roomforthetuna posted:

I'm not sure I understand your complaint - Unity is too easy?

Is there something about your game idea that you feel Unity can't do? If there's no part it can't do, and the performance will be fine (which obviously it will for a turn-based game), and you find it easy, then surely the engine you should use is Unity?

I was eyeing Unity for my next project, but since I want to use a custom input device I suspect I'd need the expensive super-pro version that supports custom plugins, which is an unfortunate limitation that counts against it for me, but I don't see anything like that in your idea.

Paniolo posted:

I'd suggest deciding if you want this project to be about making a game, or programming a game. Because if you're turned off by not writing code, then my advice is to just work on a programming project, like a hobby engine or tech demo. If you actually want to make a finished game then use Unity or GameMaker or mod an existing game or whatever is at your disposal, because actually making a game is such an enormous amount of work that an individual simply cannot afford to not take every shortcut possible.

Rocko Bonaparte posted:

Since I thought doing this would actually be easier I have concluded it's not helping and have about given up. So then I figured maybe I could model something really simple in Blender, like a cube person or something. Except that all the modeling videos are done by people talking through retainers that assume you already know how to use Blender, and basically imply you already know how to do everything they're showing anyways. So I've gotten a little bit frustrated. I have done level editing in Radiant before so I thought I'd have some basis for this, but I can't even figure out what views and magic keys I need to make a model with some basic animations.

And all this before I really write any code!

Mustach posted:

Then use an engine like libtcod instead of writing one from scratch.

PDP-1 posted:

Assuming the chunks are indexed in some way, would this work?

code:

List<Chunk> GetChuncks(int xCenter, int yCenter, int radius)
{
  List<Chunk> = new List<Chunck>();

  for(int i = xCenter - radius; i <= xCenter + radius; ++i)
    for(int j = yCenter - radius; j <= yCenter + radius; ++j)
    {
      if(i and j are valid chunk indicies) chunkList.Add(chunk[i,j]);
    }

  return chunkList;
}

Zhentar posted:

In this context, "seed" is short for "random seed". The whole point of entering the seed is that exactly the same "random" numbers will come up when you use it.

ShoulderDaemon posted:

It is as you described. Minecraft picks a random point within a few hundred blocks of (0,0) until it finds one that's an acceptable spawn location.

Orzo posted:

I'm not sure I follow. The algorithm which generates worlds is using a random number generator with a seed. The algorithm which places the player is using the same seed. So it appears 'random', although it is deterministic when you give it a certain seed. As for what the algorithm is, you'd need the source code.

MonsterUnderYourBed posted:

There is a minecraft modding thread in Games which would probably be more able to answer your question.

westborn posted:

Could you people get of your high horses for a second and actually read his initial question. He clearly does know how the seed for the terrain generation works. He was asking how the spawnpoint is determined afterwards, as Minecraft has/had the tendency to not always spawn you at the same point on the same seed.
That's why the web is telling him it's a "pick some random locations near 0,0,0 till you find sand" approach, but his observation is that it's not.
So he thinks it's probably connected to the seed and therefor not random at all.

Somehow some of you only read every second word and post to form "Hey guys, wtf, this seed generates the same terrain every time, how does it do that?"
The post you quoted was him showing the spawn isn't random, not him trying to show the world generation with the same seed isn't random and trying to figure out why...

ZombieApostate posted:

It's probably just doing something along the lines of x = randomNumber(), y = randomNumber(), z = randomNumber(), in which case, all you need to know is how random numbers are generated. It might be incrementing the coords by the random numbers or something so you don't repeat or run through all the spaces in whatever limit you supply your random number generator, but that isn't really much of an algorithm, which is, I think, why everybody is giving similar answers about how random numbers are generated.

Red Mike posted:

No, he clearly doesn't. Here:


It's pseudo-random, and it uses the same seed, so it always spawns you at the same point on the same seed.

It just uses the generator as it does when it creates the terrain. This uses x numbers from the pseudo-random series. The next 3, x+1, x+2, and x+3 are used to generate the first location it tries to put the player on. These are always the same if you use the same seed, because of how pseudo-random generators work. He clearly does not understand this, or he wouldn't be asking why they're the same every time.

And yes, you misread and thought he was arguing that it doesn't spawn at the same point for the same seed, next time read a little further.

To answer you, it uses the first 3 numbers it gets after generating the world, then, if they aren't valid, increments each one by 1 until it gets a position that works. Considering the same seed will give you the same sequence of 3 numbers after world generation every time, obviously you'll get the same position for the same seed.

quote:

Yeah I know. What I mean is, Minecraft is using that seed in some equation that sets the spawn point. I'm trying to see if anyone knows what that equation is.

Pfhreak posted:

I think I see what's going on here. Most of us are abstracting your question of "How, exactly, does Minecraft generate a starting location?" into, "How do games typically generate a deterministic random set of variables?" For most of us, and for most of the questions in this thread, working at the abstraction level is pretty common for helping someone understand whatever problem they are working on.

It sounds to me like you have a project in mind ("I would like to be able to predict a start location for a given seed so I can use that value in my mod/hack/web thing/whatever.") But you haven't really talked about what it is, so it sounds like what you are asking is for general details about random world generation, of which Minecraft is an example.

ShoulderDaemon posted:

World.java has getInitialSpawnLocation() which boils down to this:

code:

Create random number generator seeded using world seed.
Find all biomes within 256 cells of (0,0) which are one of the 5 valid spawn biomes.
Choose one such biome randomly with equal weight.
Let (x,y) = the center of that biome.
Repeat:
  Find the uppermost block at (x,y).
  If that block is grass, you're done.
  x += rand(64) - rand(64)
  y += rand(64) - rand(64)

The "find all biomes" step is in still-obfuscated portions of minecraft's codebase, so my 5-minute-understanding of it may be mistaken.

Edit: For me, at least, a big part of the confusion with this whole thing is that this is an algorithm I would not be shocked to find described as "picks a location within a few hundred blocks of (0, 0) and tries to spawn, if it fails, it increments until it finds a valid location" so it's been weird that HaB seemed to want something more.

Red Mike posted:

Red Mike posted:

e: Christ almighty, I'm being pedantic and unhelpful. I'll stop this, my apologies.

HaB posted:

Does anyone know the method by which Minecraft generates the initial player spawn based on the seed? All I can find from googling is a general "picks a location within a few hundred blocks of (0, 0) and tries to spawn, if it fails, it increments until it finds a valid location"

And that's all well and good except it's not random. If I start a world with a particular seed, open it up, check my spawn coords, then delete the world and re-create using the same seed, I get the same spawn point.

So...does anyone know what method it's using to choose? Thanks in advance.

poemdexter posted:

I might actually finish a game project for once. I'm using LÖVE (love2d.org) which is Lua + Box2D physics + some graphic stuff. It feels a lot like python and pygame without all of pygame's nice libraries. It's also missing a lot of Box2D functionality (BoundaryListener god drat it) but I'm working around it.

The game plays like an old 5 and half inch floppy game called cannons. Take turns firing at the other player trying to score hits. I wanted to keep it as basic as possible so I'd actually finish it.

poemdexter posted:

shape

Rocko Bonaparte posted:

I'm thinking maybe look at Ogre Battle for some inspiration, since I think it's doing a similar thing with multiples attacking multiples.

I'm also thinking about the amount of smacking around that's happening with just one peasant and one goblin. If they just take turns smacking each other, it looks to me like the normal formula would be who hits first wins. So they'd take turns taking away 2 HP each time, going around 5 times before the fatal blow. If that exchange is common then that would be tedious.

Something perhaps to consider is having more personality to the different individual units. I recall how in the original Warcraft, the humans and orcs were practical identical, except a small difference in their projectile attack and their magic attack. In those cases it's mostly a logistics game, and not a tactical one. If it's not tactical, you might as well just take the combined math of everything and declare a winner without the interactive combat.

Centripetal Horse posted:

Is there a reason that simply adjusting the Attack Rating and Defense numbers is not an option? It seems to me to be the simplest way to speed up combat. Glancing at your numbers, it seems that your example leads to around two out of three attacks missing.

Assuming players directly control combat, they may apply strategies such as focusing on a single enemy, which could change the number of turns required to resolve a battle.

Another idea is to use action points instead of one-action-per turn.

Centripetal Horse posted:

If I read the log properly, the knight killed one goblin per turn, and each goblin took one action per turn. I mean, there is no way to shorten that if everybody gets one action per turn, and turns are evenly distributed. Is an initiative system out of the question? If the knight were acting 1.5x as often as the goblins, things would speed up.

Also, the Wolf battle demonstrates what I was thinking: the Defense numbers might need some tweaking. The wolf is missing a lot, considering he is supposed to be a tier above the peasants.

Manslaughter posted:

Yeah about this game HaB, I just want to say misses in a turn-based game are the most fun-destroying things ever.
The only way to make a turn-based game exciting is to fill the downtime in with stuff the player has to think/strategize about.

seiken posted:

I see a few fundamental problems with your design, let's see if I can articulate them properly.

First, you have all these rules and stats like attack/defense, day/night cycle making you stronger and weaker, but as far as I can see they don't actually affect strategy in any way. Your guys could be strong or weak or whatever but in all cases the optimal strategy is simply to focus all attacks on a single enemy one by one until they're all dead, in whichever order reduces the enemy force's damage output the quickest. (Perhaps also attempting to avoid "overkill" if you have to issue orders all the same time but that not even that if you issue orders one at time.) None of the mechanics do anything to change strategy at all, essentially you just have a bunch of layers of complexity that reduce to a trivial problem and that's not really interesting.

Second, I'm assuming you have these 3 units and their attack/defense values sort of line up, so whichever unit has the best attack also has the best defense. This is kind of boring because nothing has strengths or weaknesses, they're just either good or bad.

Furthermore, the attack and defense stats are sort of redundant because having higher defense is a lot like having higher health and the same for attack/damage. They're not completely redundant because they introduce a little non-linearity which is good, but if all the stats line up for the units then they're mostly just artificially extending things by adding a chance for nothing to happen (while further biasing the strong units against weak ones). Critical hits is just like adding a bit of damage, doesn't add any strategy.

Anyway, all that matters for tactics is the enemy defense/HP and your attack/damage. So in this model you couldn't make a tactically interesting "glass cannon" unit since a single unit's offensive and defensive stats never have anything to do with each other. You could make units with high defense and low HP (or vice versa) or high attack and low damage (or vice versa) which would add "gambling" into the strategy but you still wouldn't really have any tactical choices, I don't know.

So basically I'm saying you need some actual tactical complexity if you want there to be any point to manually playing these things at all, not just fake complexity that doesn't influence tactical choices. I haven't really worded it that well but hopefully you see what I mean.

Anyway here's a couple things to think about. If you dropped the attack statistic and made the defense value a flat damage reduction, like

pre:

dude.HP = dude.HP - max(0, attacker.damage - dude.defense)

this would do the non-linearity job of your current defense/attack statistics combined in a simpler and more obvious way, without the weirdo delaying effects of rolling to miss all the time. Although you say you like the randomness aspect but there's lots of places you can add randomness like attacks could be 1d6 or whatever. I'm not convinced that attacks missing is the best way to do it. But really you need some special abilities on your units or a positioning system or something to add tactical choices. drat I wrote way too much about this and I have a nagging feeling someone more versed in the language of game design could have expressed this all in a couple sentences but there you go.

seiken posted:

I haven't played blood bowl, so apologies if I missed the point. The fear and unit abilities sound good and should hopefully make things more interesting. I just want to say you didn't mention attack range till now so I don't know how that changes things. I'm interpreting it as you get these strategic choices on the "world map" of range and when to engage and so on. But, if I understand correctly, as soon as you enter the "battle screen" the time of day, advantages of each side and so on are fixed for the duration of the battle, and at that point you just have the unit abilities to make things interesting. So you still gotta make the battles reasonably non-trivial if they are to be manually controlled even without anything like time of day and range and what have you. Maybe the "world screen"/"battle screen" are more intertwined than I thought and I'm talking nonsense.

SupSuper posted:

A bunch of people posted:

PDP-1 posted:

How many regions are you planning to have to sort through? Quadtrees are most likely overkill if you'll have less than a few hundred. It's easy to waste tons of time coding up the ~*magical perfect system*~ only to find that you've added a lot of complexity for no real performance gain and it sounds to me like you might be heading down that road.

Just start with the simplest thing that works, which in this case may be to do the point-in-polygon check over all the items until you find a hit. Run the game and see what your performance looks like. If it's too slow, go up one notch in complexity and maybe wrap each region in a circle and if the click point is outside of that circle (a cheap and simple test) the region could not possibly have been clicked on and there's no reason to do the point-in-poly test. Is that fast enough? If no, then now you're in quadtree territory.

OtspIII posted:

How are you generating the shapes? Seiken's ideas for storing the data sound good, but is what you're looking for advice on how to store the data or also how to find it in the first place?


Which pen and paper game is this? I only remember you talking about Blood Bowl, and this sounds pretty far removed from that still.

ZombieIsland posted:

Hey guys, I am looking to get into Game Development. I know the language I want to learn is C# and then go to XNA. But, does anyone know of any good Tutorials or anything like that? The kind of games I want to make are 2D/platformer. I really don't know where I should start in learning, if anyone could point me in the right direction I would really appreciated it.

Edit- I am in the process of learning C#

Jewel posted:

Riemers' tutorials are only really good for 3D games. If he wants to learn the basics of XNA, try even this super simple, but nice site (it got me started on XNA!) http://www.xnadevelopment.com/tutorials.shtml

Some of the examples are a bit silly and not very practical, but the knowledge behind them helps a ton!

Madox posted:

Hey guys - For the last week I've been making a GUI front end for the LibNoise perlin noise library. If you use perlin noise to make height maps or textures, try out my tool and tell me what you think.

I use a lot of heightmaps in my projects, and I was tired of having to twiddle code all the time to manipulate the heightmap generator. I wanted some way to see the effects of different settings, so I made this.

The download is availble on github: https://github.com/MadoxLabs/NoiseTool/downloads

The instructions can be found at https://github.com/MadoxLabs/NoiseTool/wiki

If you don't want to read them, you should at least know that there is a pullout menu on the bottom of each window, and right click parameters to make them type-ins.

Please tell me of any bugs/feature requests or enter them on github.

Here is a sample image:
http://i.imgur.com/w6sOn.jpg

Senso posted:

I've been fiddling with C++ and Allegro and I'm at the point where I have NPCs on the screen moving randomly. Thing is, their walk function is called each time a frame is drawn (I set my FPS to 40). I have some kind of mutex that makes sure random_walk() returns if it's currently running.

C code:

timer = al_create_timer(1.0 / 40.0);
al_register_event_source(event_queue, al_get_timer_event_source(timer));
[...]
if(render && al_is_event_queue_empty(event_queue))
{
	render = false;

	derp.random_walk();
	al_draw_bitmap(derp.tile_array[derp.current_frame], derp1.x, derp1.y, 0);

Obviously, it means the NPCs are zooming across the screen super quickly. So I need to implement some kind of queue that simulates normal speed. I've never tried doing real-time game, I was always making turn-based roguelikes in the past, so it's a nice challenge. What would be the best way to do this?

I could have a counter set on the objects that decrements for every frame (so if set to 160, it should run every 4 seconds or so).
I could also have the NPCs register themselves to a queue with a specific time set for their next scheduled action.

Am I on the right track?

EDIT: I thought about using a job queue and worker threads but I would still get the same problem: the jobs would be in the queue in FIFO order, not really respecting varying NPC speeds - without a possibility to mark a job to run in 20 or 120 ticks, for example.

Vivian Darkbloom posted:

I've started playing around with this project. Is there any recommended way to make a province map, where the provinces are irregular shapes instead of tiles or hexes? I guess I'll need to make a digital copy of my province map and get it into pygame somehow.

e: I'm using PyGame! I thought of maybe drawing all the borders between provinces as vectors and writing some code to infer the provinces from those lines? I'd prefer not to do this with a big ol' bitmap, even though it's a 2D game.

xgalaxy posted:

There is OpenTK.

Pfhreak posted:

Stop here. What else have you done? Published any other games? You are trying to paint the Sistine Chapel here...


Advanced math is more or less required for making games. Might be a good idea to brush up on linear algebra and trigonometry. Also, we don't sign our posts here.