art and paintings of a mischievous and magical nature.
After some difficulties here we go.
Got some better ones brewing after I make some minor corections to the lighting.
Hrm.. might look into importing them as actual 3d objects.. which could be interesting. Especially now that obsidiangames.com has a solid AM to Torque pipline exporter…
Well I am really liking t2d err.. TGB so far. With just a couple hundred lines of code I now have the bot programming and selection and buttons and a visual preview up and running.
Also not being limited by SL’s already stressed servers makes a big difference.
And being able to preload all the graphics and not have to rely on other people’s internet connections to stream data..
Granted I’ve not dug into the TGB networking yet so the potential latency pitfalls still loom.
I’ve got some goodies rendering and they should be done lunch timeish tomorrow afternoon so I’ll get them up shortly.
Well with the difficulty tracking down the ‘stillborn bot’ bug that still plagues me and the downright tediousness that fixing the console security tweak entails, I’ve started building bombBots in what I hope will become it’s final form off the Grid.
I started porting the game to TGB (torque game builder). So far I’ve got the console for programming the bot up and running (keyboard and mouse) The buttons still need a ‘click’ sound but that should not be that hard. A nice new feature I was able to add was a mini display of the entire program for the bot so you no longer have to remember how many times you hit forward etc etc..
Next up is a minimap where you can see a proxy bot move around as you enter the program.
I may take a break and go back to the hack at the SL version of the game this weekend. Ideally I’d like to be able to use the TGB & SL versions to cross promote each other eventually.
But the biggest problem with SL is turning out to be latency and extremely slow script performance.. And Junghee is usually a fairly light loaded server (6-14k ips) so maybe I’m just trying to do something that’s beyond the capabilities of of the Grid.
Oh and since I’ve never messed with the TGB networking it should get interesting… If not educational.. Well I’ve never messed with TGB before so it’s already educational. heh.
Potential features to add to the SL version.
Items in Green are done.
Turns out that creating a seating area that places the camera at the proper position when sat upon was way easier than anticipated.
So now each side has a seat that will place the camer at a good playing position.
Still need to whip up some textures for it but that should not be hard.
Hopefully I can knock those out tomorrow.
After even more playtesting and generally having a good time with the bombbots game in SL it’s time to consider the long term goals of the project.
Initially it was just to get a handle on LSL and do something fun, but after spending months at work on it I’m beginning to reach the realization that the limits of LSL are going to make distribution of the build a problem. At least any type of automated distribution.
But that shouldnt be insurmountable.. the bigger problem is marketing, hosting and general word of mouth about the product.. Whoring myself or my work has never been my strong point.
So the priorities as of now are a complete feature freeze, fix the stalled bot bug, and lock down the console to the active player. Once that’s done then Create the little seperate Tournament Manager device which pays attention to who is playing and winning and handles the L$.
Now If I wasn’t so damnned burned out I could probably do this in a week or so.
That and I want to make a stand alone version of this, and I’ve got the tools to do it.
That’s the real hard part about pet projects…forcing yourself to do the crap parts as well as the fun stuff.
Well if nothing else blogging about it tightens my resolve.
It is so easy to mentally become overwhelmed at what is left to do.
My typical train of thought is something like this…’Hmm Lets take a look at the hud. Wait then I’ll have to tell the hud when to activate, so I’ll need to modify the console, wait which console.. err.. ooh so the console will have to mirror the hud.. So all my buttons are going to have to be rewritten to be bi-directional.. So I’ll have to maintain state between the console and the hud .. Err… *sizzle* *sizzle* *pop*’ There go my neurons again…
And that is the way I have come to the revelation that it comes down to having to rewrite the majority of the console code (about a dozen scripts or so) if I want to use a hud, not to mention the lag the extra listeners/parsers are going to add. Or I could just remove the console altogether and force the use of the hud….
Unfortunately that seriously hampers the ease of use of the game so it’s not really an option. At least until I can force wear a hud to an avatar via a script.
Maybe setting the camera position when they join the game is an option, tilting the console around a bit so it’s easier to see from a more ‘over the shoulder’ camera POV will be the easiest solution.
Well my experiments with HUD’s have more or less convinced me that it’s a lot of trouble to get them to work the way I want. Still some progress has been made, but the amount of changes needed to the core console are significant.
The custom Bots per side seems to be easily doable. However I may not just have one option pere side but rather let each player select their type of bots at game start. Still debating this though as it does not lead to any gameplay advantages.
The immediate need however seems to be the player security so I can start hosting paid tournaments. However I’m thinking of having the tournament tool be a seperate entity that just tracks who is playing and who should play next and who won. And that way all the money transactions will be carried out by one object that can be shut off when not in use.
Anyway should get some more in world time shortly..
Not much gotten done lately. RL has been keeping me busy with other side projects.
I did manage though to get the actual model created for the hud.
Now i need to tweak the player recognition so that only the joined player can click on things.
That may be a painful process and chances are I wont have freetime in large enough chunks to make it worthwile to pop into yet.
Time will tell I guess….
Got the optional Hud mechanics figured out in my noggin. Now to just create it and make it work. Should be about a day’s worth of work. Maybe a day and a half since I’m adding the ‘console touched only by current player’ code in as well..
Played a bit with putting in the insectbots and it’s not looking good. The sensors are not aligned properly and the center of each bot varies thus forcing me to go to potentially 12 different codebases with 12 different sensors from the current 3 codebases using 1 identical sensor. The script changes which would be needed are quite significant. I may have to push this off until I can make BombBots2 : the unlimited prim version.
I’ll do some more poking at it but it’s beginning to delay the project and I’m really itching to finish this thing up. Technically I’m not on a deadline, but I know my attention span. And it’s already been 2 months on this project and I was able to force me to stop coding on my avatar.. Next time I may not be so lucky. 🙂
Well I had a little tournament tonight. Cutter was back and kicked butt. Everything went smoothly and everyone seemed to have fun.
Next time I definatly want to get more than 4 people showing up though. But that’s still enough for a full match and some more great feedback.
Here’s a couple more shots from the game.
Basic feedback is good. People like the game, the new instructions made sense and the 2 new guys who played tonight were able to jump in with just one warmup game.
The request for the bot selector control to be sticky (if you launch a bot and right now it resets to bomb bot) is definatly worth implementing as it will let you get the inital defenses up faster.
Also some throtteling issues on the console (ie people clicking faster than the server can handle) needs some exploration.
I had a bot appear and not get its programming again… i wish i could replicate that consistently.
Didn’t get to spend much time online yesterday.
I did however manage to get the new quickstart help completed and displayed in world.
Managed to reacquire my last 512 that my tier supports in Junghee so I’ve got some more prims to play with so I can start tweaking the arena with some decorations.
Got an offline IM from Dreilex saying he’s got the insectoid side of bots all textured. I’ll upload a piccy as soon as I get them (hopefully tonight).
I’ve got the screenshots for the 1.2.3.4 quickstart guide and Hope to assemble them tonight and get them in world so I can ditch the video.
Added in a timer state switch for the main console so that after X players join the game goes into automatic 90 second countdown and starts the game, after which the timerstate is set to gameTimeout mode which will shut off a running game after 25 minutes.
The good news is that this lets me easily add future time modes so in the long run it was worth the restructuring of the backend to make room for it.
Finally got my new body a bit closer to what I envisioned it to be.
Still have a significant amount of scripting I want to add to it just for fun :).
Judging from peoples’ reaction non humanoid AVs is proving interesting. I’ll post more about that after I get some more time under the hood.
My little corner plot of land got sold so that’s a good thing, but now I’m running a bit short of prims in Junghee but it’s gonna be a while before that becomes a real issue.
Well I wound up having less free time to spend coding on the project that I would have liked today. Still I made some pretty good progress. I managed to take the Join game buttons and attach em to the command consoles so its easier to join a game from the start positions.
Added some more text to the announcer and fixed a bug where it was miscalculating the number of active players.
Note to self: NULL_KEY != “”
Also put a slight delay between the time the obstacles of each side call llFrand to smooth out the distribution a bit. That’s what I get for useing a time based random function on identical functions called at the same time…
Saw the next two insect bots which will round up the green side. Some minor tweaking on the shapes aside, I’m looking forward to seeing them with textures. I also got a peek at some concept art for the other sides, there’s some interesting proposals but not quite the look I was going for.
Yeah I’m a picky bastard like that.
Still I’ve sunk too much time and money into this project not to make damn sure it turns out how I envison it.
Anyway its getting to the point of feature freeze and start working on the arena and script security so I can implement the monetary functionality.
