
I'm always nervous about 'buying the win' but what I was hoping for with the credits, was to be the 'in game purchase' thing, where you earn credits for free from various activities, but maybe someday you could buy large blocks of credits with USD or something...
So then the credits should be associated with making cool stuff available, so that they are desirable.
But once they are desirable, then they become a target for abuse.
And then I draw back from adding credits management to the script API. If they are going to have value, potentially, we can't be having Joe Starmap issue them willy nilly. Or Jill starmap to charge you all your credits.
I think I ultimately need two currencies: your interstellar currency (what you have today), and your local stargroup currency (starts at zero and is controlled specifically by this starmap and cannot be spent elsewhere)
then leave it to the starmap as to whether it wants to remember your balance over time, like a token. And THAT value is the one people will endeavor to hack.
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As to what the interstellar currency would be good for... I wouldn't want it to simply be "make me start with 50 pods" or it would sap everyone else's fun.
And yet, I am open to selling powerups, limited by map designer (new thing would be map designer would declare a 'store' with a table showing names, prices, cost, numAvailable. And if a store was available, the player could visit it somehow, with maybe some restrictions, and buy stuff, which would then appear on their button bar (which can get full, adding bag management as sub-game ;p)
I was also thinking that credits could be involved in collecting stuff. Like maybe all those shells and faces you collect are in your gallery, but not available for you to 'wear' until you activate them (learn the schematic?) which costs credits? And in a more perfect world, those credits would also magically go to the original artist.
I don't think I could actually make that work without just being a hacking target, but maybe someday there is a server metagame that is tracking all activity and you can have a sort of high score value that is fed by the number of credits people pay to activate your designs.
And that would be great, so long as credits were easy to obtain for free. But would feel nasty if credits cost $ and the original artist saw no income.
So overall, I like loose credits that are easy to come by, but not overflowingly so. That you don't mind spending them liberally on useless things. That their true value is as a pacing mechanism (that doesn't frustrate you) and a sort of demographic measurement.. I guess I should say analytics. What can we know from people's powerup preferences?
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* pay credits to buy 'another engine pod slot' that is only there until you restart the game. (an empty pod slot)
That's interesting. Doesn't sell you an immediate advantage, you still have to find the pod. Gives me a small rendering headache (that pod display is what takes the brunt of the screen resizing for different aspect ratios). I think I already added support for larger pod counts (so NPCs could be over-powered relative to human players)
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Thinking in terms of powerups. Maybe one that once you use it, it triples your CHARGE recharge rate for 10 minutes or something (for the faster weapons launches). Maybe only 1 minute even. Long time in game seconds.
I'm of two minds on heal potions, as it were. If it's too easy to pick up a stack of 10 full recharges, it takes the drama out of the fighting, unless you can have something like 'they can only be used after you have held completely still and not been shot or fired a shot for one minute...'
Perhaps if they were 'Zonkin Recharge Bombs' that had a certain chance of blowing you up instead of healing you, and maybe were random in the amount of healing they provided. And were rare and/or expensive.
At this point, I mainly just need to be sure I provide enough 'properties' so the map designer can mix and match them to make new powerups of interest.
Actually, maybe the recharge could just be slow. Tap it to start it, then it takes a couple minutes to recharge you completely.
I guess there should also be some blocking so I don't let you start a second one, while the first one is still doing its thing. Both to save you credits, but also adds a bag management hassle if you needed to get rid of a stack of heals.
-------------------- He knows when you are sleeping. Posts: 10561 | From: California | Registered: Dec 1998
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posted
weapon property: "spell applied for N seconds"
where 'spell' is some effect like 'slowing/speeding your energy/charge recharge'
You have to be able to be affected by several spells at the same time. (still being drained by the klevin life sapper mine I ran into a mile back, and now this guy 'confused' my smart bombs to attac me instead!)
I do like the thought of a defensive EMP pulse that when an incoming homing missle enters the ring of effect, it is reprogrammed to hunt its master... maybe for N seconds.
And I still need to add target lock sounds, so you know when someone picks you as a target (don't tell you who did it, just that it happened and probably you should expect incoming homing missiles at any time)
should I beep on missile launch? (warn the target?) I love homing missiles, but you have to use them sparingly for the game to be fun for everyone. Having them also come hit you out of the blue with no warning feels mean.
I could also have a defensive shield that was smart enough to turn on automatically when needed. That also feels 'too easy' but if rare and all that, it could be fun. You would have to first trigger it (use it.. maybe icon on button bar changes to active state) then any weapon getting close.. even a bullet? would start the effect for N seconds. That way, you would want to avoid turning it on too soon, so it wouldn't just be on all the time. And I could foil your defense with some well timed bullets just before my missile launch.
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posted
I wasn't even thinking of terms of selling credits. The idea I failed to explain correctly involved more of a level up system type. Of course I would want it to be set for a specific map. It would allow players to choose certain upgrades that would be applied when the ship is launched. I just thought it would be a nice touch to reward players that have completed missions on a map, thus giving the possibility of having less chance of them getting bored with it.
[I agree, I just like to babble on around the edges. - s]
posted
Yes, I agree and I hope the map author has enough power to explore stuff like that. Just so long as the reward for loyalty isn't instant dominance over newbies :-)
engine-wise, I just meant it meant I needed to add a mechanic to increase 'max number of pods' for an individual player. The map author could then choose to hand them out whenever, and could include the pods 'to fill them' as well, if they felt the map justified it.
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I like thinking about 'spells' (limited duration effects).
For replay value, there is also:
rare spawns. a monster that appears only so once in awhile, and pays big rewards on its map. This could include a randomization element and a list of author-provided adjectives and such to give the illusion of more variety than was actually present. And perhaps the engine could help automate this for you where you just provided a lua table of all the variables.
Some such spawns should be.. well, to steal a WoW word: World Bosses, that literally require everyone to work together to defeat them.
some replays should be triggered through use of (rare spawn) powerups. So you randomly pick up 'the key to the warp gate' but the warp gate quest/adventure doesn't start until you tap the key on your button bar (which is also the only way to free that 'bag slot')
I should make a 'key' icon since presently I have no way for designers to add icons. Maybe an 'egg' and some sort of 'chest' Perhaps a 'letter' (message), or a jettisoned beacon... debris.. alien gizmo... remote control.. alien creature.. visiting digntary, passenger, princess, medicine, super weapon, orphan,
As to letting designers add icons, I was idly thinking in terms of using the existing FACE editor but in a mode where it was actually 4 separate images (that it cycled between, as are the current powerup images). VERY low resolution. 8x8) If there is any chance of that being acceptable, I should probably focus on that, rather than coming up with my own art. But I like my little space suit for the escaped minors, so that's a vote for process A.
Thanks for all the feedback, by the way! I think my writing style often masks my gratitude!
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posted
Speaking of graphics.would it be possible to render a gradient fill for ship designs. It would probably be easiest to have it in gray scale and render it to match the ship's color.
No problem with the feedback. If I felt like it was completely useless I wouldn't bother with it lol.
if I could do THAT, I could color the zone rectangles to indicate which ones hurt when you were in them, or just indicate them at all.
Plus this is the vector outline ship game, not the 3D ship game, etc. etc.
but you won me over. something along those lines to make the ship a shiny little badge with the illusion of shading.
Besides, it fits in with the whole plan of world-specified looks, as in 'look, it's a wireframe tank game' and 'look, it's a submarine game where you don't go very deep' and 'look, the vehicles are little stick figure people and creatures, with walking animations."
I want to file this one under 'skinning the animated skeleton' I was only thinking about 2D shell skins (but wobbling in response to skeleton pose), but any simple shader for filling the polygon could be cool.
has to fit in my budget of course, and since I m using antique rendering practices here, my total operations count is budgeted.
I would probably just look into 2D polygon rendering operations and come up with the 2D point list as part of rendering the 3D shell. That would make it 'simple, but expensive' to fill the polygon with a solid color of a single alpha value. and I might bail if the polygon gets huge when up close and is part behind me
might be interesting to simulate some ideas ust by drawing your existing shell a bunch of times, slightly different sizes, to get more of an area fill. inefficient, but possibly interesting.
definetly something like that for a 'spell'
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posted
The only programming language I currently know is AIR/AS3, so I'm limited to a 2D. Sometimes it gets a little creative giving an impression of things looking 3D. I haven't gotten into the vectorial yet though, just a bunch of 2D image manipulation.
posted
I think I posted this somewhere, but how giving planets/stars the ability to orbit another planet/star. Even setting a fixed point to orbit would be nice. Could be something nice and simple as calculating the distance from the planet/star/point and change the position of the planet/star by degrees.
I'm thinking it would be a great element to have a planet/star either pull or push players out of the way as it passes through. Especially when it comes to team/boss fights.
posted
I like that as well. Probably have to limit their speed to something very slow, and the trick would then be to have good time sync between the players to agree on exactly where the gravity center was. Though gravity is only computed locally, so a small error would not be too visually damaging, I guess. So long as the spectator can justify to themselves why your ship just arced.
Originally, I thought I would indicate gravity with those 'depressions in space time' indicated with my grid lines. But my lines are too coarse to do it justice, and so far I havent invested in some trick to increase grid resolution near gravity centers. Plus it wasn't clear if it was going to help the game... would I render the 2D ship a little 'below the plane' when in the gravity well? Without some sort of 'shadow' it probably wouldn't parse as 3D by the viewer.
But I would like to have a set of little visual effects, like something to use when your ship winked out into hyperspace, or returned, or wobbled/shuddered/shrank/grew/spun etc in response to some 'spell'
probably boil that down to all the individual attributes and then try to let scene authors craft time varying sets of attribute values to form 'animations' which are then 'triggered' by scripted actions.
code:
action 'pop' = -- start some attribute animations size( 1, 2, 0, 1 ) -- grow from size 1 to size 2 starting at time 0 and finishing 1 unit later alpha(1, .5, 0, 1 ) -- grow more xparent over same period playSound( 1, "pop.wav" ) -- play a sound at moment of pop
You know, maybe the animation itself could be managed by the script. I was thinking I needed to execute down in the engine, but a coroutine... well, maybe. I think it probably, yes, ok, definitely must do the 'smooth' stuff in the engine, so yeah, mostly engine animation.
oh yeah, include particle system in the above animation definition. Yeah, I think that could work and be easy enough to deal with.
And maybe this is something you just define in your starmap, and isn't remembered as a standalone asset and distributed separately. Easily copy and pasted, of course.
Maybe not even definable in the 'static' top half (but easy code to define it in the lua bottom half)
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posted
Just a thought, hoW about a map designer portion for the game. I know there was one for the pc version. (Although I can't seem to find it anymore.) Not sure if you would want it to extend to the lau script or not though.
Another thought is to have map lists divided into open/new session games. It would probably help if the game picks up new players.
posted
the map list you see is the union of 'all the maps you own' and 'all the maps that are being played right now' with the 'being played' maps sorted to the left and sporting a FACE.
(often when working with TEMP maps, you ultimately crash or otherwise leave behind an empty instance that continues to show a FACE until someone visits it for real, and then leaves)
The faces shown on the map list are currently just random since the server is game agnostic, but I think I will make an effort to make those 'more real' (like the face of the current mod, if you have a copy)
And at some point I would like to be able to explore the map sessions a little (see list of player names, maybe) show the buddy badges where appropriate.. offer an IM feature that only works for mutual buddies.. that sort of thing
as to map editing (graphical barrier editing).. it's "on the list" but I have the problem that I still want my master source on my google drive, and it's not particularly convenient to export from the device to the google drive (I have it in there, but you have to rename files and such, and remember to copy the changes back to your master copy)
But I could do it that way. I just know it would not be convenient enough for me to use it for my own stuff (I'm that lazy). And it wouldn't really have made barrier layout 'easier'
I think what would be REALLLLLY cool if I had a custom plugin for Google Drive, that understood to highlight the lower half for lua syntax, and knew how to render the top half in an HTML5 canvas app.
Then you would be working on a single document, saved where you want it saved, and a 2D barrier editor in HTML5 would probably be about the same project as in Visual Basic :-) Assuming you don't run into cross-site issues.
So, as far as official map editors go, I think that's what I would like to achieve.
But I also want people in game to be able to easily edit the barriers as well (and a map cloned from that should include those barrier changes), so as to make it easy to re-use popular maps with small/large changes to their geography (but not script). For example, my DOTA map where you want to change the nature of the 'center obstacles' but keep the overall map topology and gate layout.
Plus, as I keep mentioning and then drawing back from, I need an editable link table to glue lua to engine, for map assets
PROBABLY an extension of the [properties] (top half) table,
Then down in the script, or, rather, the arguments that the script passes to the engine, can be translated by these bindings, in order to identify the actual asset tag to be used.
Then if you can edit the links, on the dvice, and clone a copy, then you can make 'the same map' but with a different boss shell, or such.
Then any text meeting the pattern #keyword<terminator> would be replaced by whatever the current binding was, and it could happen anywhere
code:
... name = "#minion1Name", ... announce( "#westTeamName is the winner!") ... bot:say( "I represent the #evilFactionName!" )
Anyway, I know, for my own needs, I have to be able to do this eventually. For example, right now I have to type the asset id into the bot table, to set its SHELL. I'm too lazy to do that, so I just stick to the stock shells with the easy to type names SHELL_NNN.
But what I WANT to do, is start the SHELL editor, make exactly what I think the bot calls for, and then magically get that asset id typed into my master copy on my google drive. I really just have no real solution for that exactly. I have to export something larger than just the asset id and then copy and paste it up on google drive. Not exactly difficult, but a gumption trap.
But maybe that's what I really want anyway? Maybe I should be able to paste a link to raw data as well as to asset id
shellBoss=SHELL://<ascii-encoded-form of ship design going on for a few hundred characters>
Then use editor on device, and export the asset (and here it would be *nice* to have a brand new file on your google drive that is a snapshot of a single asset, nicely named and time-stamped. You can then open that file and copy its definition directly into your starmap, to create an asset that 'comes with the map, but is not clonable/re-usable' which would probably be popular with designers, though it won't be hard to 'steal' shells, so I still want to avoid promising any sort of private ownership of designs.
But if I do that IN the property table, then it's all neat and tidy, and I can support all flavors (use this data, this asset id, or the default for this type) and be fully editable without the master starmap, to make clone maps with the same scripting but different assets.
so, to recap:
1.) a cool custom editor in HTML5 that acts as a TEXT editor plugin in Google Drive, but also has a graphical barrier editor built in, driven by the same copy of the starmap.
2.) a cool link editor that allows you to hard or soft define which assets you want the script to use, bound to easy to read #symbolicName that you use in the lua script, allowing the same starmap to be cloned with different assets but the same script.
3.) some interactive barrier editing fun that can be used in game by players (moderator, or map-enabled collaborative editing). This would also include beacons for laying out race courses and npc guard routes and the like.
But that would be along the lines of 'pick up barrier editor powerup, fly to starting point and tap pup to start. A line now connects you to starting point, and each time you tap the pup, it drops another point, until something stops it. And because of the horizontal/vertical nature of my barriers, you are actually dragging an 'L' connecting you to the previous point, not a straight line. For bonus points the barriers work while you are actively dragging them (probably not). But maybe you can pick up a point and move it later.
Anyway, so a 'fun mini game' but not a full on 2D map editor? I guess just because I dont want to export those table settings and then paste them into the master. But if I can get over that mental hump, it seems like a logical thing to have, especially if it's real time multiplayer changes, as it were.
Though then I have to worry about griefers fencing you in as it were. still, if only the moderator/a vote can do it, maybe it would be fun to 'lasso' a player.. 'corral' them I guess is a better word.
I just saw a japanese photorealistic 3D anime called... wow, fogot the name already. Let's say "SPONGE: 0", only it wasn't sponge. If you threw blade runner, the matrix, ghost in the shell, and every other dark scifi of the last 50 years in a blender, then added some uniquely original ideas (a couple), what you get is this movie, about a team of (5) resurrected dead people who wear cool super suits while fighting (real world? VR?) monsters. If you kill the boss members, then your team is resurrected, otherwise you all die for real. Something like that. There seemed to be some degree of death 'in game' that you could not come back from, but it seemed arbitrary from my view. Very violent, but didn't trigger my gore aversion. (digital samurai, lots of body parts getting severed by lasers and swords, all artfully flying through the air in slow motion accompanied by various honorable grunts of brotherhood and loyalty). If you survive the play session, you get some points added to your aggregate score. Once that hits 100, you get a choice of three options "escape this thing, which is effectively a prison", "resurrect a fellow player who died", and something I forget. Of course, everyone is fighting hard for freedom, but end up going with resurrection for the honor of saving a team mate.
Failing, freedom, I guess you are trapped in this cycle for all time, or until you lose badly enough. It wasn't clear if the movie was cynically saying that if you chose freedom, they just wiped your memory, but didn't otherwise set you free.
Anyway, I guess I liked it?
-------------------- He knows when you are sleeping. Posts: 10561 | From: California | Registered: Dec 1998
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posted
fixed a weird combination of bugs in the FM section of the synth. Actually, it was in support of contour generators that start at non zero values, which is allowed for passthrough FM control
If you are in passthrough FM (min and max freq on the LFO are both 0), then:
The contour generator in the MIDDLE means no change. BELOW the middle lowers the freq and above the middle raises the freq.
The amount raised/lowered is set both by how far the contour is from the center, and from the FM attenuation setting.
Basically, the nature of the bug would ignore the CG output until its first positive slope. Which was really weird to debug as some shapes worked, and others didn't.
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posted
Any chance of weapons being effected by gravity? An example would be having a homing missles shot at you so you cruise by a star and let the missles get sucked in.
posted
Took a break from keeping up with this. Looks like you've been a busy bee. I'll have to catch up when I get some time to read through it all.
I did skim through and see you were working a little on gravitational things and had a small idea for possible gravity weapons. They would target just like the homing missles. Once it would get into range have it explode and change the gravitational pull of the target. It could possibly drag the target to the point of the explosion or repel it away. Not sure if your up to expanding weapon types or not.
posted
I guess we're in an official heat wave, which has given us a couple micro power outages. I don't know if they were on purpose or not, just a few seconds, just enough to fry various sensitive bits of electronics :-)
But I just found the synspace server down as well, and that's up in the cloud, so how did my home power managed to shut it down? Apparently because I was 'tailing its log file' at the time, and when my connection for THAT got smashed by the power outage, it somehow, what, left a lock on the file or something? Anywhoo, the server stopped at the same time. I've that or something like it happen in the past, which is sad, because I like watching the logs :-)
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posted
Oh, and the number one user of S-R forums is still..... Russian Spam Bots (technically, Ukrainian spam bots). Just issuing mindless commands to add new accounts every couple of seconds, day in and day out. Presumably doing the same thing to every other UBB forum on the planet in an effort to what? For years now.)
Oh cool, a real person just looked at WoS... and, we're back to the spam bots..
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