All posts tagged with "programming"

Technical Director Vining Versus THE VOID

A bug that’s been in the game for awhile, and which some of you may have encountered (albeit very rarely) is the following peculiar circumstance: You start the game, you load up a new map… and suddenly, everything slowly starts to drift into the corner of the map. Finally, you end up with a giant frothing mass of dodos, and colonists, and monsters and who knows what else stuck in one corner of the map, apparently unable to move.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, you end up with the following scenario (screenshot thanks to a forum user):

20160917165146_1

So… what in the world causes this mess?

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Posted in Clockwork Empires | Tagged , , , , ,
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The Joys of Video Card Compatibility

With David taking a quick getaway vacation, and Micah off recovering from not doing anything in academia recently, Daniel and I are quietly holding the fort. By quietly, I mean “stirring up trouble.”

As you may have read, we sent out several builds of Clockwork Empires to various parties recently. Six such parties, in fact. Of these six parties, three of them were able to play the game, and three of them were not. This is what happens when you take code that runs very nicely on your office machine (Windows 7, a Lot Of RAM, a fairly recent video card of Good Quality and Character by NVIDIA, with a Fan Attached To It) and try to run it on somebody else’s machine (Windows XP laptop, 1 gig of RAM, and the video card driver is actually just Bonzai Buddy.)

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Output of the game on the Intel HD4000.

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Posted in Clockwork Empires, Programming | Tagged , , , , , , , , ,
44 Comments

I SMOULDER WITH PROGRAMMER RAGE

Have you ever had one of those weeks where everything seems to go wrong? Work is being done. Oh yes, work is being done. But at every step, we are beset upon by mystery and woe! ARGH.

Loading doors! Mr. Triolo animated them. They are lovely:

Good, well-behaved shutters. (Seen in Maya.)

Good, well-behaved shutters. (Seen in Maya.)

Let’s put them through the same process that we use for importing everything else into the game, la la…

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Posted in Clockwork Empires, Programming | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Particles; The Homicidal Aurochs

Daniel and I are crunching a little bit this week in order to meet an internal deadline. (“El Dorado”, named after the mystical city that doesn’t really exist and has never been found; we only chose that codename because “Titanic” was apparently used for a Microsoft product.) We try to avoid it as a general rule – after Dredmor, which was released after we  crunched for about three months, non-stop, the old batteries need time to recharge – and were more or less successful doing this for the Dredmor expansion packs; however, we’re a little bit behind where we want to be and we need to do a little sprinting until the end of June in order to get everything back on track.

Daniel is hard at work on aurochs this week – killing them, and butchering them for their meat. This led to twenty-five homicidal aurochs immediately rampaging your settlement and killing everybody before you have a chance to collect your firearm.  He has subdued them… for now.

It also turns out that the singular form of “aurochs” is, actually, “aurochs”. Who knew? David, apparently.

You may recall me mentioning back in May, or so, that I’d started work on a particle system and editor for Clockwork Empires. At the end of last week, I had some of the particle system done but very little editor functionality, having promised that I’d “get to it, yes” – and then ending up doing things like, say, combat or more work on dynamics lines or any of the things that I would rather spend my time doing other than a particle system.

Finally, David started holding things hostage. FINE. Particle system. Right. Good. Editor? Writing? Blech.

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Posted in Clockwork Empires, Programming | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Hooray for Scripting! (And Other Things We Did In The Past Two Weeks)

Way back in December, we had just implemented a bunch of the character logic for going through the world and doing things using our Finite State Machine model and utility functions. What we discovered was that writing the code for the FSMs themselves was, to put it frankly, a huge pain. Additionally, non-C++ programming members of the development team could not easily add new items and new behaviours to items (mines, buildings, trees, and the like.) Micah J Best, at the end of December, decided that we should use scripting to wrap some of the complexity and hide it from the end user, while simultaneously letting our development team create new objects and FSMs without requiring a programmer to go thrashing about in the codebase. I said, “Fine. Show me a proof of concept and then we’ll talk.”

Fundamentally, Gaslamp’s programming team operates based on spite. If somebody says “oh, well, we’ll never get that done in time”, or “oh, well, it’s too impractical”, somebody usually says “no, it well isn’t” and will jump to the bait. (I did this recently with a pipe system test.) Saying “Well, show me a proof of concept and we’ll talk” is equivalent to putting a red cape in front of a bull.

Over the holidays, Micah found himself stuck in Quebec. With nothing but inlaws, a language barrier, two laptops (one of which was destroyed by a cat), a turkey stuffed with poutine, and spite, he put together the first build of what is our new scripting system. It does, indeed, encapsulate all our programming decisions and is fairly powerful and flexible. We took apart all the character code we wrote in December, ported it to the new scripting system, and have now started using it to implement new things in game. It’s very powerful and, after some back-and-forth, I’m quite happy with how it’s turned out. We’re still fixing bugs and fine tuning how it all comes together, but let’s see how it all works…

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Posted in Clockwork Empires, Programming | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Dredmor for iPad

… we’ll just leave these here.

Choose Your Skills - anywhere you like, feel free.

Oh, it's just so little!

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor | Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,
56 Comments

Lean Startups, Part II: Some Games That Suck (And Why That’s Not a Bad Thing)

(Eric Ries has now started re-tweeting this series, so I will take that as tacit approval from the master. He’s in British Columbia in two months, giving a series of talks on Lean Startupsin Vancouver and somewhere in Kelowna, so there is a slim possibility that this is just a ruse to lull me into security while he takes time out of his busy schedule to hunt me down and shoot me with a blowgun.)

When last we left our hero, he had just discovered that it was possible to make a lot of money by shipping software that sucked. This, of course, was nothing new to our hero; now, however, he was confronted with the fact that this might not be a bad thing after all.

So here’s the skinny.

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Posted in Programming | Tagged , , , , ,
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Lean Startup, Part I: “Why does your IM Client Suck?”

I promised that I would write a post about my thoughts on Lean Startups at some point. This is evolving into… well, it’ll be a series. Gaslamp is not a lean startup, at least in the puritanical, traditional sense; that said, there is a certain amount of talk around the old campfire about doing our next game in a Lean fashion. Lean Games have been done before – arguably the best example is Mount and Blade, but I think Overgrowth and Natural Selection 2 both count – but nobody has put a label on the idea yet.

So let’s do this, and while we’re at it let’s talk about Lean Startups. What is a Lean Startup? Well, it’s a complicated subject. I also get to tell an Eric Reis story, which he probably doesn’t even remember, and if he reads this either I’ll get flamed and the company will be sued, or he’ll put it up on his excellent weblog. It’s a win either way, so here goes.

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Posted in Programming | Tagged , , , ,
3 Comments