Messages

1

AI War / Re: Trillion ship CPA

« on: October 19, 2012, 02:57:47 PM »

Heh. I wasn't the one who originally did that, but I remember screwing around with stuff like that too just to see what would happen when I saw people posting about it. I know I got into the millions and crashed it when it couldn't allocate enough memory for all the ships. If no one's "fixed" it since I last tried, Defender mode is excellent for hard-crashing the game that way even now after the addition of carriers and whatnot. You can pretty easily get into seven digits with the right settings/starting condition, and then it explodes.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: An Update On The "A Valley Without Wind" Art Rework Project

« on: August 18, 2012, 04:11:50 AM »

Mmm, sleeping.  I could go on about that for a while too, but I think it's plenty at this point to agree that it's important.  I'm epileptic, so making sure nothing physically or mentally interferes with sleeping properly is probably the most important thing I do every day.  Heh.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: redeem on steam?

« on: August 18, 2012, 03:57:36 AM »

Re: The oddly formatted alpha key thing, I was wondering too, because as it turned out my Steam copy's key is in a <self redacted> format and my alpha key (which also hasn't activated but I bought another during Summer Sale) is in the same format but with 1 less character. Just in case anyone was curious, I tried adding the first character of the Steam one to the start of the alpha one but sadly that didn't work! Curses, foiled.

Going to gift that to a friend if/when it finally activates on Steam, though.

By alpha, I really do mean alpha, not beta, and it's different from that one and the ones my friends got during the beta (which also obviously don't currently work on Steam).  I'm not exactly going to complain if it doesn't end up working for me, but I understand people being more frustrated if they actually paid money for it.  Heh.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: An Update On The "A Valley Without Wind" Art Rework Project

« on: August 17, 2012, 09:39:00 PM »

my arm issues only start when the height isn't right..

Speaking as someone who's played the piano for nearly 30 years, that is indeed generally the quickest and best way to cause problems, because then your wrist is out of alignment (or both of them are if your keyboard is poorly positioned too).  Having to move too far to do things can cause problems, and so can having too much resistance between the mouse and the surface it's on, but having sensitivity too high can also cause problems for a lot of people because they end up gripping the mouse much harder than necessary and tensing up their arm muscles just trying to keep it under control.  Keeping your wrist straight and not relying on bending it to move is generally a good idea, but that doesn't mean you're stuck with only your fingers.  The higher up your arm your movement starts from, the smaller the movement needs to be and with less force behind it.

The teacher I spent the most time with came from the conservatory in St. Petersburg, and he was very serious about forcing me to learn to play with proper posture and technique.  The time I spent focusing on things like that may have been boring at first, but I learned to appreciate it afterward because this is the first time I've ever had problems with anything anywhere from my shoulders down to my wrists, and I'm a programmer for both work and fun, spend 20 hours a week playing video games, and play two instruments.

<insert comment about new art>

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: redeem on steam?

« on: August 17, 2012, 04:45:10 AM »

And here I originally thought it didn't work just because I had an oddly-formatted alpha key.  I was only reminded to check for news about the status of it by the Steam sale on AVWW today.  Any month now Valve'll say something one way or another...

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: An Update On The "A Valley Without Wind" Art Rework Project

« on: August 17, 2012, 04:36:31 AM »

O_o

Using a controller to play typical mouse-driven games sounds like trying to run the marathon without legs. Why cripple yourself?

In their case, I don't know, but I can think of reasons, like being "crippled" in some way to begin with.  I hurt my wrists at the beginning of the year, and as a result I pretty much haven't played any games at all since February (which is why I disappeared off the forums and why the most recent version of AVWW I've played is 0.4xx).  I'm about at the point where I'd be ok using a controller for some stuff though.  The mouse is the worst part, and I could see that being a not-completely-intolerable way around it if it were the only option.  I've learned to use mousekeys fairly naturally for some things in the past six months, despite how terrible the keypad is as a pointing device.  Heh.

7

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: An Update On The "A Valley Without Wind" Art Rework Project

« on: August 17, 2012, 03:52:18 AM »

I've wanted to give AI War a proper go, as I've seen enough of your style of design to know that I might like it, buuuuuuut the extreme focus on mouse use currently prevents it;  I'd have to work up some screwball way to do it with the PS3 controller, which is a monstrous pain in the ass and I'm guessing isnt really feasible for an RTS, as they often seem to me like extreme precision and fast clicking is in order.   I've been able to do this with damn near any game I've had an interest in (even Diablo 3), but the one exception is stuff like Starcraft 2.... just isnt doable.

If you have a ton of patience, it would certainly be doable.  You can do pretty much everything in AI War while the game is paused, so rather than worry about clicking frantically in real time you can pause whenever anything interesting happens, queue up all your commands, and then un-pause the game.  Many of the best/most experienced players of the game do that some or all of the time, at least in single player (it can get a bit obnoxious in multi-player with half a dozen people constantly pausing the game if you're just playing casually).

What would most make me run away screaming from attempting such a thing with a controller is the lack of keyboard shortcuts.  AI War might have more keyboard shortcuts than every other game I've ever played in my life combined.  You can do just about everything without them, but it's so incredibly tedious to that I don't think I'd bother playing the game that way.  If you can play with the controller in one hand and the other hand on the keyboard chording three modifier keys at the same time (and shut up, "n" and "4" are modifier keys if AI War says they are), you may be in luck.  Heh.

8

Off Topic / Re: Play with chemicals. In space.

« on: June 28, 2012, 06:52:27 PM »

What really amazes me about it is that 95% of the game is played in your mind. I spend way more time staring at the screen and pondering than I do in actually placing components. And then I run it once and see what I screwed up and sit and ponder again for a while. I find myself thinking of puzzles when I'm away from the game as well, and then getting ideas and bringing them back later to solve something that was vexing me.

Looking back at this thread after so much time, this in particular jumped out at me.  It's interesting that someone's description of playing a game that's essentially a simulation of the experience of writing code to solve a problem is very similar to what I've said about why programming is interesting and rewarding.  I've had the same conversation more than once (including I think one time last year on here with Chris, if anyone's especially interested) which amounted to an extended version of that, about how contrary to the stereotype of it involving sitting at a keyboard clattering away typing full speed all day, it's really just a lot of thinking, for the most part.

Sure, the keyboard is there to get your thoughts into the computer, and you have to test your stuff to see if it works, and you spend time researching and playing around and learning new things, but that's all either just to feed the thought processes or a conduit to release them to the outside world.  Most of the real work is going on inside your brain, and what makes it both so exciting/satisfying and also sometimes hard for other people to understand when they can only see the end results is that all the fancy things you make the computer do are basically things you willed into existence with the power of your brain just by thinking about them really hard.

Sitting there and staring at a puzzle in SpaceChem for 20 minutes, then suddenly coming up with a brilliant idea hours later when you're going to bed and solving it by laying down a dozen symbols that you somehow magically know work is the closest thing I've ever seen in a game to...well, pretty much any bit of software you're working on and get stuck on, then similarly come up with an ingeniously simple and clever couple dozen lines of code after it's been sitting in the back of your head all day.  Because on some level, they're the same kind of process.

9

Off Topic / Re: Nexus 2 - Jupiter incident Sequel! - needs you

« on: February 10, 2012, 10:52:39 AM »

I've spent a lot more time being impressed by pictures of other people's work in Minecraft or watching videos set in Minecraft than I have ever spent actually playing it.

By far the most fun thing to do is to look at things other people have made.  It's far too tedious and time consuming to do anything yourself, and then it just blows up anyway.  The "game" parts of it aren't actually fun or terribly interesting, or at least weren't last time I checked them out, and the sandbox construction stuff is too much work.  But it's still neat seeing what other people do sometimes...

the other big benefit to using paypal is that you put your card info once, then you don't have to again, minimizing security problem.

You're funny.  PayPal?  Minimize security problems?  PayPal is a nightmare.  It tries to act like a bank without any of the restrictions or responsibilities a bank has to follow.  It seems great until you run into a problem, and then it's the worst thing ever.  Good luck if you verified your PayPal account by linking it to a bank account that you actually use for anything else or did that so you could transfer money out of PayPal and then someone disputes a transaction because they were feeling like a dick that day.  Your life will potentially be hell for months while trying to sort it out as PayPal is completely uncooperative, unhelpful, and unresponsive.  Even if you only use it to make payments, that still means someone else is putting themself at risk in that position to be able to accept them.  The whole company should've died years ago with the way they treat people and the sheer number of horror stories there are about them.

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

« on: February 07, 2012, 08:04:31 PM »

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

And here I was thinking the amoebas got you!  Stay clear of that giant green one...

Oh great.  They come in green now?  I wonder what else I've missed...

Really my ADD meds and my seizure meds got in a fight.  I'm not sure who won, but I know I lost.  So did my laptop, when I managed to spill two glasses of water into it in the process.  Oops.

Thanks very much for sharing your linux server experiences, I've been wondering how that would do.  As far as the status window, in theory I could give you a command line option that would not try to load any graphics at all or show any gui at all, but I think that just the unity engine itself won't be satisfied without some kind of presentation layer that it recognizes.  Though apparently there is a -nographics command line that the unity player will recognize.  If you're feeling brave you might try that.

FYI, the status window won't remain useless; that's where things like "advertise this server", kick/ban, etc will go.

Very strange that it's burning up the cpu like that, as Toll says the server typically runs pretty light.

I tried throwing -nographics at it, and there was no change.  After trying it on my Windows desktop where I can actually see the results instead of monitoring side effecfs, I'm not surprised; it doesn't do anything.

And I don't mean that the window is necessarily useless for everyone, just that it's completely pointless in my situation, because it's just dumping it into nothingness where no one will ever see it, wasting a bunch of effort to translate D3D calls into OpenGL calls that have to be handled entirely in software just so it can display a bunch of nothing that no one can see.

Just to add: yes, that's all there is to those.  You look at whatever the current version of the game is, download any zip files you don't already have based on that, and then unzip them in sequence (overwriting each time) into the game folder.

What is the proper way to check the current installed version of the game?  If there's somewhere easy to read that from, and if there were some way to check if there are people connected to the server, even if it just wrote it to a file that it updated when it changes, auto-updating when no one's playing (and thus when it's guaranteed to not have chunks open for writing) should be simple enough.

I suppose for a pure CLI-type server, you'd have to create a Linux-compatible release, yes? Since it has to have the Windows API, you have to have Wine, and thus you have to have a GUI running. It would be kicking to have this running on my headless archlinux CLI server, but I don't see that happening

Well, if you look at how I did it, it is possible.  My server is headless.  It's a 2U colo box I share with a few friends.  If you don't mind installing and running a bunch of stuff on it that's completely unnecessary for everything else you do with your server, it will at least work.  Xvfb lets you basically have a non-GUI GUI without any graphics hardware or input devices or anything.  It just fakes it all for the sake of things that demand it.  As far as Wine and AVWW are concerned, they have an 800x600 screen to draw to, but it's really just a small chunk of RAM.  I'm not running anything else on top of that, just the bare minimum to trick them into thinking the hardware is there.  It gets a little annoyed when it starts up and can't properly configure the sound or input devices, but it gets over it.  Heh.

11

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

« on: February 07, 2012, 04:38:31 AM »

I don't know much (or anything) about server capabilities or Linux/Wine, but 100% sounds like a lot, given that the server runs at about 1-2% on my computer without anyone playing in it, and not too much higher when people are playing. That is, I suppose, 1-2% of the total capacity of my dualcore 3GHz processor, but it's still not a whole lot.

It's 100% of one virtual core, which is half a real core, but that's still more than it should be.  It doesn't seem to change at all based on actual usage, so I have a feeling it's something being stupid with all the virtualized crap going on attempting to emulate infinite loops as fast as possible...and display the output on a nonexistent screen using software rendering mode.  If anyone who uses Wine more often/less infrequently than I do has any bright ideas where to start poking at it, I'm up for suggestions.  I know some of you out there play have been playing AVWW and AI War through it for a while, only on proper hardware.

As for updates... Not sure how handy you are with code, but you might be able to toss something together with http://avww.s3.amazonaws.com/AVWWUpdatesList.xml? AFAIK, you can just unzip them to the game dir, and the update should be applied. I've been meaning to do something similar myself, but since I have access to the auto-updater in the "real" game, I haven't bothered with it much.

If all I have to do is grab those, pull the files out of them, and replace the existing ones, that's pretty trivial.  Should be easy enough to have it poll that for updates every now and then, grab them, kill the server, apply them, and restart it.  There's not really any way at the moment to broadcast a message to people who are playing that it's going to happen, but too bad for them.  They'll get over it.  Heh.

12

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

« on: February 07, 2012, 12:16:05 AM »

After fooling around for a little while with two of us, it seems to work fine.  One of my half-cores stays pretty much pegged at 100% the whole time, but that doesn't change whether no one's connected or both of us are doing stuff in different regions entirely, and it still runs well.  The lack of movement smoothing for enemies makes things kind of a mess, and the shadow bats cause a gigantic flood of error messages (but otherwise seem to work properly until I kill them...which is not a good time with them spazzing all over the place with jittery movement), but nothing seems horribly broken running it this way.

Edit: Oh, the other thing is I'm really not sure how in the world I'm going to handle updates.  That's going to be a giant pain.  I suppose for the time being just do it on my desktop and then copy the files manually, but there has to be a better way.

13

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).

14

Game Development / Re: I tried to start small projects.

« on: November 12, 2011, 06:59:53 PM »

For me, I simply find the programming fun.  I guess it's kind of like asking "how do you manage to make it to the end of a game, where do you find the perseverance?"  For players that enjoy the game, they are sad when the game is over, not feeling like the game is work to play.

That's a good part of it, too.  I've been doing it for a long time, sometimes more, sometimes less, but it's always been something I've enjoyed.  I wouldn't've kept doing it all this time if it weren't, I suppose.  I was one of those kids back in school who had to turn down other clubs/teams trying to recruit me because I was busy enough already being on the math team and doing music and computer stuff on my own, and I was a big enough dork to ask for (and receive!) a new IDE for Christmas one year way back when.  Before that I always had logic puzzles and at one point even the "joy" of typing crap by hand in BASIC from a book or a magazine I got somewhere into my VIC-20 and trying to figure out whether the reason it didn't work was because I made a typo or there was one in the original source...and then discovering that when it worked, it still sucked anyway.  So yeah, if that didn't kill my interest, I guess I really do like it.  Heh.

Solving problems/creating things through raw logic is just fun.  You can almost will things into existence by thinking about them hard enough (not counting a little bit of typing here and there, but that's the most trivial part of the work being done).  You just come up with a neat idea or a problem that needs solving, then let your brain get to braining until you come up with a suitable approach (which may involve looking things up or trying things out, but that's all just more fuel for the braining process).  When it comes down to it, whatever awesome thing you end up with is really just a giant mathematical expression that describes what you came up with in your head that you wanted to have happen.  That's pretty cool, in my book.

15

Game Development / Re: IDE of Choice

« on: November 08, 2011, 04:32:45 PM »

I am just curious about what IDE people like to use, or if they even use them. (I know of some people who do text files and command line only)

Hey, that sounds like me a good deal of the time.  I worked on a project that was ~100k lines of code entirely using nano (yes, really, shut up, that's the editor I usually use; I had traumatic experiences with both vi and emacs as a kid, so it was easier to use pico and learn how to use other tools to make up for its shortcomings, some of which nano has now addressed), grep, sed, etc.  At no point did I ever do anything that wasn't straight from a bash prompt in some sort of terminal window (or occasionally non-window, when I didn't have a GUI running).

I'm surprised to see so many positive comments about Eclipse, because I'm used to seeing a lot of bitching about it elsewhere.  I've been sort of starting to learn my way around it lately for stuff I need a real IDE for/out of curiosity, though, and it seems pretty ok-ish to me so far.  I've never used any one thing for long enough to become hugely attached to it.  They all annoy me in some way or another, but as long as they do what they're supposed to do in the end, I tolerate them.