Turning Down Hell's Thermostat

ID:106648
 
Jan 4 2011, 7:47 pm (Edited on Jan 4 2011, 8:06 pm)
Keywords: design, progress
When you've been here for years without ever completing a game, people are liable to figure it'll be a cold day in hell before you do. Well, although motivation is often hard for me, I'm somewhat a creature of habit, and it's a lot easier if I jump back on that horse as soon as I fall off. With nary two days off, I've been riding this game for about four weeks now, and the game is shaping up nicely.

Photobucket

Current working features include:
  • Procedurally generated plots of land, residing in planets, residing in solar systems, residing in relation to eachother on a universe map.
  • Each player owns a ship with a customizable interior and can command crew members of that ship to move around.
  • Line of sight engine only allows the player to see turfs that one of the units or devices under their control can see.
  • Advanced creature artificial intelligence framework that functions via states generating behaviors which are executed based on assessed priorities.
  • A great deal of the 4.0x skin controls are up and running fluidly. Some that are working are not pictured above.
  • Lots of stuff I forgot, no doubt.
Current code size (excluding anything but .dm files, but including my frequent comments within those dm files): 299kb (432kb on disk). This could very well be among one of the most advanced BYOND projects ever made, on the scale of Space Station 13 or Dungeon Master.

Of course, in order for that to be true, I have to finish it, first. Current goal is to have a playable beta out as soon as possible in order to collect feedback. However, my idea of "playable" is very nearly "feature complete." So it's hard to say exactly how long that will be other than, "when it's done."
Jan 4 2011, 8:32 pm
Looks great. I've always found myself sort of a space-junkie, so this is right up my alley! I'm really looking forward to it's release, keep up the good work!
Jan 4 2011, 9:23 pm
It sounds very interesting, something I can definitely see myself playing. Looking forward to the beta. :)
Jan 5 2011, 9:22 am
Dungeon Master? Advanced?
Jan 5 2011, 10:15 am
Murrawhip wrote:
Dungeon Master? Advanced?

It's hard to compare a game as different as Dungeon Master to what I'm building and say it's better or worse.

Besides, Ginsing's not done working on it, it could very well be he'll pull an overhaul or two that would surprise us.

So, if I were to flat out say that my game's got an advantage in certain departments and this makes it the "advanced" game, it wouldn't be a real fair assessment.
Jan 5 2011, 2:32 pm
Geldonyetich wrote:
Murrawhip wrote:
Dungeon Master? Advanced?

It's hard to compare a game as different as Dungeon Master to what I'm building and say it's better or worse.

Besides, Ginsing's not done working on it, it could very well be he'll pull an overhaul or two that would surprise us.

So, if I were to flat out say that my game's got an advantage in certain departments and this makes it the "advanced" game, it wouldn't be a real fair assessment.

For some reason the box I was writing my reply was replaced with an "Error 404", and I'm way too lazy to retype the entire thing.

Basically, I was saying Dungeon Master isn't advanced. I wasn't saying your game isn't, if there was any confusion 'bout that.

I've spent plenty of time using Dungeon Master sourcecode, being the source maintainer for the last year. There's really nothing in there that could be construed as "advanced", it's just really extensive. I envy the amount of motivation Ginseng must've had to get that far.

As far as Ginseng producing any overhaul on it, I doubt it. He's made a couple attempts since he gave up on it, and it usually only lasts a couple days.

But yeah, SS13 advanced? Absolutely. Dungeon master? Nah.
Jan 5 2011, 3:51 pm (Edited on Jan 5 2011, 4:16 pm)
In retrospect, "advanced" is a bit of am ambiguous word.

Having looked at the cave crawler source code before, I see where you're coming at there: the main thing the game has going for it is the amount of content produced and, to an extent, the rest of what it does is relatively simple.

Not that simplicity is a bad thing, it has certain advantages in terms of maintainability, efficiency, and ease of content production. In terms of leveraging the platform well by not reinventing what it does, simplicity can be considered the more clever approach.

I'd say having a lot of content falls under the realm of something that advances the state of the game, but that's just choosing a concept to go under a label of "advanced." I don't think there's any universally agreed upon hard and fast rules for what qualifies the word.

Is my code, "advanced?" Well, it does dynamically generate and maintain an entire universe, with an architecture designed to abstract-off underused portions of the universe to cut down on processing time. It does dynamically generate icons from maps. It does have an artificial intelligence that operates in several layers and loads/unloads behavior modules as appropriate. It is designed to be a persistent state, yet mutable, environment.

I guess that's reasonably advanced. How that stacks up to Space Station 13's atmospheric system or Cave Crawler's excess of content (not that SS13 is lacking there either) is tough to say.