More Moving Crap

I'm still moving, still destroying the walls of my prison brick by brick and carting the debris down three flights of stairs to the dumpster heh.

I should be done tomorrow sometime, unless I get lazy and need to finish up on Monday.

It'll be good to be out of here, this place used to be cool when I had a cornfield and a farmhouse to look out at from my balcony, back in the first couple years I lived here, but now its just a bunch of houses, 'cause the farmer guy sold his land to housing development folks and took off.

Which is what I'm doing heh.

No time to really work on the game or anything but that'll get better in the next couple of days.

Ex-b has been on a scouting mission in Florida this week, checking it out, looking for some place to set up shop, but he ain't really decided on Florida, I don't think.

Its been humid as hell up here in Chicago and if its even worse down there in Florida then I can't even imagine what he's dealing with right now.

Yah, he's the only guy that's actually seen my game in motion so far, and he's pretty excited about it, excited enough to give serious criticism and talk about business shit insteada saying encouraging crap, saying shit like "well, that's pretty good for a beta, but..." so I know I'm on to something good heh.

Most of my junk is actually alpha 'cause its only had one pass and I was learning everything I was doing as I was going along, so the first pieces I built are totally rough around the edges and the more recent things I've added are more the "knock your socks off" kinda shit.

Whatever, to do everything I did in the relatively small amount of time I did it is pretty kickass no matter what, when I think about how far along I'll be in another month I get all excited, the only time I've ever seen anybody do what I been doing lately is when the Real Life Dwarf did his genius thingie, doing stuff in three days that took a "professional" team of twenty a couple months to do worse than he did it, so now I'm all like, oh sweet, I musta stole some of the Dwarf's Power or something ahaha.

Y'know, as much as I talk about the tropical island shit, I'm more the "let's move to Alaska or Canada or Norway or something" kinda guy, my brain is a sensitive instrument that generates a lot of heat, and I like it cold.

I don't mind driving in a blizzard either.

Actually I don't mind the heat as long as I ain't gotta go up and down three flights of stairs with a ton of stuff that weighs as much as water.

And the tropical island stuff ain't good because of the heat, its good for every reason except the heat heh.

And the heat is even good when it makes chicks dress in skimpy shit, y'know, insteada big poomfy snowsuits and stuff, so it does have that going for it ahaha.

Hmm

So now that the North Pole is totally melted, and we can grow asparagus on Mars, Ole Billie Boy is stepping away from Microsoft.

Coincidence?

Aw c'mon man we gotta get one last jab in there wtf ahaha.

Figments

Did they ever do a movie where the stunt guy for an actor looked totally different than the guy he was supposed to be the double for, and you ended up liking the stunt guy better than the actor?

'Cause like, he was the guy that took all the kicks to the nuts and everything?

A movie about a movie like that would make a good movie heh.

And then maybe the actor could try to do better and make up for what a dweeb he was and the stuntman and the actor could solve a mystery and it'd end up being a buddy movie where they beat a bad guy or something ahaha.

See that's the classic SNL comedian formula crap right there, all it needs is some lame "unnoticed best friend" love story, like where the actor ends up falling in love with his biggest fan or the chick that does his hair, and the stuntman gets the lead actress from the movie AHAHA.

And I wonder why there ain't never been a movie that starts out being about an alien invasion or a zombie apocalypse but then halfway through the thing you start to wonder if the people in the movie are hallucinating everything and killing regular people insteada aliens and zombies and stuff.

I mean, you think there'd be a lot more of those 'cause I'm sure there's plenty of us that think about that shit when we're watching a movie that might go that way heh.

And from that, I got the idea for a story I ain't got time to write.

You know how sometimes folks say that maybe life is just a dream and we're all just the figments of somebody's imagination?

'Cause of that thing where there's really no proof that your sensory system ain't been compromised and that's the only road into and out of you, y'know, you can't use your only input to determine if that input has been compromised, you need a good one to compare it to, which you don't got.

Mostly you just go by whatever seems consistent as if there's some rule about crazy shit being inconsistent heh.

When actually anything that's been compromised by any sort of intelligence is bound to seem pretty consistent on the surface in order to remain undetected.

Its the basic premise of the whole Matrix thing really.

Anyways, what if there really was a guy that was dreaming the world up and we were all stuck in his dream?

What if his dream was really crappy, and we figured out who he was, and we killed him, and then the world didn't just stop, it just switched to being somebody else's dream, a better dream, or maybe an even worse one.

But we can always track down the next guy and get rid of his ass too y'know until we finally "roll" a good one heh.

See, now that's a good idea for a story, might be some secret society of folks that know the truth about stuff, the only folks who remember what the worlds were like from dream to dream ('cause all the other figments just "play along" and don't notice the way the world keeps changing), and so there's some secret war over the power, might even be a little kid or something like that that ends up with the power, which makes it hard to kill 'em, even though their world-defining dreams are horrible, 'cause he or she is cute (not just when they're sleeping haha) and they're just a little kid.

And then maybe you got the whole deal where the guy that was gonna kill 'em ends up protecting 'em from the other guys like him, even though the world is crappy, that's a kickass setup.

I don't wanna forget that one.

Plus you can combine that with the zombie-hunter movie that turns out to be a hallucination AND the stuntman one for some much needed comedic relief and buddy movie slash love story shit heh.

Only thing bad about it is that when the kid grows up, he or she won't be so cute anymore, and that makes it easier to kill 'em off, especially when you have always been torn between killing 'em off in a bid to make a rotten world a better place, or protecting 'em and just putting up with having the world be a crappy place.

Well, that's not really a bad thing for the story, actually its a good thing for a sequel, its just a bad thing in general.

Yah, I guess if you wanna keep 'em around you gotta make the dreamer a really sweet little girl that stays sweet (somehow, my suspension of disbelief is starting to go right off the tracks at this point heh).

That'd be good for the third story in the trilogy, after the first kid turns into a rotten teenager and an evil Caligula overlord or whatever in the sequel ahaha.

Moving

I'm packing up my crap and getting ready to move.

And I can't take a lot of junk with me, y'know, fer a lot of reasons, but mostly 'cause I'll probably be moving again pretty quick and really there's a part of me that just wants to get back to my hobo roots where I can carry everything I care about in the entire world in a guitar case.

My mom used to laugh 'cause I really did do that in the old days and she's a total packrat.

I can't say exactly what's going on (well, yet) but I can say that it ain't anything really interesting or cool in any way (well, not yet), and it ain't anything that's gonna change much of anything for me at the moment.

Anyways the whole "getting old" and "computer guy thing" really messed up that "fit it all into a guitar bag" gag for me, nowadays I got like ten million books and an entire room full of Frankenstein's computer equipment, even if all my furniture and everything else I own is a bunch of crap that folks gave to me.

Plus my mom dumped all this stuff on me from when I was a kid, one of the times one of their houses flooded, so now I got ten thousand comic books in dusty crates (that I'm never gonna read and I'm thinking about tossing out even though I've heard ten million old guys say they wish they hadn't thrown out their old comic books) and I got all this pen and paper roleplaying game crap, boxes full of all the old books and a bunch of shit I drew and pads of graph paper filled with maps and "adventures" me and the other kids played and character sheets and index cards with pictures of swords on 'em and little kid descriptions of how awesome they are and little boxes of mashed-up miniatures and dice and all this other crap like that.

It'd be funner to look at if it wasn't covered in twenty years of dust bunnies and shit heh.

Man, there's nothing worse than reading something "dramatic" and "serious" and "poemy" you wrote when you were a kid ahaha.

Unless its good, y'know, then its okay.

There's a few things I'm thinking about stealing from my old self already ahaha.

I got a pretty horrendously humongous dvd (and vhs haha) video libray, too, I'm thinking about chucking a lot of that out.

I do appreciate the fact that I got the time to pick the junk I wanna keep, y'know, some folks get burned out of their houses and stuff and they just lose their junk forever, they don't get to choose.

Not that I gotta lotta stuff that I really care about, I don't think I really do care about any of this stuff, I can always make or get at whatever I need wherever I go.

I'm gonna try to dump some of the junk I wanna keep on my mom, like all this dungeons and dragons crap, give whatever else is good to my little brother so his kids can wreck it, and just throw everything else out.

I'm hoping I can whittle it all down to "my big frankenstein computer," my linux laptop that's the historical museum of every arcade and console game ever made, and a guitar bag fulla clothes in the end.

It'll be sweet to feel light on my feet again like I was in the old days.

I wish I could get rid of the frankenstein computer and just do the laptop deal but personally I'm pretty sure that I'm gonna die without ever becoming a big fan of laptops at this point heh.

Well, you never know, I guess, I mean, maybe I'll find a laptop that I don't hate at least a little someday ahaha.

Levels

I gotta add the leveling system to the game.

'Cause when I get bored of refreshing the screen in the game to see what my changes look like as I'm programming something, I go out and strangle a few monsters (with no items and my bare hands heh) for a couple minutes and I always gotta worry that I might trigger a level up when I ain't got the code in place for it.

Sometimes little numbers are cooler and more brutal and satisfying than big numbers.

That's how DK's first level works, its like, 18 experience points to second level, and 1st level monsters are 1 or 2 experience points each.

I kinda like that.

Its got the standard "takes more monster kills per level" deal as you level up, so by the time you are 50th level, its taking like a hundred and sixty thousand experience points to get to the next level and monsters are two hundred something experience points a piece, but all the DK stuff is hard coded and I don't wanna do it that way 'cause it just seems silly to me to make a table of crap for that and do queries when you can just make an equation for it.

I can even do hell levels and stuff with an equation.

Should I make my thing like that?

Anybody got any preferences for it to be another way?

I'm not really into the cult-building cognitive dissonance garbage so I don't actually care how it works, no matter what kinda system I do, the stuff you get from leveling is gonna eventually matter less and less to you ('cause those "increases" are not going to "increase" as you level) and things will reach some sorta plateau.

There'll probably be other ways to get experience points besides killing monsters, too, y'know, like quests and all that, but I wanna base the thing on the monster killing.

So like, how many experience points should you get for killing a monster that's your size?

And as you level up?

And how many experience points should it take to reach the next level as you level up?

And should there be a bonus for killing things bigger than you, and a penalty for killing stuff smaller than you, where junk eventually "grays out," or should it be a flat sorta thing, like, you get a certain amount of experience point per level of the monster that you killed (or more likely it'd be calculated off the monster's hitpoints and not its level) and that is that.

I kinda like the flat thing, since I don't gotta ever let anybody bother each other and fight over spawns and all that crap, I don't really have any reason to make shit "gray out" to try make you wanna leave the newbie yard or whatever.

Heck, the way I figure it, if little shit is gonna bug you, you better get paid for it heh.

Should a first level monster give you 2 experience points, and a second level monster give you 4, and a 50th level monster give you 100?

That seems kinda crappy to me.

Or should that and the experience points you need to level do the traditional deal where they jack everything up and make it hard to figure out in your head?

So a first level monster is worth 4-6 experience points, and you need 54 experience points to get to level 2, and second level monsters are worth 7-9 experience points, and it takes 126 experience points to go from level 2 to level 3 (or a total of 180 experience points to get to level 3 from level 1), and all that kinda crap.

Somehow the obfuscated logic of the "scrambled eggs" thing seems better, aside from the cult building time investment boil-the-frog-slowly thingie where you make people do more and more.

I guess that's 'cause it makes it hard for your brain to turn it into 99 bottles of beer on the wall.

Y'know, like, you can't really figure out how many monsters you need to kill until you kill enough that you can use a calculator to figure it out (once you figure out how much monsters are worth) or you kill enough that you can figure it out by eyeballing your experience bar.

I guess I oughta do it that way.

Should I have "hell levels" and stuff?

"Oh that level 35 is a bitch!"

'Member that shit?

Bad stuff for no good reason that gives folks some shit to complain about together and feel sympathy for each other and stuff heh.

"Oh I remember when I had to do 35! I almost quit the game! Level 60 is even worse!"

Goddam cult crap ahaha.

Oh, we can have "bonus to experience points" items and stuff too.

And I was planning on trying to make "more the merrier" style grouping, where everybody gets the experience points and loot for monsters as if they killed them all by themselves, and that would tend to make leveling (and powerleveling) easier (and grouping more fun), but my game is evil enough with the way it does encounters and the way that monsters are hard to control to make it work out so that a Big Guy would be better off escorting his Little Buddies around places that fit the Little Guys better (a bunch of Big Guys and one Little Guy would do better, but eventually the Little Guy is gonna get it heh).

Big Guys with friends in real life that don't play as much wouldn't mind it working like that, that's way better than not being able to group with your buddies at all 'cause you'll ruin their points or something, and even if the loot is crappy to you, you can always give it over to your midget pals (and obviously you play more than them, 'cause you are bigger, so you can keep doing whatever it was that made you bigger than them when they ain't around heh).

So that's gotta be included in the deal some too.

UO was the only game that really did the more-the-merrier any-level-guy-can-come-along style grouping thing right, but that "point for every three swings of your sword" stuff has its own problems heh.

Well, Mount&Blade worked out really sweet, if you think about it from the perspective of having the NPCs you were in charge of being your "little buddies," y'know, 'cause you had tons of guys of all shapes and sizes in those fights, that's more like the way that I'm looking at it, 'cause my mathematical model fits that better.

Getting Slap Happy Again

Man I'm getting slap happy again I gotta straighten out.

I redid the items table to try to make one table that'll hold all the different kinds of items and item templates and instances of actual items and everything.

Its not that hard, its just gonna be hard to remember how a weapon uses the structure compared to a piece of armor and stuff like that until I add the front end that'll do all the remembering for me heh.

Anyways right after I do that, I figure I'd start adding some hard-coded basic items, and the first thing I figgered I'd add was a bag, y'know, 'cause I'm gonna need a goddam bag to hold all this other awesome newbie shit I'm adding, right?

And now I can't stop laughing about the "Large Sack" I added, and the ten thousand "sack" jokes it makes me think of.

Its bad enough that I didn't add a "small sack" first, I just din't have the heart to give nobody a tiny sack, y'know, sacks gotta start at "Big" and go up from there or something ahaha.

Ugh I ain't laughed this hard since the time I was doing the one-hand weapon versus two-hand weapon versus dual wield thingie and it reminded me of the way that Raph and all his followers are the only folks who never made the leap to "dual wielding is cool" for some weird, possibly Greg Brady Goes to College "fencing" inspired reason.

I mean, think about how many games have "ambidexterity" in 'em for like five seconds and then you gotta sit there and ponder the whole "what the hell could Raph be thinking?" question.

Is it a black sock and sandals at the beach kinda american tourist with no-taste thingie?

I'm okay with the idea of a guy using a one handed weapon and a shield, as long as its a spear and he's using a round shield, 'cause that looks cool.

Or a guy with a pistol in one hand and a flashlight or a briefcase or something in the other hand ahaha.

What the hell are the Raph People doing with their other hand? AHAHA.

Oh man I'm gonna blow a blood vessel or something I gotta cool off.

I wonder what percentage of internet nerds would say that they're "ambidextrous."

I bet that number is over fifty percent AHAHA.

The Book of Many Things

I'm adding the Encyclopedia to the game now.

Y'know, the Monster Manual, the thing that lets everybody add their own Monsters and Items to the game.

Items being armor, weapons, accessories, bags, and commodities at this point, the things that are randomly redistributed by the game (which leaves towns and buildings and vehicles out of it for now, 'cause those are mostly hardcoded and not received as loot and stuff, although vehicles might end up in there if I end up making them a little more complex).

Players will only be allowed to see the stuff that they've added to the game (and that'll let them check out how people have rated the stuff they've added), even if they have their own world (I might make something so that a guild or multiple people can work together on adding monsters and items though).

Actually the author id for all that stuff is that of their current character, and not the user, 'cause I don't want nobody to see each other's User Names, but I might wanna show the name of the author of a thing, for User Content Ratings contests or something, so I'm doing it all by character.

The reason players are limited like that (not allowed to browse the entire Encyclopedia) is because they're supposed to be sorta randomly browsing the Encyclopedia by playing the game, I don't want them ruining their appetites and stuff.

Real admins will be able to browse everything in the database, and even add new types of items (that's really why I'm building it right now), so they're the only folks that it will really look like an "encyclopedia" to, which makes "encyclopedia" a pretty stupid name for it *sighs*

As usual, if any of you guys got a better name for it, lemme know.

I dunno why I suck at names so bad, its like its some kinda metaphysical curse to make up fer all the other shit I can do or something heh.

Its kinda like that curse where all the movies you really want haven't ever been out on DVD and stuff ahaha.

Oh yah, eventually this'll be the same thingie that hosts the quest-maker and npc-maker and dungeon-maker and all that other kinda junk.

And even the world-settings stuff for player's that have their own worlds.

Ooh I could call it the Grimoire, a summoner's book, that's all fancy and stuff ahaha.