Topics

1

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Linux Server (sort of)

« on: February 06, 2012, 10:48:03 PM »

So I kind of disappeared for a while, but...it's me again!

My old AI War group's interest in AVWW has finally picked up enough to the point that they're getting kind of antsy about 1.0 finally coming out at some point, particularly because it actually has multiplayer now, so I figured that was as good an excuse as any to set up a server and see what we could see.  We'll see about that part later, but the server part is an adventure in itself.  I am a firm believer that servers should not run Windows or be on my home connection, especially when I have a perfectly good one sitting mostly idle in a datacenter somewhere which is already running Linux.

For anyone playing along at home, it seems to work fine so far just zipping up the Windows install dir, chucking it up on there, and running it in the current stable version of Wine.  I also needed the Mesa OpenGL crap and Xvfb just so it would have somewhere to draw the useless status window that I can't see, but without it it won't even run, so...  The moral of the story is that it does run, even if it's a bit inconvenient.

I haven't tried playing with other people yet, so I'm not sure how performance is.  RAM use is just fine with no graphics to deal with or anything, but the CPU situation is not looking great.  (Speaking of which, I still do not understand how I'm not getting a solid 60fps in this game.  It made sense in the alpha before stuff was more optimized, but I have even faster hardware now than I did then, and I was dropping frames a few times in the tutorial of all places.)

So yeah, you can run the server completely headless on a remote Linux box with a bit of dicking around.  It is doable.  I'll have to get back on you on how well it actually works on the hardware I have (two cores of whatever hexacore offering AMD had last year, shared with someone else, and 2GB RAM; it's not otherwise doing anything terribly intensive most of the time, so most of that is available to it).

2

Off Topic / Indie Game: The Movie

« on: June 24, 2011, 06:46:47 PM »

I somehow managed to miss hearing about this until now.  Sounds pretty neat, and I'm impatient for it to be done after reading the article and watching the trailer.  Don't really know much about FEZ, but Braid and Super Meat Boy were great, and I've read some pretty interesting things from the guys behind both of them (even if Jonathan Blow can be a bit...abrasive/opinionated at times, he's a pretty smart guy), so I'm looking forward to seeing more.  I'm also kind of curious about the documentary on one of the Aquaria co-creators it just barely mentions in passing...

3

After Action Reports / The Glorious Autobomb Cannon of the People's Liberation

« on: June 13, 2011, 01:32:22 PM »

I decided to do something silly, just to see how long it would work.  Turns out the answer is longer than I expected, but not as long as I hoped.

I fired up a 40-planet Fallen Spire game, 7/7 random easier/moderate, no exotic options on, and found a snake map with a starting planet all the way at one end with autobombs.  The goal was to see how far in the FS campaign I could get using only an autobomb doom cannon (multiple space docks with engineers pumping out autobombs set to rally on FRD in whatever system I was attacking), with bombers as the only other unit I was allowed to use, solely for cleaning up the things the autobombs couldn't, i.e. missile frigates (which are immune to area damage, and thus autobombs) and force fields (which are inexplicably immune to them and just make them vanish, not even explode doing zero damage).  If I were so lucky as to make it far enough as to get Spire ships, then I could use those, too.  Oh, I also didn't capture any planets other than my starting one, because I'm mean to myself.  Heh.

Not to give away the ending right up front, but...I didn't win.  It was pretty hilarious at times, though.  The first couple planets were pretty trivial to plow through.  It started getting a little annoying when the autobombs made it to a system with a force field, which they were very determined to throw themselves against completely futilely, even though there were plenty of other valid targets.  It's weird, because nothing in the force field's list of immunities suggests that it should be immune.  If they're supposed to be for balance reasons, it'd be nice if it said why and if they were smart enough to not just bash their heads against them...

Anyway, I got my micro on and manually bashed their heads against the correct things, used the bombers to support them when they needed it, and got the first shard pretty trivially.  You do not make the autobombs angry when there's a constant stream of them heading your way that's bigger than your constant stream of wimpy ships.

It started getting a little more annoying, as pretty much every system after that had a fortress (imagine my retroactive lack of surprise to learn that it was a Fortress Baron) and at least one or two force fields or shield sphere guard posts, but the autobombs marched on.  It takes them a long time to kill fortresses...

Incoming waves were pretty amusing to watch fail, even with no defenses, especially the usually-harder-than-normal bomber waves which died twice as quickly.  For some reason it started fixating on missile frigates, though, and about 50% of the waves were those, which the bombers had to deal with themselves, which slowed things down.  A mk4 planet also got a bit tedious.  Never really much of a threat, though.

The next shard/ship/whatever was only slightly harder, and that got its outpost and ships built pretty quickly with all the resources I had nothing better to do with.  I exploded a path to the third one, hoping to actually get my first city going, and was sort of surprised I wasn't dead yet.  I still hadn't run into anything scary, which seemed a bit odd.

The survey ship finished doing its job, I sent the shard on its way, and the bombers and four measly Spire ships tagged along behind it.  It started out pretty well, but this time the autobombs couldn't really keep up with everything, and eventually that meant the bombers and everything died without the suicide squad doing its job properly.  The real problems were the Core Starships and other crap like that, which can just march across an entire system or three ignoring the dozens of ships ramming it, unlike most smaller starships and guardians.  I actually had the shard in the system next to my homeworld when it died, but it didn't quite make it.

I suspect it's probably possible to make it a good deal further if you're a bit luckier than I was, play a bit smarter, micro a bit more, or use a slightly less masochistic variation on the rules I used.  Heh.

4

Game Development / 2D Game Engine

« on: May 21, 2011, 08:00:24 AM »

It's been many years since I've really done much that's directly game-related, but I've accumulated enough ideas over that period of time that I'd really like to play around with some of them to see if they're as much fun in practice as in theory and if they're worth doing anything more with, since I have plenty of free time at the moment.  While I'm capable of putting together a basic engine/environment for testing things out in, I'd rather not waste too much time doing that and would prefer to take something already existing and modify it to meet my needs (if needed).

Ideally it would be something free, cross-platform, and reasonably well supported/documented.  For the time being, I'm likely to be sticking to 2D stuff, and I suppose tile-based is the easiest way to go.  Some of my ideas may get a bit hectic and action-y with a bunch of scaling/scrolling/rotating, so I'd go for a bit more complex but efficient over easy-to-use and slow if I have to.

I honestly have no idea where to start.  I've written code in all sorts of languages for various purposes, from Fortran to Python, but the last time I did much graphical stuff, my OpenGL 1.2 book was considered up-to-date, so I'm not exactly up on what languages/libraries/frameworks/tools the kids are using for stuff like that these days.  Heh.

5

After Action Reports / Bah, Pitiful Human; or: How to Lose a Game in 27 Hours

« on: May 16, 2011, 11:41:26 AM »

Ok then.  I just looked at this after finishing writing it, and I appear to have been rather verbose.  Consider yourselves warned in advance.  I just started writing and included everything I remembered as I went over it in my mind.  If anyone actually makes it through the whole thing, I'll be amazed.  Heh.


I pretty much always play AI War as a co-op game, usually with 4-6 people, and single-player feels so different that I was never really able to get into it.  It never managed to hold my interest for more than a couple hours...until now.

I was bored and had nothing else to do over the weekend other than help my girlfriend move, and I conveniently was also impatient waiting for other people to try the Fallen Spire campaign with, so I figured I could try it myself and hope for the best.  Because we've been playing using fairly vanilla options lately (generally no minor factions or anything), I decided to go nuts and throw in Golems, Spirecraft, Roaming Enclaves, and the Dyson Sphere to keep me company.  All expansions on, nothing disabled, 60 planet Maze B Easy, 7/7 AIs both on random easy/medium, normal caps?  Sure, why not?

I started out in my little corner of the map with Infiltrators, for no reason other than that I'd never used them before.  Took the dead-end planet behind me for resources and the one ahead of me at a fork in the maze path to set up my defenses and got going on the survey ship.  My scouts found absolutely nothing useful nearby and a few obnoxious things like a captive human settlement and a co-processor.  No easy expanding without either risking +100 AIP or guaranteed +20 from knocking the co-processor out because it blocks supply?  Awesome.  Oh, and the other obnoxious thing they found is that one of the AIs appears to be a Spireling, and there are Blade Spawners, Maws, Mini Rams, Stealth Battleships, and Tractor Platforms everywhere.  Double awesome!

Meanwhile, I'm doing my Fallen Spire stuff, and it's time to go investigate a weird signal a few hops out of my territory.  The AI is not amused, and I'm warned to "carry a big stick".  I figure the couple hundred ships I brought as an escort for the survey ship should be plenty.  Uh oh.  We're going to need a bigger stick.  After getting wiped off the map entirely in all of five minutes, I reload and try again.  I usually avoid save-scumming in AI War (which is weird, because I'm all in favor of abusing it in most other games), but it was just starting to get interesting...

This time, after an absolutely ridiculous chase that nearly got me killed, I barely survive in the end, and my first city goes up, cheerfully hosing my economy in the process.  Naturally I put it at my defensive planet at the fork...and then am informed that in order for it to expand, I have to clear out the planets surrounding it...which are the two I mentioned earlier.  Great.  At least one of them is just going to sit there un-colonized, because I'm not taking chances on +100 AIP, so I don't even get resources from it that I desperately am going to need.

As I build up my city, I explore the co-processor path and eventually discover a few handy things a few planets out, like an ARS and an Artillery Golem, so at least heading that way will do me some good, I hope.  I start neutering things along the way and hope I'll be able to set up my second city at the next branch in the path so I can have a nice safe strip of space that I can either ignore or colonize if I need resources.  The next shard seems to go a bit more smoothly, and I'm almost ready to plant my flag in the system I'd chosen, but then Suddenly!: CPA and exo-galactic wave!  While I'm divided too thin between holding my new planet, defending my home base, and rebuilding my fleet from the shard ordeal!

Things are not looking good, as all my new planets are on the receiving end of a textbook roflstomp, and my fortified position at City One is only holding up slightly better.  They chew up most of my turrets, my fortress, all of my ships, and all of my shields, and a few actually make it to my homeworld.  If they hadn't been so excited about trying to kill the refugee outpost, they could've easily taken out my command center, but that little distraction bought me just enough time to finish them off.

At this point, I'm already several hours in because I'm in moderately turtly mode by default, but I go all out super ultra mega uber turtle just to be safe after that.  Everything somehow gets rebuilt, City One is fully expanded and defended much more heavily, and I adopt a new policy of obliterating literally everything on every planet between me and my destination.  To the point that I get paranoid and start throwing tachyon warheads at them in case that Remains Rebuilder is secretly a Stealth Battleship.  You can never be too sure, because the AI is a sneaky bastard.  Lightning warheads are also sprinkled liberally around to deal with incoming waves, because there are no warp gates within a couple hops of any of my remaining planets, so they just come in as loose threat, and when it gets too big to deal with using my fleet, I just explode them all.  Occasionally they get Martyrs instead, just for variety.

My new "take no prisoners" plan works quite well, and my second city goes up and is as heavily fortified as my original, and then the third goes on the other branch, so no matter which way they come at me, even if they somehow get through my absurd defenses, they have to make it through two city/fortress/turret setups (two->one or three->one) before they can get to the squishy center of my territory.  I feel much better about things and am beginning to have absurd resource income from all my new planets, plus plenty of Science! to upgrade my Spire goodies.

I also scrounged up some Viral Shredders from a Zenith Reserve, and the dozen or two I started with have grown to 500, then 1000, and eventually almost 2000, just by parking half of them over each wormhole in my two border cities.  With support from a bunch of turrets, fortresses, and the fleet ships I leave behind, they are nearly invincible, and their numbers grow after every fight, whether it's an incoming wave or exo-galactic strike force or anything else.  They are fearsome and even better fodder than my Infiltrators, which mainly see use for their awesome ability to be so cheap that it doesn't matter if they die in one hit, because if they absorb a hit that does ten times more damage than they have health instead of it hitting a more important ship, I come out ahead.  I can rebuild a full cap of them in about negative three seconds anyway.

After a bit more screwing around, I completely exterminate all life in a sizable chunk of the galaxy, maybe another eight planets up to another chokepoint, which has the ARS and golem I originally found, plus another ARS, another golem and...another ARS at the end?  Today's my lucky day, I guess.  City Four goes at the chokepoint, I have Chameleons and MLRSes and Tachyon Microfighters, more Science! than I know what to do with, metal, crystal, and energy enough to power almost anything imaginable...and roughly 500 AIP.

I continue largely ignoring AIP, because normal fleet ships/waves are a complete non-threat at this point and throw themselves helplessly against my defensive fortifications and fleet, and even the Fallen Spire events seem feeble.  I am invincible!  My Shredders may be mostly dead, because they're too low level at this point to keep up with the stuff coming in, but everything else is invincible, at least.  It's been 20 hours since I started, and ever since I took up my Destroy All AI crusade, I have been untouchable for hours.  Nothing has come remotely close to putting a dent in my plans.  I will march across the galaxy, taking every planet in my name, and the AI will be powerless to even make me slow down.

I find the Dyson Sphere a few more planets out and liberate it, just for fun.  Their puny forces are no match for me or the AI at this point, but it's entertaining to watch them pester the AI, and it seems to really piss them off, so I like it.  Shard five is mine, my first four cities are maxed out, my Spire fleet is maxed out, and life is good.  I place my fifth city, build it up, and prepare to liberate its neighbors so they can join my glorious empire.  AIP is around 700, but who really cares at this point?  Oh no, 1300 Vorticular Cutlasses are heading my way.  Whatever shall I do?  They'll survive about 15 seconds.  Yawn.

Hmm.  This planet doesn't seem terribly enthusiastic about becoming my friend.  It's Mark IV, and there seem to be an awful lot of ships here.  Maybe I should've gotten a little more worried several hours ago when it started giving me messages about ships being put in carriers and barracks on planets I've never even heard of because I hadn't gotten scouts that far.  Eh.  Whatever.  I'm sure it'll be fin-...EMP Guardian?  Oh dear.  There goes the half of my fleet that I brought with me.  Guess I'll have to rebuild it and try again.

Meanwhile, the planet reinforces heavily as I'm clearing threat out from the other side of the galaxy and cranking ships out, but I assume it'll be ok if there aren't anymo-...EMP Guardians?  In my system?  It's more likely than you think!  Make that a train of EMP Guardians, one going off in each of four consecutive systems.  Dammit, AI.  Don't make me have to put you back in your place.

I hold it off just fine before it gets to anything important and finish clearing out that Mark IV planet...just in time to notice that my scouts finally made it through there now that I've taken out the Tachyon Guardians, and they discovered that one of the homeworlds is two hops away...and for bonus points, it's now very angry because Tractor Platforms have dragged my ships all over it while I was fighting in the area.  Suddenly this seems a lot less good than a few minutes ago.

Shortly after that, the AI decided to follow my lead and obliterated everything in its path, i.e. all my stuff, with dozens of Stealth Battleships, Tractor Platforms, and Blade Spawners, plus hundreds to thousands each of several high-Mark fleet ships.  27.5 hours, and all I had to show for it was a gigantic train of death parading across my territory.  I didn't even bother trying to stop it after it made it through the second city in its way.  I just sat back and watched.  It was rather impressive how quickly they chewed through stuff.

Could I have prevented it?  Sure, if I'd scouted better, but at no point did was I ever able to find a Factory to make Mark IV scouts (or anything else), despite controlling 24 planets out of 60 and having brute-forced a couple planets farther in each direction.  I was over-confident after how easy of a time I was having, and I was unprepared for anything that might actually fight back.  Oh well.  So much for that campaign.

6

AI War Technical Support / Multiplayer Issues

« on: May 02, 2011, 01:30:23 PM »

I play AI War almost exclusively as a multiplayer game with a group of people that's been playing once a week for the past year, so it's kind of unfortunate that we've been having progressively more and more issues getting games to sync as time goes by.  I don't remember ever having any notable network problems in 3.x, and 4.x was usually pretty good, but if I'm remembering right, toward the end of that beta cycle and definitely ever since 5.0, we've been unable to complete a game.

Creating a new game always works fine, no matter what, for the entire length of that session.  If we actually make it in game when loading a save, it also works fine (with the exception of disabling/enabling a player slot while in-game, which more often than not breaks things horribly and requires us to all drop and reconnect).  The problem is that we only play a few hours at a time, so it takes several sessions to finish one campaign, and the more time has passed in the current campaign, the less likely we are to make it past the initial loading/syncing stage.

If we do somehow manage to make it into the game when loading a saved game, it will work with zero problems until we quit, but the odds of it loading again the next week keep getting progressively lower.  Eventually it gets to the point where we're nearing the end of the game and going to win after a few more hours, but it's so hard to coax it into loading the game for everyone that we just give up.

As far as we can tell, it doesn't matter which one of us hosts the game, and it doesn't matter which subset(s) of players join it or in what order.  Once it gets into that state, we haven't been able to figure out how to un-break it.  The only thing that seems to definitely prevent it is playing with only two players total, which none of us have ever had any problems with.  Three or more always seems to eventually gets borked, though.

We've tried with both 5.000 and 5.009 recently, and both have the same problem.  Everyone has the relevant port forwarding set up, a rather good Internet connection, and computers that way more than meet the requirements.  It happens with everyone using the Windows version or a mix of Windows/OS X clients.  No amount of fiddling with network settings seems to make much difference.  Our entire group is basically a bunch of IT people and programmers and whatnot, and we're completely at a loss and unable to find anything wrong outside of the game itself.

The odd thing is that it very rarely ever actually desyncs.  The problem only occurs when everyone is initially connecting to the host, and we all just end up sitting there on the map with the "Waiting for players..." message, while the host watches the numbers for each player slowly count down, then randomly jump back up again.  Occasionally it'll sort itself out and let us play the game, but usually it'll just repeat that cycle indefinitely, while half a dozen seconds of in-game time (according to the clock) will pass over the course of 20 minutes of real-world time.

Here's the most recent save we have.  No matter who tries to load and host it, the same thing happens.  I can get a couple dozen more, along with any other info that might be useful, if anyone has any ideas.