Messages

16

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Light as the opposite of entropy?

« on: November 07, 2011, 12:28:04 AM »

It's just connected concepts: an original purity or power dissolving over time into mixture or lesser-power involves entropy.

If you want to get picky, almost everything you do in almost every game (and absolutely everything you do in the real world) involves entropy.  Setting something on fire with a fireball involves entropy.  It is in a less ordered state after it's been burned, and your own resources have had that property of them expended in order to cause that effect.  You might as well call guns/bullets entropy magic by that reasoning.  Heh.

I'm pretty sure that not only does combining rubies and walnuts not make fireballs, no combination of anything makes fireballs shoot out of your fingers.

Well, there was this accident in the magma-fueled jeweler's workshop...

He pulled the lever, didn't he?  They always pull the lever...

17

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Light as the opposite of entropy?

« on: November 06, 2011, 06:03:54 PM »

I'd suggest waiting until the game does more storytelling before worrying about the names of the primary categories of energy   Light and Entropy actually fit very, very well to that.  Origin and Dissolution on one hand, Reinforcement and Remolding on the other, etc.

But...but...that's still not what those words mean.

I'm pro light/entropy as they are.  I'm not sure I see any connection between the purple spells and the entropy I learned about in high school physics, but to be totally honest I'm not sure that a ruby and a walnut produce fireballs in real life either.  It sounds cool enough and surely that's what it's supposed to do?

And this is why my previous post concluded with me saying that I never would've said anything about it on my own before, because it doesn't really matter when it comes down to it.  I'm pretty sure that not only does combining rubies and walnuts not make fireballs, no combination of anything makes fireballs shoot out of your fingers.  The entire thing is already an exercise in suspension of disbelief to begin with, just like almost everything with a  fantasy or sci-fi setting, so as long as it's interesting and fun, I don't find it distracting...except when people try to argue that it's actually correct.  While playing the game it's fine and I never notice it, though.  Heh.

18

Off Topic / Re: Serious Sam 3

« on: November 06, 2011, 11:36:48 AM »

A lot of people are hoping that Serious Sam 3 is going to be what Duke Nukem Forever was supposed to be, at least in terms of quality and gameplay.

That would really be nice.  I still plan to check it out if there's a demo and/or if it eventually goes on sale cheap enough, because I at least like the idea of what they're doing, and with any luck maybe the new one will get me back into it.

19

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Light as the opposite of entropy?

« on: November 05, 2011, 10:31:43 PM »

I feel like entropy (see also: chaos) as a magic/element/damage/whatever type isn't that unusual, and it's usually partnered with order/creation (or some synonym for one of the two) if it's in a system that has opposing pairs.  Well, the use of the name is not uncommon, at least.

Actually using it properly thematically is another story entirely, and as has already been pointed out, it's totally not being done here, either; it's called "entropy" entirely because it sounds cool.  The spells in its category so far generally have less effect on overall entropy one way or the other than most other spells do, amusingly enough.  And "what he/they said" about light as its opposite.

On the other hand, it's no worse than pretty much any other fantasy/magic game out there, and I never would've said anything about it if no one else had.  Heh.

20

AI War / Re: Word of Wisdom

« on: November 05, 2011, 08:54:54 PM »

It's interesting, I only have 4 on my Macbook and don't have much trouble with it swapping.  But then again, I tend to have most everything else beyond just web browsers and unity closed.

Just my browser is several hundred MB with all the crap I have open.  I usually have at least a few dozen tabs with things I'm reading/watching and various reminders, plus references for stuff I'm working on or learning, and so on.  I tend to have a bunch of other stuff running at any given time, too, since because it's my laptop and more easily accessible, it's my "do random crap" computer (mail, music, IM, half a dozen terminal windows doing everything from IRC to smaller programming/scripting work that doesn't need a full IDE).  Enough random crap and it adds up after a while.

21

AI War / Re: AI War Beta 5.020, "Nanoswarm Fortress," Released!

« on: November 05, 2011, 08:17:55 PM »

Also, a Nanoswarm Fortress sounds very cool.

Oh great.  You strapped rockets onto the grey goo.  Now it exists on a galactic scale.

22

AI War / Re: Save File Generation

« on: November 05, 2011, 08:14:30 PM »

The AIP is actually stored in duplicate on each AI Player, because at one point I'd been flirting with the idea of different AIP per AI player (long before even beta of the game).

So what happens if they don't match?  Does it use the first one it finds?  Does the last one it reads overwrite whatever happened to be there?  Does it throw an error?  Does the AI explode?  Heh.

23

AI War / Re: Word of Wisdom

« on: November 05, 2011, 07:53:29 PM »

Heh, yeah, it's a big game for sure.

It's no worse than any of at least a few dozen others I have on my PC.  It did always end up with a bit of swapping on my MacBook when I only had 4GB of RAM in it, but so did everything else, because running OS X with that little RAM and not closing everything before you run something big is just asking for trouble.  It's a very RAM-hungry OS and always has been.  Should be fine now that I'm up to 8, though, just haven't tried.  On the other hand, I've never noticed it swap angrily on my desktop.  Never did when I had 4GB, and it certainly doesn't now that I have 12.

24

Off Topic / Re: Serious Sam 3

« on: November 05, 2011, 07:41:17 PM »

It should be exactly what I want, considering how sick I am of all these newfangled shooters and their "improvements" that sometimes just take all the fun out of things.  Sometimes you just need to circle strafe like a mofo, carry 600 pounds of guns and ammo, bunnyhop, etc., all at implausible speeds without regenerating health.  And without reload or run keys, either, because stopping to reload and moving at less than top speed are for wimps and get in the way of shooting things.

I really tried to get back into it when the first HD remake came out, but having played Painkiller a bunch shortly before that, I wasn't feeling it, and that's kind of dampened my interest in anything else Serious Sam since then.  I actually stopped playing after a couple levels out of boredom, of all things, which never would've happened ten years ago.  I'd much rather have a new Painkiller game that isn't a complete atrocity, but I gave up all hope of that a long time ago.  At least I still enjoy playing the original one...

25

AI War Strategy Discussion / Re: Autobombs: Defense Strategy

« on: November 05, 2011, 11:45:38 AM »

Laugh.

That is the first time I've seen it actually be appropriate for it to turn that into an emoticon in a numbered list.

My approach is slightly different, but the general idea is the same.  I use one dock for each mark I have unlocked/want to have active in that situation, and way, way fewer engineers, because that's overkill, especially for low marks.  Even high marks don't take much engineering to crank out at max build speed.  Every time I ever see someone say "10-20 engineers" in the context of something like this, I wonder what's wrong with them.  There's a cap on how fast a dock can spit ships out, and with that many of them, you're attempting to build ships like three times faster and furiouser than is even possible.  What's the point?

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Elemental Damage

« on: November 03, 2011, 11:42:47 PM »

I seem to recall hearing that a lot of those combos in Magicka, while fun at first, became game-breakingly unbalanced pretty fast in the hands of players.  That's the problem with open-ended combo systems.

That's exactly why they're fun, and why the game in general is fun, for that matter.  The sheer absurdity of what you can do is what makes it so entertaining, along with having to learn to restrain yourself so you don't end up killing everyone on your own team constantly or waste time casting spells a few orders of magnitude more powerful than you need when something much weaker and faster would've finished casting before you got killed.

Unrelated, the glyph color shifting as you cast spells, particularly having three color combos, reminds me distinctly of Chrono Cross.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Q & A

« on: November 03, 2011, 05:22:39 PM »

Yep, there's already a "bestiary" idea noted in mantis from long ago, which is basically the monsterpedia thing.  That said, what I'm finding is that I'm not sure if adding extra steps to the whole encountering a new monster for the first time process is really a desirable thing.  Sometimes having an extra process (scanning and looking up) can be fun, sometimes it just adds some extra work for the player without adding extra fun.  Right now I've kind of hedged and you just get the info when you pause the game and hover over monsters.

If you don't want the hassle of extra steps, a lot of people still like to be able to look up different enemies and spells and various other things about the game in some kind of reference (if there isn't one in-game, people will inevitably make one outside of it if the game is complex and popular enough), so just adding each of them to it after you've killed one would be a simple way of approaching it, for example.

28

AI War Strategy Discussion / Re: Autobombs: Defense Strategy

« on: November 02, 2011, 12:24:53 PM »

Been playing a game with Nanoswarms lately, and setting up the "ship cannon" on the friendly side of the wormhole from the target planet is becoming one of those things I could do in my sleep.

I picked those as my bonus ship in the first game our group started after you fixed the targeting bug I found in that other thread, and I had ship cannons for them set up scattered across the galaxy, both for offense and defense.  Everyone was happy to see them, and it was the first game we won in months.  They can't really clear things out on their own like autobombs or some of the other ships you can crank out like that, but unless there's an entire fleet of ships that's immune to them, they're going to ruin someone's day with the mess they cause.

29

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

« on: November 02, 2011, 05:09:11 AM »

For me, it always helps to pick a project that I'm interested in enough that I can keep pushing through it when I get to a dull part.  Sometimes I might have to take a break for a bit and work on something else for a little while, but not everything is always going to be fun and exciting, even if it's a project that's really interesting overall or something that you're getting paid for (which can be pretty motivating).  Sometimes you just have to suck it up and do it so you can get past it and move on.

It definitely helps having all that stuff planned out ahead of time so you at least have some idea of how it's going to work before you sit down to do it and can get it over with more quickly, rather than having to work out all the details at the same time as writing the code.  Knowing what the general structure of it is going to look like and how much of it you have done already and what's still left to finish both makes it easier to do it right and gives you something to work toward.  I kind of go nuts in the design stage sometimes, mapping stuff out and organizing everything until I'm satisfied before I ever sit down to write any code, so I always know how much more there is left to go on whatever piece I'm working on and have some kind of finite goal I can set to reach by lunch or the end of the day/week/whenever, along with measurable progress.

And back to the "working on things that are actually interesting" thing, that ties back into the "measurable progress" part.  If you're working on something you're excited about (for whatever reason, whether it's for fun, like a a game, or something useful, like a tool that solves a problem that's been bugging you for a while), seeing it take shape and start doing the things you want is pretty neat.  A good example is a chat client I was working on, which wasn't terribly interesting at first, but then when it hit the point where it could successfully open a connection to the server and authenticate with it and showed up in the userlist, that was a pretty big milestone.  It may not have been able to send or receive messages or anything useful at that point, but with the foundation in place, adding and testing more features was suddenly possible, plus I could confuse and annoy other people with it by testing it on a live server.  Motivation achieved!  Heh.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: AVWW Beta 0.531, "Glyph Transplants and Abandoned Settlements," Released!

« on: November 01, 2011, 05:14:11 PM »

One consistent theme from what we were talking about today is that the concept of a multiverse is really getting increasingly central to this game.  The idea of a string-theory-type multiverse has always been one of the founding ideas of the AVWW mythos, but it's been a much more subtle thing up until now.

It's why all the instance of the world are called Environ, for instance, but each one is completely different in the details.  Each one exists in a separate universe.

Not to be pedantic, but...who am I kidding?  Solely for the sake of being pedantic, I do believe you really mean quantum mechanical instead.  Many-worlds is compatible with string theory, but other than not ruling it out, string theory itself is not concerned with it.

How did I end up talking about theoretical physics in relation to AVWW instead of AI War?  I didn't see that one coming...