And the next thing is the way I gotta redo the database to handle monsters and stuff.
'Cause I wanna make three tables for monsters and loot and towns and buildings and specials (which are the same thing as spells) and everything else the players can add to the game.
One that stores all the junk that Users can add to the database, like pictures and descriptions and all that cool stuff.
And one where I store the naked mechanical skeletons for monsters (and everything else) that the game uses to sorta randomly apply all that window dressing junk to, the attributes and number of attacks and what kind elemental damage it does and what kind of loot it drops and whatever, in the case of monsters, but its other things for specials and weapons and armor and magical items and buildings and towns and vehicles and blah blah blah.
And the third one being actual monsters and items and towns and buildings and stuff that people own and junk (monsters only being somewhat persistent unless they're pets or the boss of a dungeon that nobody has killed or something).
I think that's the way that I gotta do it.
Friday, June 13, 2008
Inventory
Alright, so I'm gonna do yet another database revision.
I gotta do it anyway so I can clean up my map code with "selectable icons" for the users and make it all done by variables (I don't have a field in the tables of Towns and Players for what "icons" they use, the urls for pictures need really long fields and I didn't have any extra).
Plus I wanna start working on the Character Class and Combat and Monster and Loot and Inventory stuff, 'cause that's the fun shit.
And one of the things I need to do for that is to change the stuff I put in the database for how to handle inventory and backpacks and bank slots and treasure chests and places you can stash shit in your vehicles and whatever buildings you own and npc merchants and stuff.
'Cause right now all I got is forty inventory slots and forty bank slots per "character" inside the character table.
Which is a really dumb way to do it.
'Cause I can give people the potential for way the hell more inventory if I make a separate table to store something like "forty-slot backpacks" and then just make sure that the "backpacks" have the character's name on it (well, their ID, but same thing).
And its just more efficient to do it that way anyway, when you think about cutting down the amount of data moving through the pipes, like, you don't really need to know about your inventory (and especially all the shit in your bank and whatever else) unless you wanna look at it or equip something out of it or sell it or put something in the bank or something, aside from those things, it can stay "asleep," basically.
Well, there's also the thing about like, giving people crappy backpacks to start with, and a limited amount of bank slots, and then giving them better ones and more slots as they get bigger, so I need some fields for that "how many slots does the backpack have" in the Inventory Database.
Hmm, are backpacks a kind of loot?
They're definitely something the users could add pictures for, a cheap way to customize your User Interface to suit your character heh.
But really all they'd have is a pic and a number of slots, they ain't got any other attributes, I don't think.
Well, they'd need to know who they belonged to, so I could pull them back out of the "Inventory" database by character ID, and then they'd need to know what kind of inventory they were, like, whether they were a backpack on a character, or a bank slot, or the trunk of a car, or something in a building.
And they might not have an "owner," if they're a treasure chest in a dungeon or an abandoned car or something.
So I need some fields for "where" they belonged, too.
Or I could just reference them from the thing they belonged to, by giving buildings and vehicles "slots' for storing whatever "backpacks" or "inventories" they own.
And then the user owns the character, the character owns the car, and the car owns whatever its got in its glove box and trunk, and it checks back up the tree to its owner before it lets anybody else mess with it heh.
And if it don't have an owner, then whatever its got in its trunk is free for the taking to everybody.
Yah, that's the way to do it, same thing with all the houses and Taverns and forts your character might own and stuff.
But his bank slots and personal inventory will be directly assigned to him, and not assigned to him through some other object that's between him and that inventory with a chain of command and stuff.
Okay, so that's the way I'm gonna do it.
An inventory table made out of "forty slot backpacks" with fields for an owner, a name (so you can give the backpack a name), an image, the max number of slots it has ('cause it might be less than forty), the number of slots that its using, and some space to store the IDs of the items that are currently stored in that backpack.
I'm just going with 40 'cause I think that's a good number even though there's some junk like "gloveboxes" that can't hardly store anything, it don't take a "glovebox" any more time to move out of the database than it takes a forty slot backpack with the same amount of items in it.
And I don't wanna get into chaining "ten slot backpacks" together into one big forty slot back pack, that's actually inefficient in the database ('cause each of those "tiny bags" would need to store their owners and all those other "header" variables, which are just about as big as the tiny bag itself heh) and its inefficient on the player side of things where their machine has to do more math and queries and crap to put things together, its better to go with the "biggest" size you think you might wanna display as a single inventory, I think, even though that don't sound exactly right.
I could make the slots as a "text field" that expanded to any size too, and then just parse the thing.
Mebbe I should do that.
The only bad thing about that is that you gotta parse the thing before you can grab something out of it, if you got forty fields in the database, instead of a "variable" amount of slots stored as a string that you gotta parse, you can go straight to field 32 in the database and grab whatever that thing is without bothering with anything else.
I dunno if I'm ever gonna wanna do that, I'm just thinking it all out heh.
And if you store it as a string, you gotta parse it out into an array to play with it and then smush it all back into a string to stick it back in there, insteada just updating one slot of it.
I dunno if that's that big a deal though, I mean, a string with forty IDs isn't all that big a deal, and its one read or write from and to the database either way.
And with the string, you could grow it to anything you want, 100 slot backpacks and all that, and it doesn't waste any "unused" space in the database on "empty slots."
Yah but one programming mistake or a glitch and that whole backpack gets torched, where if you do things one at a time you are limiting the potential damage heh.
I think that's what is giving me the willies about the string idea ahaha.
I think I'm gonna do the string thing though.
Hmm, the thing with the car owning an inventory isn't going to work, 'cause cars (and all the other things that might have an inventory) might have the same ID as a character, 'cause they live in a separate table.
So I need to keep track of the ID of the inventory in the thing that owns it, and not search the database for "things owned by this or that guy," 'cause it might not be a guy that owns it.
Unless I add a field that's a number that says what type of thing it is that owns it.
Yah I'm gonna do that just so that I can do it either way, its always good to have a little more rope than you need, y'know, 'cause what if I wanna do treasure chests that only open up after you kill their owner or something like that heh.
I gotta do it anyway so I can clean up my map code with "selectable icons" for the users and make it all done by variables (I don't have a field in the tables of Towns and Players for what "icons" they use, the urls for pictures need really long fields and I didn't have any extra).
Plus I wanna start working on the Character Class and Combat and Monster and Loot and Inventory stuff, 'cause that's the fun shit.
And one of the things I need to do for that is to change the stuff I put in the database for how to handle inventory and backpacks and bank slots and treasure chests and places you can stash shit in your vehicles and whatever buildings you own and npc merchants and stuff.
'Cause right now all I got is forty inventory slots and forty bank slots per "character" inside the character table.
Which is a really dumb way to do it.
'Cause I can give people the potential for way the hell more inventory if I make a separate table to store something like "forty-slot backpacks" and then just make sure that the "backpacks" have the character's name on it (well, their ID, but same thing).
And its just more efficient to do it that way anyway, when you think about cutting down the amount of data moving through the pipes, like, you don't really need to know about your inventory (and especially all the shit in your bank and whatever else) unless you wanna look at it or equip something out of it or sell it or put something in the bank or something, aside from those things, it can stay "asleep," basically.
Well, there's also the thing about like, giving people crappy backpacks to start with, and a limited amount of bank slots, and then giving them better ones and more slots as they get bigger, so I need some fields for that "how many slots does the backpack have" in the Inventory Database.
Hmm, are backpacks a kind of loot?
They're definitely something the users could add pictures for, a cheap way to customize your User Interface to suit your character heh.
But really all they'd have is a pic and a number of slots, they ain't got any other attributes, I don't think.
Well, they'd need to know who they belonged to, so I could pull them back out of the "Inventory" database by character ID, and then they'd need to know what kind of inventory they were, like, whether they were a backpack on a character, or a bank slot, or the trunk of a car, or something in a building.
And they might not have an "owner," if they're a treasure chest in a dungeon or an abandoned car or something.
So I need some fields for "where" they belonged, too.
Or I could just reference them from the thing they belonged to, by giving buildings and vehicles "slots' for storing whatever "backpacks" or "inventories" they own.
And then the user owns the character, the character owns the car, and the car owns whatever its got in its glove box and trunk, and it checks back up the tree to its owner before it lets anybody else mess with it heh.
And if it don't have an owner, then whatever its got in its trunk is free for the taking to everybody.
Yah, that's the way to do it, same thing with all the houses and Taverns and forts your character might own and stuff.
But his bank slots and personal inventory will be directly assigned to him, and not assigned to him through some other object that's between him and that inventory with a chain of command and stuff.
Okay, so that's the way I'm gonna do it.
An inventory table made out of "forty slot backpacks" with fields for an owner, a name (so you can give the backpack a name), an image, the max number of slots it has ('cause it might be less than forty), the number of slots that its using, and some space to store the IDs of the items that are currently stored in that backpack.
I'm just going with 40 'cause I think that's a good number even though there's some junk like "gloveboxes" that can't hardly store anything, it don't take a "glovebox" any more time to move out of the database than it takes a forty slot backpack with the same amount of items in it.
And I don't wanna get into chaining "ten slot backpacks" together into one big forty slot back pack, that's actually inefficient in the database ('cause each of those "tiny bags" would need to store their owners and all those other "header" variables, which are just about as big as the tiny bag itself heh) and its inefficient on the player side of things where their machine has to do more math and queries and crap to put things together, its better to go with the "biggest" size you think you might wanna display as a single inventory, I think, even though that don't sound exactly right.
I could make the slots as a "text field" that expanded to any size too, and then just parse the thing.
Mebbe I should do that.
The only bad thing about that is that you gotta parse the thing before you can grab something out of it, if you got forty fields in the database, instead of a "variable" amount of slots stored as a string that you gotta parse, you can go straight to field 32 in the database and grab whatever that thing is without bothering with anything else.
I dunno if I'm ever gonna wanna do that, I'm just thinking it all out heh.
And if you store it as a string, you gotta parse it out into an array to play with it and then smush it all back into a string to stick it back in there, insteada just updating one slot of it.
I dunno if that's that big a deal though, I mean, a string with forty IDs isn't all that big a deal, and its one read or write from and to the database either way.
And with the string, you could grow it to anything you want, 100 slot backpacks and all that, and it doesn't waste any "unused" space in the database on "empty slots."
Yah but one programming mistake or a glitch and that whole backpack gets torched, where if you do things one at a time you are limiting the potential damage heh.
I think that's what is giving me the willies about the string idea ahaha.
I think I'm gonna do the string thing though.
Hmm, the thing with the car owning an inventory isn't going to work, 'cause cars (and all the other things that might have an inventory) might have the same ID as a character, 'cause they live in a separate table.
So I need to keep track of the ID of the inventory in the thing that owns it, and not search the database for "things owned by this or that guy," 'cause it might not be a guy that owns it.
Unless I add a field that's a number that says what type of thing it is that owns it.
Yah I'm gonna do that just so that I can do it either way, its always good to have a little more rope than you need, y'know, 'cause what if I wanna do treasure chests that only open up after you kill their owner or something like that heh.
Sweet
Woot hours of Monty Python on BBC America thank the gods somebody worth a shit is in power heh.
Now all I need is some old Doctor Whos ahaha.
Now all I need is some old Doctor Whos ahaha.
Walk Ins
I had this idea that I'm gonna forget unless I write it down.
All along I've been thinking about making the "currency" in the game be confined to the "world" it came from.
'Cause like, dollars from one Parallel Universe don't look the same as dollars in another.
The Apes from the Planet of the Apes had different presidents and stuff.
And then it'd be cool to see the coins from Ancient History and other countries and junk, so mebbe its not just a Parallel Universe kinda thing.
Anyways that's easy to add to the game, 'cause its just a "find a picture of the thing" and then copy and paste the link to it into a box kinda thing.
And even with the different kinds of coins and bills and stuff from different countries in the same world, its not a big deal to make an exchange table you can use at the Bank in Town to convert all your crap into one thing, although when you get into Time Travel, its starts getting kinda complicated.
But it'd be cool to make your own money for your game world with your face or the face of somebody you knew photoshopped on to it, y'know?
It really don't matter a whole lot to the mechanics of the game what it calls a "gold piece" and whether or not it has a picture for it, especially if they aren't worth anything in other worlds.
Anyways that's all sorta besides what I was thinking about.
What I was thinking about was commodities that Parallel Universe Traveling guys could trade between worlds.
Stacks of things that have value that they could trade for other things of value in other places.
Without using money.
Y'know, like you could convert all your cash to gold, and then go to another Parallel Universe and trade the gold for some sinfully delicious Ramen Pride Noodles and some Magic Beans that were in high demand in a third Parallel Universe.
I've always sorta intended to do some kinda Trader game, with the NPCs in different towns producing and wanting different amounts of stuff from other towns, but the Parallel Universe bit adds an incentive for folks to do the ole Walk-In and visit weird little worlds that they never woulda bothered with as long as it comes up on their trading radar with high demands for something.
Like Bullets For Zombie Town.
And Water and Oxygen for the Space Pirates.
And Gasoline for Barter Town.
And Bananas for the Ape Planet.
Haha no that'd get you killed don't do that.
Anyways that's what I gotta remember.
That, and to look for really high res stuff I can use for maps of Mars and the Moon and junk.
All along I've been thinking about making the "currency" in the game be confined to the "world" it came from.
'Cause like, dollars from one Parallel Universe don't look the same as dollars in another.
The Apes from the Planet of the Apes had different presidents and stuff.
And then it'd be cool to see the coins from Ancient History and other countries and junk, so mebbe its not just a Parallel Universe kinda thing.
Anyways that's easy to add to the game, 'cause its just a "find a picture of the thing" and then copy and paste the link to it into a box kinda thing.
And even with the different kinds of coins and bills and stuff from different countries in the same world, its not a big deal to make an exchange table you can use at the Bank in Town to convert all your crap into one thing, although when you get into Time Travel, its starts getting kinda complicated.
But it'd be cool to make your own money for your game world with your face or the face of somebody you knew photoshopped on to it, y'know?
It really don't matter a whole lot to the mechanics of the game what it calls a "gold piece" and whether or not it has a picture for it, especially if they aren't worth anything in other worlds.
Anyways that's all sorta besides what I was thinking about.
What I was thinking about was commodities that Parallel Universe Traveling guys could trade between worlds.
Stacks of things that have value that they could trade for other things of value in other places.
Without using money.
Y'know, like you could convert all your cash to gold, and then go to another Parallel Universe and trade the gold for some sinfully delicious Ramen Pride Noodles and some Magic Beans that were in high demand in a third Parallel Universe.
I've always sorta intended to do some kinda Trader game, with the NPCs in different towns producing and wanting different amounts of stuff from other towns, but the Parallel Universe bit adds an incentive for folks to do the ole Walk-In and visit weird little worlds that they never woulda bothered with as long as it comes up on their trading radar with high demands for something.
Like Bullets For Zombie Town.
And Water and Oxygen for the Space Pirates.
And Gasoline for Barter Town.
And Bananas for the Ape Planet.
Haha no that'd get you killed don't do that.
Anyways that's what I gotta remember.
That, and to look for really high res stuff I can use for maps of Mars and the Moon and junk.
Hockey Puck Online
Welp I got the multiplayer map thingie working in a very basic way.
And I can auto-load anything from the database onto the map, besides players and towns, so that's cool, 'cause that means I could throw monsters and dungeons and buildings and everything else down, if I want to.
And the game is saving your position and all that stuff.
But I really need to make some better icons heh.
Unfortunately I don't really feel like doing that at the moment, 'cause the web page programming stuff is funner, now that I'm done with the blood-and-guts of the map.
I'll need to go back and do the "zone" thingie eventually, but I gotta build up the "monster manual" and combat and the rest of the game first before I know what I need for the database so Admins can paint down "terrain" and have it mean something.
Oh yah and the animated icon thingie is all set, I just need the animated icons.
I'm gonna make the icons something you can pick from and all that (they're actually all done by url at the moment, although I dunno how well that'll hold up under fire with all the animated junk, I guess the browser caches 'em 'cause the "player 1" icon is destroyed and recreated from scratch every 30 milliseconds or something, but that still don't mean it'd be okay to let everybody pick their own "unreliable" links for icons, even though I totally control the size of everything and it auto-shrinks).
And I kinda wanna work on an idea I had for town maps, where you could walk around inside the town and visit all the buildings (that otherwise ain't visible on the Big Map), 'cause I already set aside space for them to have their own maps (which would be a good test of the mechanical junk for the "teleporting to a Parallel Universe" system heh), but I was thinking that maybe I'll let towns section off a piece of the google map and make it a separate monster-less instance of the map that's like, so-and-so tall and wide, 'cause then you could put icons for buildings like "inns" and "restaurants" and "houses" and all that kinda junk down in a real map of a city, without having to draw anything, and the players would be able to go in-and-out of 'em.
Y'know, 'cause you really can't do nothing better than something like this for a good town map heh.
Oh yah, those little popup balloon thingies are a lot more sophisticated than they look, they're actually "mini web pages" that are fed variables from the database and they can be resized with scroll bars and pictures and links to stuff, but I didn't bother loading 'em up with anything fancy yet (I'm at the "just glad its all working" stage of enjoyment heh).
And my town coordinates are just the first thing I found on the internet that had a list of cities with latitudes and longitudes that I could use for 'em, they all seem to be positioned at airports at the moment, but that's all easy to fine tune or change around any way you like (plus you can add as many new towns as you feel the urge to).
Mmm, that reminds me, I need to add a luxury liner love boat thingie or something in the ocean off the west coast of Africa 'cause you end up getting teleported there when something I programmed goes wrong ('cause its 0,0, y'know).
The King of Boobs and Gore
Gonna take a break here just to talk about Friday the 13th for a second.
Not the superstitious holiday thingie, although, if you ask me, anything you think about too much like that is bound to have some kinda effect on your day heh.
Yah, I know that's some kinda "don't be scared of the dog! he can smell fear!" advice, that's why I like it ahaha.
Anyways, Friday the 13th, the movies, is really where the whole "boobs and gore" thing came from.
See, when I was a little runt, like, 11 years old or something, and too young to party properly, we used to steal some beers (when you are eleven, three beers will get you wasted), or mix small, undetectable amounts of booze together from somebody's parents' liquor cabinet, and then we'd kick back and watch slasher movies.
And the king of the Boobs and Gore slasher movies was the Friday the 13th movies.
Especially because they never made any sense, starting with the premise that Jason Voorhees is a full-grown and gigantic muscle-bound guy that drown in a lake when he was a little kid.
But they were never campy, that's the thing, the Friday the 13th movies, for all their "logic of no logic," somehow managed to be pretty damn well done and cool and not sloppy or cheap or anything at all, I mean, there really are some really well directed and awesome scenes from the Friday the 13th movies, with the rain and the ch-ch-ch-ow-ow-ow sound effects and the flood lights.
Plus they're sorta like "Time Capsules" of what was cool at the time they came out, which gives 'em a lot of flavor, most things try to seem "timeless," but Friday the 13th went in the other direction ('cause they needed to have some cool kids so the cool kids could die first haha) and it ends up making you realize what really is timeless, y'know, when you see the same ole shit over and over again in different clothes.
And they always always delivered on the Boobs and Gore, without fail, there may be nothing in this world that you can trust, but this, this you can trust heh.
So I just thought I'd do the hat tip and stuff.
In the horror world, there's fans of Jason, and fans of Freddy, and I'm not a fan of Freddy.
With his stupid "looks like a guy with a lot on his mind!" quips as he unzips some guy's skull and looks at his brains, all that shit to make the movie seem less scary, Freddy is a cartoon, Nightmare on Elm Street is for pussies.
Jason don't say shit.
'Cept fer that creepy bird-noise ch-ch-ch-kill-kill-kill stuff ahaha.
And Freddy don't deliver on the Boobs portion of a Balanced Boobs and Gore Breakfast, man.
So there you go, he don't even fucking count heh.
Same thing with Michael Myers, even though I totally Like Mike, the Halloween movies are top notch as far as horror movies go (well, the original one, at least), but Mike ain't really a reliable source of Boobs and Gore either, he's definitely nothing you could make twenty different kinds of drinking games around like you can with the Friday the 13th movies, y'know, where you can bet on who is gonna get it first and how they're gonna die and who is gonna take off their shirt and scream about how fake the special effects looked and all that, Halloween just ain't a social thing like that.
Jason is the King, man, the King of Boobs and Gore, long live the King ahaha.
Not the superstitious holiday thingie, although, if you ask me, anything you think about too much like that is bound to have some kinda effect on your day heh.
Yah, I know that's some kinda "don't be scared of the dog! he can smell fear!" advice, that's why I like it ahaha.
Anyways, Friday the 13th, the movies, is really where the whole "boobs and gore" thing came from.
See, when I was a little runt, like, 11 years old or something, and too young to party properly, we used to steal some beers (when you are eleven, three beers will get you wasted), or mix small, undetectable amounts of booze together from somebody's parents' liquor cabinet, and then we'd kick back and watch slasher movies.
And the king of the Boobs and Gore slasher movies was the Friday the 13th movies.
Especially because they never made any sense, starting with the premise that Jason Voorhees is a full-grown and gigantic muscle-bound guy that drown in a lake when he was a little kid.
But they were never campy, that's the thing, the Friday the 13th movies, for all their "logic of no logic," somehow managed to be pretty damn well done and cool and not sloppy or cheap or anything at all, I mean, there really are some really well directed and awesome scenes from the Friday the 13th movies, with the rain and the ch-ch-ch-ow-ow-ow sound effects and the flood lights.
Plus they're sorta like "Time Capsules" of what was cool at the time they came out, which gives 'em a lot of flavor, most things try to seem "timeless," but Friday the 13th went in the other direction ('cause they needed to have some cool kids so the cool kids could die first haha) and it ends up making you realize what really is timeless, y'know, when you see the same ole shit over and over again in different clothes.
And they always always delivered on the Boobs and Gore, without fail, there may be nothing in this world that you can trust, but this, this you can trust heh.
So I just thought I'd do the hat tip and stuff.
In the horror world, there's fans of Jason, and fans of Freddy, and I'm not a fan of Freddy.
With his stupid "looks like a guy with a lot on his mind!" quips as he unzips some guy's skull and looks at his brains, all that shit to make the movie seem less scary, Freddy is a cartoon, Nightmare on Elm Street is for pussies.
Jason don't say shit.
'Cept fer that creepy bird-noise ch-ch-ch-kill-kill-kill stuff ahaha.
And Freddy don't deliver on the Boobs portion of a Balanced Boobs and Gore Breakfast, man.
So there you go, he don't even fucking count heh.
Same thing with Michael Myers, even though I totally Like Mike, the Halloween movies are top notch as far as horror movies go (well, the original one, at least), but Mike ain't really a reliable source of Boobs and Gore either, he's definitely nothing you could make twenty different kinds of drinking games around like you can with the Friday the 13th movies, y'know, where you can bet on who is gonna get it first and how they're gonna die and who is gonna take off their shirt and scream about how fake the special effects looked and all that, Halloween just ain't a social thing like that.
Jason is the King, man, the King of Boobs and Gore, long live the King ahaha.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Other Ones
Google Sat
Google Hybrid
Google Physical
Google Street
Yahoo
WMS
There's actually even more of 'em but I ain't got 'em all hooked up as toggles like this.
There's even some radar stuff for weather I could add heh.
Ah yah I been meaning to see if I couldn't animate some rain and thunder and lightning falling down on the map, I keep forgetting about that.
I think I can do it with a semi-transparent image overlay, y'know, to make it look like the ground is "lighting up" in flashes and stuff.
C'mon that's classic ahaha.
Oh I got my click-to-move thing working the way I want it to, too, where your guy mostly stays in the middle of the screen as you zoom along, even at crazy high 1500+ mph speeds zoomed all the way in with the map rolling quicker than I've ever seen it go over a long period of time, it was a matter of adjusting my animation timer to the perfect spot.
Google Hybrid
Google Physical
Google Street
Yahoo
WMS
There's actually even more of 'em but I ain't got 'em all hooked up as toggles like this.
There's even some radar stuff for weather I could add heh.
Ah yah I been meaning to see if I couldn't animate some rain and thunder and lightning falling down on the map, I keep forgetting about that.
I think I can do it with a semi-transparent image overlay, y'know, to make it look like the ground is "lighting up" in flashes and stuff.
C'mon that's classic ahaha.
Oh I got my click-to-move thing working the way I want it to, too, where your guy mostly stays in the middle of the screen as you zoom along, even at crazy high 1500+ mph speeds zoomed all the way in with the map rolling quicker than I've ever seen it go over a long period of time, it was a matter of adjusting my animation timer to the perfect spot.
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