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The To-Do List:

Potential features to add to the SL version.
Items in Green are done.

  • Dynamic (per game) Obstacles
  • Make Inactive/killed player home bases vanish during a game.
  • Single Player Functionality
  • Console Money management for betting and tournaments
  • New Join game process that’s console centered.
  • Console adustment, camera manipulation, or hud to make seeing the board and programming work easier together.
  • Disctinct bots per side. (in progress)
  • Replace Video Tutorial with quickstart visual panels.
  • More announcer comments. (ongoing)
  • Improved arena. (ongoing / pending land purchase)
  • Deployment Packaging so it deploys with a click and everything is in exactly the correct spot.
  • InterObject/AV security before implementing L$ based transactions.
  • Examine bot code for lag / stall with edited programming.
  • Force Kill active bots at the end of a match.
  • Automatic Start%
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Quickie

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.

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Scripting back into flatland and looking at the horizon

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.

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Thoughts and the Debris of Idle Minds

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.

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Methods of Madness

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..

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Sloow progress interruptions and the like

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….

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Next up…..

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. 🙂

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Tournament results

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.

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Little things.

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.

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Quick update…

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.

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Automatic Startup Timer and a new me!

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.

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Modicrum of progress…

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.

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Good Day..

Good day in SL.
Made the BombBots Group. Got the home bases disappearing like they’re supposed to when the player is killed.. granted the default stati is still 50% transparent and leads to some confusion. But that’s a Trivial Fix.

Big Big kudos to my friend Fina Deladda who was kind and generous enough to move and sell me her land so I now have 2048m of space to work with.. I still have ~400 prims to spare. (with 166 reserved for the bots and their effects)

In addition on a personal note I made a couple new friends and played the social butterfly for a while.. which is a nice change from looking at code.

Didnt get as much testing done as I would have liked, but I did get to test the new obstacles and they work well. However I am still unable to duplicate the seizing of the shieldbot that’s happened 3 times.

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Obstacles, new bots and Planned Tournament

Well I was able to get the randomly placed obstacles appearing on the board yesterday. I must say that I think that it changes the game dynamic a good bit.

I also upgraded my tier and acquired some more land so the Prim limit for each bot is now 12. So I’ve not got room for a welcome area and such.

I hired Dreilex Eusebio to design some new bots for the individual sides after I saw the Insectile GunBot he whipped together yesterday in 10 minutes and even without final textures it’s wicked badass. I’m so excited to have each side have a different ‘style’. So far its looking like ‘Insectoid’, ‘Nuclear steampunk’, ‘Humanoid’, and possibly ‘Alien’ for each of the sides, but nothing is final yet. I’ll post a screenie as soon as I get the final textured version.

With the new obstacles in the game and i have 1 more feature to add, I plan on having another testing/tournament this weekend. I would also like to have a group formed where I can announce testing events.

So much to do and so little spare time.

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So.. What the hell is it really?

That’s the big question isn’t it.

Where do I draw the line as being beyond the scope of the project, determine what features need to be put in and which ones won’t work?

So to begin, BombBots is a 1-4 player game set in the virtual world of Second Life. BombBots is a real-time strategic board game.

  • Real-time in the sense that the game progresses regardless of player interaction.
  • Strategic in the sense that the players have to plan ahead the behavior of their bots on the board and anticipate the behavior of the bots programmed by their opponents.
  • Board game in that the gameplay arena is broken down into a distinct grid (like chess). Thus implying that time and space are broken down into a set of distinct absolutes for each game (turns or clicks, and X & Y locations)

How It’s Played: Each player has access to Bots, with the purpose of detonating a BombBot on one of the 3 vulnerable squares in front of the other players. Each Bot must be programmed before being created onto the game board. Once a Bot is on the game board it is autonomous and the player has no control over it anymore. Bots are not intelligent and will only perform their program, even if that program involves running into walls, bots, or other self destructive actions.

How It’s Managed: The game system, should be self contained and reqire no constant maintenance. The game system should be intelligent to recognize it’s state and reset itself in case of abandoned games, and or give passerbys the ability to cancel an abandoned game in progess. However the admin should have the ability to configure overarching play configurations. Such as, but not limited to, pay to play settings, house taking a cut, and sweetening the pot in case of tournaments.

Object & Scripting Autonomy: Game components are to be self contained and inter object communications are to be kept to a minimun and Objects shall be aware of the game state and functionality (such as extra listens, link messages etc) shall be deactivated when they’re not needed in order to limit world script load.

Development Criteria: Everything will be written for worst case conditions, ie high lag and latency, redundancy systems will be put in place to prevent lag clicking and missed server updates. Well to the best of the ability to do so in LSL.

Feedback & Testing: Feedback from testing is high priority. Find and tweak what maintains fun and enjoyment. If it’s not fun it’s a waste of time.

That’s a good start. Any feature and or change which does not pertain/enhance the core game or the enjoyment thereof needs to be examined in great detail before consideration.