Haha dude I got Google Maps (and Yahoo maps and any of the other things like it, that's just a toggle) working with DK as my world map with clickable town markers and everything.
You can turn on all the streets and photos and whatever else they got, too, I just got all that stuff turned off 'cause it looks messy and I was messing with the way I wanna do the markers for all the towns in the game.
Right now I have the map centered on Chicago (so Chicago IS the town of Midworld from the game).
Moving by 1 degree of latitude and longitude is way too much.
I need to mess with that some more, adjust the proportions of the World of DK to the Real World, the closest town to Midworld is 30 degress north and 30 degrees east of Chicago, which is like, way the hell too far away.
And right now you can fool with the map all you want (so you could look for places to click for the popup to teleport to) but when you move your character it recenters the map on your character's new location.
I still haven't made an animated icon thingie for characters and vehicles (or stuff for towns and other sorts of places) yet, and I kinda wanna use the map's panning function (so the thing will work like Starcraft, where you click on a spot and your dude starts to move there, which is a totally different control and encounter system from what DK uses), but for right now, I'm just glad it all works with the regular game of DK.
Oh and you can walk around the world east-west and come back to where you came from but I still gotta add the trick for making that work north-south.
Yah, if you look close, I have the Scale set up so you can see what 100km or 50 miles is at this altitude, I can actually make people on foot or horse and in different sorts of vehicles travel at different speeds and stuff ahaha.
Welp, there's another thing I need to add to the database.
I'm gonna have to do some kinda layer for the water thingie that the server will understand so that you can't walk on that without a boat.
Meh I gotta do that for different sorts of terrain and "zones" for chat and encounters and crap too (right now the monster system is set up so that the monsters get tougher every 5 degrees of latitude and longitude you go away from Chicago heh).
8 comments:
Despite my teacher always tell me to go with 'C', I'm going to go with A)You. Pretty cool stuff man, particularly coupled with the embeddable content from the previous post. Can't wait to open up zombie apocalypse world!
Yah that embedded thingie turned out to be kinda dumb 'cause you don't ever hang out at the same page in the game for long (even when you are wandering around in town) so I just made it something that pops up youtube in a separate window (when you click on it) so that the song won't get chopped off when you leave the page and start gambling with the other players at the Inn (gawd I can't wait to code that even though its just "candy" ahaha).
Hmm, I was thinking about making a Jukebox at the Inn that all the folks in town could add songs to but mebbe I'll just make that a
"second page" for the game that you can keep running in the background if you want.
Or some kinda Nailgun Monkey Radio Show thingie or something heh.
Something you and your buddies could use for your own Apocalypse News TV and Radio Network in Zombie Apocalypse World ahaha.
Goddam is this shit ever fun.
Meh, I gotta do some animated icons already, I wanna have a Dual Wielding Cowboy walking around on my screen that can park his Post Apocalyptic Recreational Vehicle in his Time Machine inside a city already ahaha.
Thinking zombie stuff, I was thinking broadcasts/recordings. Possible even use it as a mission dispenser, y'know? Click a radio and bam "Help! Is there anyone out there? Were over in the old Wal-Mart in Chicago, and we're surrounded!"
Go clear out zombies? Get in the Wal-Mart and click on the people? And audio message thanking you, and they reward you with some ammo and a shiny new axe from the gardening department!
But, yeah, may script is better for that kinda thing, unless it just really plays to form. For instance, for a zombie game UrbanDead.com, a guy puts on a weekly vidcast: http://radiosurvivor.blogsopt.com and that's fun, even if not efficient.
Oh man I like that, after I said what I said last time I realized I could put car radios and stuff in vehicles and actually help people organize voicecom stuff through the game too (y'know, as if it was CB radio or whatever).
I gotta remember to come back to this post when I start monkeying with a quest-maker system.
Right now I'm still working on the stuff that's required for the "click to move around on the map" exploring and map control junk that'll replace the way DK handles a lot more than just its map and movement system.
Ah man, I dig the radio stuff. Hell, I say just write an email to a few internet radio sites and brand it in-game, and I'm sure they'd love it. Let buildings and cars have drop-down boxes that change from stream to stream, (or even let players add their own.) For bonus points have a small .ogg of static installed so that you can loop it while the next stream is buffering and fade it out when it's ready. Bam, instant radio!
But yeah, this is 'way off' kinda stuff, a distant second to things like 'moving.' It's an easy jump from "embedding content" to "user-driven video content similar to how Bioshock used audio-diaries." Just let users make "click this link to http:X" as the impetus in quest propositioning. The video/audio/site pops up in the embedded window along with the traditional yes/no box.
Haha well its not just "moving" really, its the "javascript talking to the database through php in the background" stuff that makes the game work like a regular MMO running inside a window in your browser (insteada something that needs to reload pages to update the information on the screen), but if I start explaining what's tricky about that (like passing variables between five different programming languages that all wanna talk about 'em differently, and how I need to build programs just to let those programming languages tell me what they're doing to my variables so I know what I need to do to translate it for all the other things that need to work with 'em, because doing that is faster than reading a book on each programming language) it'll quickly turn into a bunch of mumbo jumbo heh.
But the important thing is that I got the skeleton of that "information passing system" thingie working, and I redid my database to handle it, so now I just need to start using it for things, like programming how your character moves to where you want 'em to when you click somewhere on google maps, which takes a little game programmer trig and some UI stuff, so now I gotta figure out how the php side wants me to talk about trig and how I wanna limit movement and map control and stuff (on the javascript-to-google maps side AND/OR the javascript-to-php-to-sql server side) to keep things looking and feeling nice for the end user.
But once I'm done with that "gamey" junk I can move back to the fun and easy "web programming stuff" again and now I'll have the ability to show the other players around you moving around and doing stuff on your screen in real time (and a bunch of other real-time back-and-forth-to-the-game-database effects like that) without making your browser reload.
That's damn impressive. Like... really damn impressive.
I think you shouldn't change scale based on movement mode; people will feel like they're moving faster if they see their normal scale just zipping by. And people like fast.
You should definitely keep the scale change stuff though; what you could do is make it so you hand-pick areas that you want to define as interesting and give them names and monster spawns or quest dispensers or whatever. Then, the closer your map is to an interesting area, the more the scale goes down.
That way, going through middle of nobody-gives-a-damn Wyoming is kinda quick, because Wyoming shrunk. But when you get to Midworld the game zooms down so much you can see individual buildings.
You know, all crazy and no-Euclidean like the world was back before we had maps.
Also, if you pick the places yourself you don't have to let people zoom in on places where Google doesn't have any good pictures; try Friendship, Wisconsin if you wanna see what I mean. I mean... that's a town, I grew up there. But the map is so crap that you might mistake it for cow fields, heh.
If you still want to have three metaphysical stats, you should make it Lucky, Strange, and Bent.
Lucky is Lucky, we all know how that works already.
Strange is a personal disconnect with the way that the world works. The more Strange you've got, the less the world works normal-people style for you. Magic doesn't even exist if you don't have any Strange; but that guy over there might have some and he can use Strange and your brain just kinda skips over it. So Strange can be used for just about everything, kinda like Lucky, but it's one of those like-effects-like systems. Your magic doesn't work as well on things that have less Strange of their own. And most people have a little, enough that you can do a good amount of weird stuff to them, but some things are just too serious to notice you trying to magic them.
Bent is kinda like Strange, but instead of it being a personal difference in how the world works, you're completely normal. It's just that the world doesn't work the same around you. So if you have lots of it, faeries and unicorns exist around you and even those hardcore Science people who are completely immune to Strange have to acknowledge that they're there. But you don't have any control over that, you're just more used to it than everybody because it's following you around. So you're a wild-card in a fight, since crazy shit just happens around you on its own, and you just do your best to survive; and you're good at surviving the crazy shit that Bent throws at you because you live with it. But it's still crazy shit so you might fuck up.
Also, not sure about that name. I was thinking like the world got bent around you, but if you can come up with something more awesome, you've gotta call it that instead.
Holy shit man that was so awesome its kinda freaky.
I mean, its freaky that you are so in tune with what I'm looking at on the mechanical level even though I didn't explain it at all 'cause I thought it would take ten pages of writing heh.
And THEN you have a really awesome idea for it on top of it.
And not only do you kick ass on the technical side, but THEN you have a really awesome idea for the totally opposite-extreme weirdo-level too ahaha.
It does need a better name than "Bent" though its way too cool to be called "Bent" beh.
Dude its shit like that that makes me glad I actually wasted some time writing shit on the internet.
Man, not only do I think your "technical" idea is totally the cool way to do it, I think I CAN actually control the speed of the "panning" system by zoom level (times the speed of your character on foot or in a vehicle or on a horse or whatever too).
And as far as that non-Euclidean stuff I'm not a stickler for "realism" unless it adds something.
Some worlds might have an interesting Wyoming, you never know.
And I could add something to the "control console" for admins of their own "worlds" to monkey with that, for folks who don't wanna see the map down to street level ('cause mebbe they're doing an ancient roman thingie or a "dream world" or a Dinosaur Apocalypse or something and they don't wanna see all the modern streets and buildings).
The mapping out hotspots "on an area by area basis" deal is actually something on the easier "add a front end so people can supply that kinda info" side of things.
Maybe I could even figure out a way for the server to detect those "sorry we don't have a picture for this level of detail" thingies, and use that to build some kinda of "auto-zooming" system for random encounters and stuff, but I'll save that for later, 'cause I really should get done with the rest of the core junk like fixing up combat and finishing off the front ends to all the databases so folks can start playing with the thing heh.
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