Something a little more inflamatory

Just launched www.wowisbroken.com. It's basically polite trolling of WoW's developers, for the purpose of trying to get them to fix some of the stuff that I can't stand about the game.

Something I really loved about UO

I was just thinking that I really loved how UO had books. You could write stories. You could only fit maybe a page and a half of text in the longest available books, so that lead to very condensed writing when I was playing. I sold serial adventure stories on my vendors, and the RP community that I was a part of ate them up.

I think I might make a weekend project of a quickie gray shard system for collecting, rating, and spawning player-made books on the world's bookshelves. I doubt the tiny community on Alexandria will take advantage of it much, but there's always the chance that it'll enrich the shard for the better, and possibly draw in more RP-minded players.

I'll publish it here on Sunday night, if it's finished.

Game Design On Hold...

I'm sad to say that my game design ambitions have to be put on hold for some time. I've become possessed with the need to free myself of the 9-5, and that means either a) re-launching my web design site in earnest, or b) creating a bunch of profitable websites until I reach the critical mass where I can leave my day job. 

Either way, it doesn't leave a whole lot of time for game design & dev. I had a few ideas I was toying around with surrounding Flash (usually I haaaaate Flash, but I have found Actionscript 3 to be reasonable), but they'll have to wait. Ultima navigation DLL? On hold. Gray shard projects? Much to the frustration of my playerbase, on hold.

On the bright side, if this works, I can write an article or a small book on How To Free Yourself To Write Games.

Bye bye, blog. See you when I see you. Hopefully I'll be writing the next post in this blog from my laptop next to a pool.

Oh, hey, sup?

Yeah, I've been neglecting the blog. The WOW expansion hit my productivity hard. For xmas, though, I've gotten 4 books on AI. Combined with the recent purchase of OneNote, this has the potential to be pretty awesome. Will write if anything particularly earthshattering strikes me.

Still here, still alive

Well, I've been doing more gaming than writing this month, thanks to Fallout 3 and now Wrath of the Lich King. I also had a few moments to try out a few demos, and snag some downloadable stuff via XBLA.

I'll mention the ones that were actually notable on a game design level...

Tomb Raider: Underworld demo

Drove me bat-shit insane jumping from ledge to pseudo-ledge and falling to my death. You can control the camera, but can't spin it all the way around to, y'know, actually LOOK where you're about to jump. Ledges and handles that look like you should be able to grab onto them tend to be blatant lies, leading to a ragdoll death for Lara. I spent a lot of time cursing at this demo, and promptly deleted it upon completion. If they were to fix the camera and loosen up on what is and isn't an "official" ledge type object, it'd be a lot more enjoyable. This is an example of a game I wouldn't have bought without a demo, and I won't buy with the demo either.

Mirror's Edge demo

This was a short-but-sweet demo. It showed off the premise of the game, had some cool experiences, let you finish your mission, and ended. I'm almost willing to give it a try based purely on the fact that the demo didn't make me foam at the mouth by ending in the middle of a boss or something equally dicktastic. I have too much on my plate right now, but this one's on my used games list, I think.

Fallout 3

This game is pure, burning, radioactive love. As a huge fanboy of the original games, I was really skeptical of it being turned into a 3D world, but it seems they got it right. Everything feels like an achievement, from blowing up a city down to picking a lock or shoving a live grenade into someone's shorts (Sorry about that, Mr. Simms). You get little hits of XP for almost everything, and that just makes it constantly fun. The wide-open world is quite awesome as well, and travel/exploration is by far better than the original games, where you'd just click on a map to travel and maybe get a random encounter. In FO3 you actually trek through the wasteland of D.C. and maybe see something interesting off on the horizon, and bam, you're off on a potentially disasterous adventure. I'd be playing this game for unhealthy amounts of time if not for...

WoW: Wrath of the Lich King

Oh gods, help me. It's pulled me back in again. After I'd finally managed to quit a few months ago, the expansion has pulled me back in. I get home, make some decidedly unhealthy food, and play until 2 or 3 AM. This is not a good thing. Hopefully once the initial rush to get to 80 with my rogue has finished, I can get back to a more healthy schedule and actually, y'know, get some work done on my various projects. Anyway, Northrend seems a lot more polished and interesting than Outland was, and the quest hubs are very streamlined. Maybe it's just because I'm actually using an addon called Questhelper this time around, but I'm enjoying my leveling experience much more than I did in the last expansion. Of course, last time I just skipped a zone ahead and started grinding...

Portal: Still Alive

What can I say, it's Portal with extra levels. The levels are devoid of GLaDOS, but overall the experience is as I remember it. Still an awesome game. I'm finding the developer commentary enlightening as well. 

Megaman 9

Does anyone remember Megaman being so mind-bogglingly difficult? This is the kind of game that would've made me pitch a spaz as a kid. Just goes to show, nostalgia is more important than the frustration factor.

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Navgraph update: Calling it Ultima.Navigation.dll. Should be able to do something like NavProvider.GetPath(pathinfo, callback). Callback's for the sake of time slicing, etc. But, like I said, WoW has sapped all of my time, so nothing new is likely to come of this for a couple weeks.

Still Alive...

Still here. Been letting myself get lost in WoW again... what can I say, I'm a sucker for Halloween-related events.

I've more or less finished the testing related to creating a global UO navgraph: It finds surfaces correctly. Next up on the list is linking (shouldn't be too tough). I've restarted the project from scratch and am now developing it as a DLL so it can be plugged in with very little effort and developed independantly from the main codebase. I've added a "nav info provider" that will fetch nav nodes (optionally linked) from a given area, so the process will look something like 

Rectangle3D Area = new Rectangle3D(...);

Sectors[x,y] = new NavOctree(Area, Map, NavProvider.GetLinkedNodes(Area, Map));

And the Octree takes care of dividing the nodes into their appropriate leaves/branches, and linking leaves to their accessible neighbors as higher level nav nodes. Then the pathfinding...

Also, with NaNoWriMo coming up, I'll probably be pretty quiet again (between that and games that I absolutely must play: Castlevania Ecclesia, Fallout 3 (thanks to Jason who awesomely preordered this for my birthday), Silent Hill Homecoming (still!), and (gasp) WoW:WotLK, I'm gonna be swamped with writing/games, not much time for anything else, but I'll try and give the blog some love when I can. Just saying, I won't be dead...

Going to write the next year of Alexandria's storyline as a warmup for NaNoWriMo, though, so expect a brief post on that.

Toying with data structures

My current thinking on the pathfinding sub-project, as far as implementation, is something along the lines of:

1. A grid of 256 x 256 x 256 Octrees as the 2nd level of the heirarchy, each with a list of outside leaves and what other outside leaves they connect to, which gives us the ability to link each tree as a node, and find paths through each node in a relatively efficient manner.
   
2. The 3rd level of the heirarchy is using those Octrees as nodes, and inserting additional game data - teleporters, cave entrances, doors, etc, stuff only available in the live game - which would alter the edge costs in all 3 heirarchies and add additional links and edges where appropriate (this grid block links to this one via this tree, in this leaf, via this node -- teleporters are costless edges, doors require action to traverse, and so on)

I'm not really fully confident I'm grasping all of this correctly, but I figure the best way to learn is by doing, so I'll let you know how it turns out...

The Alexandria playerbase is getting kinda angsty while I'm working on projects and not paying attention to them as much as I normally would, and I need to keep a few promises on that end, so I  probably won't be posting much progress for a week or so. On the bright side, next week is Silent Hill 5. I'm also kind of undecided on preordering Dead Space.

I also got my hands on Warhammer Online a couple days ago. There's stuff I like, and stuff I don't, and I'll get around to an analysis on that as soon as I put a little more play time in; I seriously doubt that I'm qualified to judge the game with two characters at lv6 and 5, but so far things are looking good.

War chars: Reikynael (R5 Witch Hunter) and Maegluin (R6 Shadow Warrior) on Chaos Wastes.