…I haven’t written an update in a while. I’ll get to that soon, I promise. In the meantime, here’s a cool picture of Genki Sudo bowing after knocking out Royler Gracie.
Draining
I swear, this thing might kill me. I’m still plugging away at Corrosion and the combat mechanisms in particular. The pathfinding is done, it works, but it’s anything but fast. Limiting the searches to about 200 tiles or so seems to help with the speed and makes the game slightly more playable, but it creates strange situations where pursuing enemies break off the pursuit through a corridor when they find their path blocked by their friends. I think I’m going to have to find a reliable way where they ignore their friends in terms of finding a path, but respect them in terms of getting in line. That way they’ll continue pursuit but never overtake their friends until a space in the corridor opens up.
Why is it going to kill me? Well, these musings keep my preoccupied throughout the day. Whenever I have a free moment, there’s only so many topics that my mind wanders towards, and Corrosion is on that list. (Together with finding a possible place for a friend when she arrives back in Amsterdam soon, my soon-to-be-unemployed sister and her financial situation, my work, my Shadowrun game, Jiu Jitsu, etc.) So today, while I was walking to work, I nearly got myself run over by a bus because I had been preoccupied with figuring out this pathfinding problem. The adrenaline dump of a near-death experience quickly brought my mind back to reality, but simultaneously drained me of a lot of my energy. Funny how that happens.
Mocked and Laughed At, Again.
I’m tired and grumpy today. I didn’t sleep so well as something has been bugging me since last night. I had a lovely dinner with two of my friends. At one point the conversation turned serious as we debated on whether you could, or should judge someone based on their tastes – tastes in art, clothes, furniture, music, or whatever. In that conversation I was mocked and laughed at for my beliefs and how serious I was about them. This isn’t the first time it has happened and it always makes me feel miserable. These are people that are supposed to care for me, and if not that then at least care about my opinion on matters, irrespective of whether they agree or not. Being mocked is bad enough, but being laughed at really goes one step too far. And like I said, this isn’t the first time that has happened. It seriously makes me reconsider my friendships and it makes me deeply unhappy.
I’m going to watch Merton the Chat Roulette Piano Guy to cheer me up.
Pathfinding, A*, Motivation and Progress
As you might have concluded from my last journal post, I got demotivated when I hit a snag in my self-devised pathfinding algorithm based on the A* principle of pathfinding. I knew that A* was going to be a simple, straight-forward and decidedly stupid way of finding a path, but I wanted to understand the principles of it before I migrated on to adding “costs” to the logic of the algorithm and making it smarter. I was shocked to see that with the relatively simple map that we had created, roughly 34×58 tiles large, finding a single target from one side of the map to the other made PHP run out of its allotted memory. And so, it took a few days for me to pick up the deving and figure out what was going wrong.
It turns out that when I started to examine the path that was returned for a relatively short example, that there were some mistakes. It returned some tiles as part of the path that weren’t supposed to be. Then I took a look at the examined tiles and there were way more than I thought there should have been. It turned out the algorithm wasn’t ignoring blocking tiles as it should be. When I had found the problem and fixed it, I found the load was cut by more than 50%. That was good, but it’s not good enough. I’m going to examine it some more soon, but it means there is still progress to be made before I start implementing the costs structure. Perhaps when I’m no longer able to streamline things, I’ll show you guys what I came up with.
Anyway, reinvigorated motivation FTW.
What Have I Started…
Corrosion has been my baby for the past four months now, starting out as an idea that was born from an evening of hanging out with my brother and mostly due to my brother’s enthusiasm and creativity has turned into a somewhat more complex game than I had initially thought it was going to be. At first I thought it was going to be a simple statistical crunch game, but then we got the idea to make the combat engine a tile-based game, which meant Line of Sight algorithms, path-finding algorithms (A*, breadth-first, etc.) and slowly but surely it’s becoming more and more complex. I’m slowly getting to the point where I start wondering if this is ever going to be finished, but then I look back at what we’ve accomplished already, and I feel better.
Currently, the game is not even close to finished. You can make a character of any race, mundane, a shaman or a mage (no adepts yet) and we have weapons, armor, drugs, spells and cyberware that you can purchase. Important things like rigging, decking and conjuring haven’t been implemented yet, but that’s a matter of time. Drone rigging is going to work similarly as conjuring, where you basically have a companion that fights along side you, or, if that turns out to be too complex, that acts as a buff to your own attacks and capabilities. Of each category (spells, weapons, armor, cyberware, etc.) we’ve only added a few items so that we can teach the overall mechanism that governs them, and we moved on. Weapon accessories are going to be important, as are various electronics that should be able to use during combat.
Just thinking about all the things that still need to happen make me go a little funny in the head, but luckily I’m having a lot of fun and I’ll keep plugging away until it stops being fun. It helps that I’m not the only one working on this, even though I have to do the majority of the work. So yeah, hopefully next week I’ll have some time to introduce path-finding and tweak the stealth/perception mechanism that currently exists (I don’t like it, it’s too crude.)
I guess one of the things that I struggle with is whether or not I’ll just be doing this as a way to keep myself occupied, or if this is actually going to be something that other people will enjoy and play. Also, what would I rather have, really?