Can't Call It Long

I started to convert everything over to a floating point coordinate system, to get rid of this "two layer" thing I was doing, trying to keep DK as a sorta overlay of the Real World, 'cause DK uses nice solid integers for everything (its a grid with 500 rows and columns), and the Real World uses the ultra-hideous latitude and longitude coordinate system, where the city of Chicago is at Negative 86.something longitude (or you could say West insteada Negative) and positive 41.something (or North insteada Positive), and Russia is like, Positive Long and Positive Lat, and Brazil is Negative Long and Negative Lat, and Australia is Positive Long and Negative Lat.

So the Earth map is a Cartesian plane with good ole 0.0 sitting in the water off the west coast of Africa, and four positive-negative pairing quadrants, where north and east is positive, -180 West to 0 to 180 East, and 90 North to 0 to -90 South.

That seems nice and everything at first but then you get into some problems with game programming.

Like, it makes Bounding Box logic (for sql queries and stuff) really complicated and messy looking.

And you gotta do special cases for anything near the Zero and 180 East-West switchovers.

And conversions between different programming syntax things are a total headache even without that junk (I was using "lat" and "long" as variable names, y'know, nicknames for "latitude and longitude" until I was politely reminded by the Robot that "long" was a keyword for a couple of the older programming languages, y'know, the hard way ahaha), especially if you wanna make something that's gonna work internationally (which I've been doing my best to keep up on 'cause I got a lotta buddies from all over and that's one of the coolest things about this stupid game heh).

Plus php and sql and javascript all got different sorts of floating point problems, and the fact that some of 'em are "type jugglers" doesn't help a whole lot either when you gotta do a lot of math with the junk, although its nice when you can keep things pristine as strings for as long as possible while they're getting passed around and then just parse 'em out however you want when you need 'em, I think of it like "freezing" and "unthawing" 'em ahaha.

Oh man I got so much work ahead of me now.

I'm thinking about tricks I could do to make the whole thing easier.

Like, not using floating point, or using "fake" floating point numbers that are really integers, and then converting 'em to something that looks like floating point my own way, so that I can always be sure they'll look right and match up.

And getting rid of the positive and negative junk with the map, in the background of the game where I mess with stuff, by adding 90 to north-south stuff, and 180 to east-west stuff, and then just switching it back when I display it to users.

But then there's still the problem of the Zero lines and the brand new 360 degree overlap thingie I woulda made heh.

Ugh ahaha.

And the DK code ain't helping, the way it checks to see if you are in a town is by checking to see if your characters latitude and longitude is equal to the latitude and longitude of the town, and that's a no-no with floating point numbers, even if you were doing something simple, which I'm not heh.

So I started to redo all that by making a "bounding box" around the towns, so I could do a "greater than less than" type of thing, instead of an "is equal to," and that's how I got into thinking about all this messy map stuff.

And now I'm just trying to think of whether I wanna switch to a totally different trick or just keep trying to make the floating point stuff work.

I like the floating point stuff, I don't really wanna have to play around with that, and the resolution of the google map shit is crazy awesome, like no map that's ever been used for a game, y'know, its the Game Map of the Gods, man, and the floating point shit actually works really good for that, 'cause it adapts to it.

Plus I gotta do a lot of trig and I don't even wanna think about inventing my own mathematical framework thingie so that I could do all that with integers.

If I could just keep the "floaters" in line it'd be great heh.

Monkey Versus Robot

This is a picture of what I'm looking at as I'm programming, that junk at the top of the screen is monitoring all the different systems as they pass variables around.

I get to see exactly how much floating point error I'm accumulating on a constant basis and then I know where I gotta get in there with the duct tape and the plunger and pull some cheap-ass tricks heh.

I'm starting to get kinda slap happy from donking around with this thing.

I've got the animated icon thingie working, where you click somewhere on the map and your icon moves there and the camera follows him, the DK arrow-key-looking control stuff on the bottom right still works in a weird "leap one degree around" way but the game doesn't really use it anymore.

Well, the icon isn't actually animated right now, its just a hockey puck I made in Gimp, but it could be an animated icon, I have the direction you are facing and all that crap you need ('cause you need it to make characters move across the earth at a certain rate) and I've already got the code working for it, I just didn't feel like drawing heh.

I've got the animation set to whatever your browser can handle 'cause of its timers (something like 50 frames a sec on a good machine) to make the movement look as smooth as possible when you are zipping along at like two hundred miles an hour or something at street-level in google maps (which ticks along really slow when you zoom out to the altitude in the pictures in the last post, but that's way the hell higher than what I've usually seen in airplanes heh).

And I have to pan the camera after your guy as he zooms ahead of you because the camera couldn't handle loading google maps at ground level that fast if I tracked at the same speed your toon does (I tried it that way first but all I usually got to see was map stuff loading behind me), so if you are traveling long distances your guy flies to the edge of the screen and then the next load of pictures from google maps loads and he whips through that if you are going full blast on your way to somewhere and you just zoom down to see what it looks like (and the more zoomed out you are, or the shorter the distances you travel, the smoother it gets and the more the camera recenters on your character).

But its not out-of-control crazy or anything if you are actually playing around down at street level and moving short distances-at-a-click on your screen, then it works like a normal game.

I've got it set up so that you can't pan the camera and look around the map ahead of your guy, although you can zoom out to the moon and tell him to walk to Australia from Cleveland with a single click if you wanted to.

I'll probably get rid of that amount of zoom-out too eventually, though, once I'm done screwing with the thing, 'cause it kills something of the "adventure" of the thing when you can see that far around, even if I make it so that you can only see "towns" and things that are within a certain distance of your guy (which I'm working out how I'm gonna do now, there's opacity settings and everything, so I can have far away things "fade in" as you get closer).

Mmm, maybe I'll slow you character down to the point where I can keep up with him at a speed that the google map stuff can handle, and then make the zoom out speed faster for long distance travel, I dunno, I prefer that "keeping the guy in the center of the screen" junk but this stuff wasn't really designed to be used like this ahaha.

I also gotta figure out how often I should save your character's position to the database when you are out exploring around, there ain't nothing else to save besides your position, 'cause that's all that's changing with your character, I mean, the game saves your dude whenever you fight and loot and whatever stuff, but when you are exploring, the game is running at six thousand miles an hour, and I don't want all these clients trying to save their character's position at the speed of the animation, 'cause that's impossible with regular ghetto equipment heh.

I'll probably cheese out on that "saving your position" thing pretty bad, I mean, as much as I think I can get away with.

And the game still has all that instant-travel teleportation stuff in it (you can instantly beam back to Chicago for free any time you want, 'cause that's the "starter town").

Hmm, what else.

Uh, oh yah, that "saving the game" thingie might as well be tied in to how I load the "towns" and "people" that you can see around you too.

I don't have monsters on the map, everything with that is still the DK-style where you get pulled into "random encounters" sometimes as you explore the map (and you can "try to run away" or "stand and fight").

I'm gonna leave it like that until I get to play with the combat stuff some, I like that Diablo-Syndicate-Fallout type stuff but I wanna see what I can do with the old-school crpg Bard's Tale-DK-style thingie first, I wanna at least see how that'd look with multiplayer grouping and stuff before I turn the thing into a Fallout clone or something with little monster icons that you mash.

I like the idea of trying an encounter system like AD&D had, with "surprise" and distances and all that kinda tactical stuff.

And I kinda have this picture in my head of a thing where you and your buddies just sorta sit back and drink beer and let the game do all the work, like, whenever its your turn, you just throw down some crazy "special" that everybody else in your gang can see (that are made by players, so you could "craft" your own to make your buddies laugh), sorta like an evil magic power card game or something.

I've never been big on Magic the Gathering or any of those kinda thingies, but I did play the hell out of a card-game NWN mod, and I like UNO, so I know that shit is fun heh.

And then you collect all the weirdo random loot that the other players made and either use it or sell it, y'know, easy peasy.

Maybe, if I do the card-game thingie good, I could have "specials" be part of the loot or something.

Or the bare-bones mechanical thing that you build-your-own specials with.

Mmm, I dunno.

Gawd I wanna work on something else besides this animated map crap already, that might be really cool to people who didn't have to dig all the irrigation ditches to make it work but the new toy smell has totally worn off of that part of it for me BIG time heh.

It's like having X-ray vision on the beach and seeing everybody's skulls-n-guts insteada the good stuff ahaha.

Who Is the Man

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).

Oh Gawd

Oh man I just tried embedding youtube stuff into the game and it works.

So now all the user-added-everythings can have their own theme music and videos and stuff (including all your characters heh).

This screen shot doesn't make a whole lot of sense 'cause I just decided to try it out in the middle of programming the editing system for towns so that they can load their own maps that you can travel around on (and so the screen is all messed up) but its pretty damn cool anyways.

I'm gonna see if I can just show the "control bar" without the video too, in case you can only find a stupid video for a song you like.

Haha yah it works.



Goddam this is fun ahaha.

Alright, time to add a few more fields to the database.

I'm doing the multiple-map and Time Machine slash vehicle stuff right now so that you can travel around to different player-added world maps and visit towns and houses and businesses and forts (and crappy dungeons with no collision detection) and junk heh.

More Screenies

This is "Ole Bald Angus" the level 1 Quick checking out his own character sheet, and "Purple Dinosaur" the level 1 Strong inspecting him (through the Who Is Online thingie).

Which pretty much shows the important bit of being able to add junk to the game as a User, although I wanna make some kinda cool and official looking front end for the Monster Manual and Item Compendium and all that so that people are filled with an appropriate amount of awe ahaha.

I got all that new character class stuff added into the database and wired up to the admin and player screens but I haven't done any of the mechanical things with it yet.

And I also added ten hundred other things to the database like support for grouping and hometowns and bank slots and inventories and paper doll stuff and a trial version of the User Content Rating system and a bunch of other crap I'm prolly forgetting but I haven't wired any of that stuff up at all yet.

The game still works as DK though, I never let that break 'cause I need it to test the junk I'm doing heh.

Lucky and Strange

Alright so here's what I'm thinking after a little internal debate with my split personalities and the Squash Monster.

Seven character "classes," based on the seven character attributes...

Strong (Strength)
Quick (Dexterity)
Tough (Constitution)
Smart (Intelligence)
Wise (Wisdom)
Charming (Charisma)

... and Lucky (uh, Luck).

The only thing I'm sorta stuck on is the Arcanum thingie, with Technology and Magic for the Smart guys.

'Cause Smart is Intelligence, your knowledge of trivia and facts, and your understanding of complex and arcane and unnatural and high level systems.

Where Wise is more of an understanding of natural things, although Wise people tend to be Smart and vice versa, there's some folks that lean one way or the other really hard heh.

Y'know, like Farmers are Wise, there's "Farmer Wisdom," and City People are Book Smart, but that don't work the other way around ahaha.

That works for all the other ones too, y'know, 'cause Quick guys are gonna be kinda Strong and kinda Tough and kinda Smart and kinda Wise and all that too (I need to work out some kinda table for that, for giving you attribute points as you level, y'know, like, Quick guys get a point of Dexterity every level, and a point of Smart and Wise every other level, and a point of Strong and Tough every three levels, and a point of Lucky every four, or something, I dunno yet, but I gotta figure it out before I change the database over to the New Stuff and get the game running again or the "game" part won't work heh).

It looks like there's three Physical Stats and Three Mental ones, and Lucky, which is an Existential Stat or something, so far, all by itself.

Ah, its a Metaphysical Stat, that makes it sound cooler and more Kosterian to boot heh.

Anyways, going back to the Magic Versus Tech thingie, my own opinion in Real Life is that Magic is just Badly Explained or Misunderstood Technology.

But there's the argument that Magic is Magic and sorta the opposite of Technology.

I'm starting to think that maybe I should add an Eighth attribute, "Strange," and have that be the attribute for Wizardry and Sorcery, insteada having them share Smart with Mad Scientists and trying to treat Magic like Science (although, if the Astral and Etheral Planes exist, then they have a physics that can be handled scientifically, too, imho).

"Strange" might be the thing for Greek Oracles and any of that kinda weird "stuff of the gods" crap too.

And that fits pretty good, 'cause magic, when it isn't like a science, is almost always about some dude getting "powers" from some kinda supernatural being, y'know, like the Swamp People where I came from believed in Black Magic and White Magic and spirits that you couldn't trust that were responsible for all the mischief and random acts of kindness in the world.

Plus Doctor Strange is the Sorcerer Supreme and all that, so "Strange" fits pretty nice.

And so if I add Strange as a stat, for Arcane Stuff, then I'd have eight stats, y'know, Quick, Smart, Strong, Tough, Wise, Lucky, and Strange.

And if I got eight, I kinda want Nine.

I dunno know why I want nine, I just like that number better than Eight.

Things Come In Threes or something.

Plus if I come up with another one, then there'll be Three Metaphysical Stats, Three Physical Stats, and three Mental Stats.

I got nuthin' ahaha.

Hopefully something will occur to me as I proofread this heh.

Hmm, I guess I should either stick with seven stats and "make it fit" somehow, or do some kinda metaphysical wisdom thingie for magical healer types like hippy Druids or something.

Mmm, I dunno 'bout that.

I like Strange but I dunno if I like it enough to monkey around with Wise being for Doctors and Druids and junk, if I switch that to be some kinda "strategy" pool of "specials," like, something for officers in an army or something, then the non-magical healing Doctors won't have any place to go.

Yah, naw, I think I'll just stick with seven attributes and classes for now and try to deal with the Magic and Tech thing separately somehow.

Return of the Dex Monkey

So I'm looking at this Character Class stuff in the game.

And I don't wanna do the Monkey-Robot-Pirate-thingie, well, not exactly, see, I'm gonna make it so that you can call yourself whatever the hell you want, you can be a Dwarven Cowboy or a Radio Wolfman or whatever the hell, that's your own bag, all those "Dwarven Cowboy" thingies will just be a variant of some kinda base class.

I haven't really made my mind up on how I wanna do it but I wanna lock it in a little bit 'cause I got a lot of programming to do.

I think I wanna make it so that the game doesn't have any max level (or like, the max level is Level 65535 or something heh), not because that's "cool" or whatever (although kids think that's cool heh), but because I'm lazy and I just don't care about end-game garbage.

I'm thinking more about buddies running around together in the game no matter what level they are, so that more-the-merrier-style grouping thingie like UO had it is a requirement, basically.

And I can do something like that with an endless level system as long as the level thing plateaus pretty quick.

And all I really wanna do is just compute rewards for leveling off some kinda base thingie, 'cause its stupid to waste database space and all that code on anything you can easily calculate, especially stuff that you don't need to calculate often, and especially in a turn based game where speed isn't exactly of the essence heh.

And the no-max-level thingie is no big deal, just think of like UO where a guy that had 70s in his skills and whatever could do fine and everybody could group together no matter what sizes they were.

Plus after a while, getting one extra hit point and a point of Dexterity (or whatever) ain't no big deal, but you are still having a little fun making your character an itsy little bit tougher, there's no sense in putting a limit on that, that's all thats about.

And I could always have it work like Fallout where you can pick "special powers" from a pool of powers, every so many levels, and then just add powers as folks get so big that they need new ones.

And since the monsters are all "calculated" by the game its pretty easy to have them sorta keep up with you (although the nice thing is that they'll plateau too, which makes it non-poisonous for everybody else).

Anyways I was thinking about doing something like D&D for classes at first, y'know, Warrior, Thief, Wizard, Priest, Druid, yadda yadda yadda, but those aren't really all that great.

I mean, there's no purely mathematical and logical way to break those down into something that make sense, like, although Warrior is good for a Strong Guy, he also needs to be a Tough Guy, and who is wiser, Thieves or Priests.

And what's the difference between a Thief and a Priest in real life, y'know, where the Priest wouldn't have any magical healing spells?

Not a whole helluvalot.

Not a big difference between a Thief and a Priest and a Psychologist either heh.

Psychologists got the most "issues" out of that bunch ahaha.

Hey man at least the goddam Wizard might make a semi-honest living as a computer guy or a Man of Science or something AHAHA.

Well, whatever, this thing has gotta work both for the Magical Worlds and the Non Magical Ones.

And so then I started thinking something like Smart, Strong, Quick, Wise, Tough, and Charming, for the six stats in D&D, that's pretty cool, 'cause like, an Archer and a Thief or a Two Gun Cowboy would be a Quick, a Samurai would be a Strong, a Wizard or a Mad Scientist would be a Smart, I dunno know who the hell would be a Wise, there ain't any of those in real life, maybe I should change that to "Lucky" heh.

Yah, no, Priests are Charmings in real life.

Oh okay, mebbe they are Wise, and that's why its so easy for them to trick people AHAHA.

Well, whatever, you know what nobody is gonna pick?

Tough.

Nobody is gonna pick Tough, man.

I might as well call it Chewy heh.

"My super power is that I can get really beat up! For a long time!"

"omfg."

Y'know, if you are gonna make a Sword Guy or a Berserker you are gonna go for a Strong, let's face it.

Die Hard might be cool in the movies but nobody wants to specialize in walking on broken glass in their bare feet without screaming man that's just stupid.

But see, without Tough, there's only five of 'em, and everything is lopsided heh.

Gawd dang this conceptual crap is so pathetic, everybody is always like "my grandfather was not an ape! The gods are super powerful but not even they could turn an ape into a human and stuff 'cause that's impossible!"

But sometimes you can totally tell we were cavemen like, five minutes ago, our logic is so bad heh.

"I need six classes!"

"Why?"

"'Cause its gotta be even!"

"I thought it had to make sense?"

"Yah that too!"

"Well I'm not playing a Tough, man, so you can just put that right out of your goddam head. I'm gonna be a Quick. I'm a Quick in all these Parallel Universe Time Traveling Planet of the Apes Nailgun fighting games, I always play a Quick, that's my class."

"Me too!"

"I love pets and super speed and teleports and ranged attacks and being a dps class."

"Yah me too!"

Yah man, nobody is gonna pick a Wise or a... what the hell were the other things?

Strong, nobody is gonna be a Strong, not when a Samurai or a Ninja could be a Quick.

There's a reason there's never been no such thing as a Strength-monkey.

He might as well be a Tough and Chewy monkey while he's at it ahaha.

Its always gonna be a Dex Monkey.

Dex is just like, too good.

Everybody is gonna Pick a Quick.

With a Smart for an Alt or something mebbe ahaha.

So three classes is all I need.

Quick and Smart and the "Don't Pick This Guy" choice that only exists to make you feel better about picking a Quick or a Smart heh.

And you just know that somebody is gonna pick a Don't Pick This Guy and start complaining about how I didn't hardly program them at all 'cause I din't actually imagine that anyone would really wanna play one ahaha.

Man its funny how the more awful I get the more true I get AHAHA.

Hmm, I think I do need to do this pretty good though.

At first I was like, oh who cares about character classes, there's Time Travel and all that, you can have an Ancient Roman Quick, a Clash of the Titans Quick, a Caveman Quick, a Knight of the Round Table Quick, a Spaceman Quick, the list goes on and on with an endless variety of Quick Picks hehe.

But I might as well do this pretty good.

It could definitely add something to the replayability if I figure out a good way to divide things up, if the "pool of hilariously cool looking but generally equally effective special attacks" or whatever was interesting for each kinda guy.

Smart and Quick are easy to make interesting, its the other ones that're kinda tanking for me heh.