help?

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May 23 2001, 7:42 am
In response to Dan
The thing that always bothered me about pac-man is that the guy ate all those pellets without ever growing bigger or excreting anything. It violates conservation of matter! Perhaps AM could work that important physical principle into the game somehow, to make it live up to its name!

You see, Pac-Man is not meant to literally represent a physical being at all. Rather, Pac-Man is a metaphor for our very society, consuming the world's resources in the name of some artificial "progress" without actually producing anything. The world seems to replenish itself as its resources are used up, but in the end the ghosts of our past crimes against nature will catch up to haunt us, no matter how hard we lash out at them.
May 23 2001, 7:43 am
In response to Dan
On 5/23/01 9:47 am Dan wrote:
Have you experimented with different settings of client.preload_rsc? You might want to try turning it off, which will download resources only as needed.

Not with this game, but I did do some experimentation with a previous game. I found that, at least from my perspective, it was more annoying to have the connection slow down every once in awhile when a new resource was needed rather than get them all at once at the start. Certainly, setting this to download resources as needed would help the initial lag as fewer than half the icons are needed at the start, but I'm not sure I want to do that.

Deadron's idea of being able to force a download before the game starts (or making the fact known and available to the programmer) would help. In the meantime, I can implement a check to see if the player has ever connected and give a message if not.
May 23 2001, 8:02 am
In response to jobe
On 5/23/01 9:45 am jobe wrote:
well its not that.. its the fact that itis too fast moveing for an online game.. you see... you move in a dir untill you chnge dir or cant move anymore.. but it is hard as hell to get in the right tunnle when your playing.. even after it has downloaded.. it seems to just flash the icons here then al the way over a second latter making it imposible to run away..

Hmmm, I've done everything I can think of to ensure that it's playable over a modem. I've tested with a 56k modem and it plays quite well for me. In fact, I did a test the other day with me on the modem (Earthlink) and my fiancé on DSL (which is in fact only 4 hops from the dantom server, approximately 25 ms ping time!). She experienced more lag than I did... Perhaps your (and maybe the majority of people's) connection isn't as good as mine, but I'm not sure what more I can do about that. Of course, you can download the game and play it locally, but a big part of the appeal of doing this, to me, was the multiplayer implications.

If you haven't played a recent version, you might try again. On Sunday I added a feature where you press the direction key once and your guy keeps moving that way until you press another direction or he stops. You can press the new direction before you get there, to anticipate the turn a little bit. Maybe a little ascii art could help illustrate:

| |  | |      | |
| |  | |      | |
|  ==   ======   =====
|          c
======================

Let's say you're the "c", traveling to the right, and you want to turn and go up when you hit the tunnel there. You can press the up arrow key right where you are, and it will remember that you wanted to go up when you get to that tunnel. I find that this works quite well, even with some lag.

and some players have differant expectations when they hear dung...

Well, true... I suppose I got some people's hopes up with that name and then they got all disappointed when there was no poop (except for my crappy code). ;-)
May 23 2001, 8:10 am
In response to Dan
On 5/23/01 9:58 am Dan wrote:
Air Mapster, have you tried fiddling with world.tick_lag? That might improve the responsiveness, but I can't guarantee anything for network play.

I haven't tried that, but I suppose it's worth a shot. The fastest anything moves is every .2 seconds (I try to make it about as fast as that other game, but even this is a little slow in comparison), so increasing tick_lag to 2 may be ok. Though I'm not sure if it'll do anything really unless I make everything else slow down accordingly.

It is very unfortunate that we had to change the original name of BYOND! There were many clever puns, that are now all inside jokes. This game is one of them. My Night Soil combat system is another.

I was always fond of Dung: Eons and Dragons.

The thing that always bothered me about pac-man is that the guy ate all those pellets without ever growing bigger or excreting anything. It violates conservation of matter! Perhaps AM could work that important physical principle into the game somehow, to make it live up to its name!

Heh, that could be an interesting twist. I'll probably end up making it similar to Una, where there will be a "classic" mode and a very perverse "enhanced" mode. You can choose to be a Dung-Man or a DUNG-GOD. Heh.
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