Today...

[Noxx]

Lately i've been thinking about moving. Last night the last of my "old friends" (as in friend i've known for longer than a year) moved away. Over the past 2 years or so pretty much every one i've known for a decent amount of time has moved back to their respective home countries due to contracts ended, or other personal reasons. And i found myself in a situation where it has become progressively harder to really meet new people. So i've been thinking about it a lot and i think it might be time for me to do the same thing, as in make a move. I'm thinking about finishing the last of my licenses in the US, finding a job there as a flight instructor for a few years, then taking it from there. Realistically the only reason i never seriously considered this was because jobs in that field pay a lot more in the Middle East than they do in the US, but honestly there are more important things in life than having a big bank account. It's something i've actually been considering for a few years now, but the one thing that has always kept me from doing it was my fear of having to start all over. 

[Veiva]

I've been working on a game. it's like Scribblenauts, a game where you can type something like "happy blue zombie" or "dirty janitor" or and spawn objects like... happy blue zombies and dirty janitors. Except it's a roguelike, and you control the random feature generator via description. So if you type "haunted ancient plains," you should get something with ruins and ghosts, but it should resemble a plain and thus be open and flat. Or "grassy lush desert" and be a doofus I guess.

 

So I've been working on one the critical parts, object rendering. I want items and other objects appearances to change based on their description. For example, a "stone potion bottle" should be made out of stone. An "undead shopkeeper" should have purple skin. A "mossy stone dragon" should have stone for scales. That kind of thing.

 

I made an vector description object I named "pixie" (since it's not exactly a sprite, but kind of is). It allows me to assign palette entries to shapes, but not just that--texture slots and such too. For example, take this character, the Iron Tower:

 

 

Now imagine if he's made out of glass, or cork:

 

 

You can also apply transformations on palette colors. This means you could have a dragon where its belly is the complimentary color of its skin. So a blue dragon would have an orange belly by shifting the hue 180 degrees. You can modify palette entries relatively like that:

 

 

It's really nice, I think.

 

The best part is I serialize the material data back into the original SVG document, so when I make changes I don't lose anything. I only have to update new paths/shapes. I make the actual graphics in InkScape, and use my tool (pictured above) to prepare it for my game.

[itookthecake]

Did you decide on a list of acceptable adjectives or is there some sort of tool/dictionary available that tells you which of your palletes a given input is closest to?

 

 

 

 

Several years ago someone made a tif youtube channel. I'm remember there being a video of Jaerk doing a room tour and somebody with a creepy piano music tutorial. I can't find the channel, so could somebody please link to it?

[RpgGamer]

Don't people make decent money, making games like that on miniclip or addictinggames [may i date myself and suggest flashplayer.com?]or something? You could be on to something

[Goonstalf]

im on to something too

[Noxx]

I bought an Apple Watch today. Loving it. Been wanting one for a while and finally decided to get it.

[Veiva]

Did you decide on a list of acceptable adjectives or is there some sort of tool/dictionary available that tells you which of your palletes a given input is closest to?

I'm going to select a few hundred nouns/adjectives (nouns can be used in the description, I think; for example, 'pirate king' would make a pirate with a crown or something) and assignm them to groups. For example, words like 'big' and 'small' would be in the "size group". Different words in the group would offer different benefits; 'big' may may something 50% bigger, while titanic would make it 200% bigger. So a Titanic potion bottle would store 200% more potion, and a titanic shopkeeper would have a hard time fitting through the door... (And a slow shopkeeper would be easier to steal from!).

 

You get these words as scrolls from quests, monsters, and exploration. So if you want to summon a 'legendary undead terrifying titanic dragon', you'll need to find those adjectives and nouns first... And it will also drop items that are legendary, undead, terrifying, and/or titanic. This means that a 'puny small dragon' would drop puny, small items, making it less worthwhile to game the description to make the game easier (your drops would suck).

 

Don't people make decent money, making games like that on miniclip or addictinggames [may i date myself and suggest flashplayer.com?]or something? You could be on to something

I'm going to be releasing it via Steam, but that's two years away optimistically. I just began working on this last month pretty much.

[Noxx]

Bought Ghost Recon: Wildlands yesterday. It's really good. Been playing on the Hardest difficulty from the start but had to bump it down a notch because it was just too hard, which is really exciting because i can't remember the last time i played a game where i actually felt a challenge like this. Also realised how much more i enjoy having a desktop over a laptop when it took me less than 5 minutes to open up the front, clean the accumulated dust, and put the front cover back on. So much more convenient than having to take the whole thing apart like i would have had to do with my old laptop. 

[Melos]

Today I'm going to be going through all of my goal lists and updating them for the new year. I'm also going to be cleaning and organizing my PC because I just have so much stuff that I randomly saved lol.

[RpgGamer]

I smell like beef

[Dax]

I smell like beef

 

Coincidentally, today is the only day of the week I don't smell like beef. #butcherslife

[Noxx]

Updated my Bios today. probably should have done it when i first built the PC but i expected it to be a lot more complicated than it turned out being. That's about the only productive thing i did today.

[Veiva]

Updated my Bios today. probably should have done it when i first built the PC but i expected it to be a lot more complicated than it turned out being. That's about the only productive thing i did today.

I don't think I've ever updated my BIOS. If it's not broken, don't fix it is how I handle things like that. Don't want to brick my motherboard...

 

...

 

I implemented a (very rough) 'thing renderer'. It handles applying materials (loaded from a central 'material database') and colors thus far to 'models' (basically icons/characters/etc; i.e., the visual representation of a thing/game object).

 

So I took it for a spin with a potion bottle:

 

 

Left is just a literal "potion bottle", center is a "green potion bottle", and right is a "neon green cork potion bottle." It works, even when adding/removing description at runtime...

 

The contents can change with the inventory of the potion bottle, too. So a red potion would make the pink blob red, a blue potion blue, a some lava orange-and-black, etc. But I didn't implement that yet...

[Goonstalf]

today i ate the last mushro

[Goonstalf]

it really comes down to whether youre painting a house or miniature clay animal figurines

[Boris5000]

Does anyone know any good brands for paint for a beginner.

 

Pretty much only want to get 3 colors. Black, white, and blue. And think I'm interested in water color and acrylic

Try going to a craft shop, the shop assistants would be able to help you. For watercolours I've only really used Windsor and Newton Cotman box sets, they are like $10 so its a pretty cheap investment. Don't really like acrylic so I can't say much.

[Goonstalf]

i usually just buy the cheapest house paint at the hardware store 

i find that quality of the paint doesnt really matter if youre just filling the tub with it to splash around for a bit to see what life would be like as different colors

[MuffinMaddy]

It's my birthday, I'm home alone for the whole day and I have heartburn.

 

I still feel really happy internally, though

[RpgGamer]

Happy birthday though

 

Today the lady that disappeared for 5 months is back. I'm not sure I want to ask her where she went

[Goonstalf]

happy birthday

[Noxx]

So i spent my day finishing the rest of Ghost Recon's main story missions. The story was very good. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The ending caught me off guard and had me sort of sitting at the edge of my seat. I played about the last 70% of the game on the hardest difficulty, which wasn't always as hard as i expected it to be, but it did mean that i had to cheese some of the missions i just found a bit too hard to do. I'm excited to see what the DLC is like.

[itookthecake]

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCitBED2_mcUjpAzNQQITuow

 

I managed to find the channel in case anyone else was wondering.

[Veiva]

I finally got the object system sorted. There's ThingMaterial, which contains resources like a texture (e.g., glass) and properties (e.g., strength, durability, weight). Then there's ThingDefinition, which contains further resources like the model (e.g., texture atlas/skin/inventory icon) and skeleton, and a list of materials with specific weights. The first material is considered the "base material", and has a sane default. For example, a potion bottle currently is a 100 parts glass and 1 part cork, with glass being the base material. A "stone potion bottle" would override the glass and become 100 parts stone, 1 part cork.

 

A ThingDefinition can be instantiated into a ThingInstance. Every NPC (I refer to friendly NPCs as peeps and monsters as creeps but there's no fundamental difference), item, and even the player are ThingInstances. They have properties like a description, inventory, temperature, etc; e.g., things that change in response to gameplay events.

 

And so I instantiated a player and some undead glass peep:

 

 

That was a lot of work!

 

Funny aside: Technically, I want materials to become liquid/gaseous if they become hot enough. I already created a system for this. This means if a dragon keeps breathing fire on you, your armor can melt... evil...

[Major Dash]

I tried pineapple dipped in chocolate fondue today. It was... interesting?

[Goonstalf]

yeah right

i dont think so for real