Game Development

2:27 AM

:D

The Mattbat999

2:40 AM

(I am basically making a Elder Scrolls Arena clone :P)

11:38 AM

@TheMattbat999 Mithril doesn't exist, and I've seen it represented as pale green, blue, or silver. Do what you'd like! Make it red even!

11:57 AM

@doppelgreener Yes, but he maybe wants to stay true to the original source

But yes, terraria made it green, cobalt blue and adamantite red for readability's sake

@Bálint fair call, and suddenly i realise mithril might actually be an invention of Tolkien

as opposed to a prior thing in folklore that he adopted

It is usually silvery though yeah

silver or blue is the most common depiction i've seen

The Mattbat999

12:53 PM

@Bálint though I am not using Adamantite, I do have Cobalt as blue! You are correct about staying true to the original source. All what I knew about Mithril was "stronger than steel and light as a feather". I will probably make it a silverish color.

But with a little tint of green to it.

user92578

1:27 PM

user92578

god damnit I wished that looped better

2:00 PM

@Tyyppi_77 that looks great!!

user92578

somehow the motion feels a little unnatural to me, I feel like it should be slower at the maximum positions

user92578

however I'm not really sure how to accomplish that

Yes it feels lighter than it looks like it is. It's heavy so it has more inertia to turn around.

Did you try stealing the formula?

OTOH it has more weight to help it turn that around.

2:03 PM

It should swing with the same period independently of weight.

Oh nice

user92578

yeah that's how it should swing, but it's not necessarily what feels best

user92578

Currently it's indeed a rotation controlled by a sine-wave

user92578

Or do you mean the stuff under "Compound pendulum"

No, looks like a regular pendulum to me.

user92578

2:07 PM

user92578

I might just steal some code from this

user92578

2:27 PM

user92578

I really thought this was going to work

user92578

Smoothstepping a sine wave and inverting every other cycle to mirror it

2:43 PM

@Tyyppi_77 That does not look right IMHO, the fact that it's hanging from the ceiling would have us think that it would be smoother. It would work if the thing was protruding from the wall following some kind of hidden rail behind it.

Also, hello :)

I'm busy lately :/

user92578

yeah that was a failed attempt

@Tyyppi_77 I think the motion per se is salvageable :)

3:14 PM

@Tyyppi_77 your problem above there is that you have some kind of tween slowing it down at the end

the velocity needs to remain constant across that seam

the one further up that looks better at the bottom has a problem with the seam like

1 0.5 0 -0.5 -1 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 0.5 0 if you know what I mean

I'd probably just write a 1-dimensional harmonic oscillator simulator object. Set the period and amplitude, and let it do its thing

user92578

Not sure what you mean with the issues with the one futher up

user92578

That's just a pure sine wave

user92578

Won't I end up with just a sine wave with a harmonic oscillator?

yes, but if you implement it there will be no bullshit. It should just look awesome.

easy to adjust speed by changing the period

it's a simple object to write, and you can reuse it for other stuff

add a damping parameter and it becomes even more useful

the one above doesn't seam properly. or is that just the gif loop?

user92578

yeah just the gif loop, a frame or two too long

3:29 PM

ok

the harmonic oscillator object can also be made framerate independent

I tend to overengineer physics stuff like this, but I get really good results

user92578

so can physics ;)

user92578

(way too late for me to start caring about framerate independency)

For a 3d anti-grav bike sim, I used 3 speerate physics objects to model its rotation. Controller applied torques to them, then composited all three together for the final orientation of the object.

the problem with using one object was gyroscopic precession.

fucked everything up

It had a great feel

such a shame we never signed a publisher for that

4:18 PM

Am I the only one, who's experiencing issues with MathJax on the site?

4:29 PM

@Bálint link?

Q: MathJax (\$\LaTeX\$ in posts) has been added! Let's make some math!

11

MathJax has been enabled on our site! That means we can have actual fancy mathematical equations expressed as such without resorting to pseudocode, uneditable \$\LaTeX\$ screenshots, etc. MathJax is derived from LaTeX, but not exactly equal to it. (It's generally off topic on TeX Stack Exchang...

@AlexandreVaillancourt

The question looks fine to me

It does show errors though

Hmm, weird, tested on Explorer, Chrome and PaleMoon on windows and they all look as expected.

Looks right for me.

4:34 PM

Not sure what's happening

Failed to load resource: net::ERR_CONTENT_DECODING_FAILED
mathjax-editing.en.js?v=eff2c09e3b48:1 Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'config' of undefined
    at mathjax-editing.en.js?v=eff2c09e3b48:1
    at Function.execute (MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS_HTML-full:19)
    at cb (MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS_HTML-full:19)
    at Object.Process (MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS_HTML-full:19)
    at Object.call (MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS_HTML-full:19)
    at Function.WAITEXECUTE (MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS_HTML-full:19)

It apparently can't load this: cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/mathjax/2.7.2/config/…

Can you?

Not sure what I'm supposed to

Well if you click the link, you see the file?

Nope

Ok, that's odd.

maybe a DNS mess up? I dunno

Jimmy

5:21 PM

maybe a plugin is blocking it? can you curl the URL?

6:47 PM

Okay, I think it's time to actually figure out what I'm going to do with the economic system of my game...

I think I'm going to distinguish between "Goods" and "Ship Supplies", probably even having a different store for each.

Build a wall to keep out foreigners. That's a proven way to become insanely rich!

Actual economic theory is somewhat mixed on that view.

There is some optimal version of free trade/ restricted trade that seems to be the best.

But that's a bit beside the point.

It was meant as a joke -.-

LOL, I know.

Sorry, I'm in a funky mood as of recently...

iphonehacks.com/2013/11/…

Well, for one, I think I'm going to simply have each city have the ability to grow stuff, as opposed to having seeds.

There will be a way to transfer seeds, but it will be done via some kind of a mission.

Making the harvest depend on the seed's climate, space and fertilizer requirements might make it too complicated.

6:56 PM

Yeah, so there's a few ways that I'm going to work around that.

The first is that some seeds will be limited to a single place, and can't be traded.

The second is that the seeds will only be dependent on the climate, nothing more.

Well, maybe space, but...

Oh, and worker requirements.

I'm also going to want some kind of a skill system.

The skills might be the same thing as seeds actually.

For the cities?

Yeah.

There might be a skill in something like clothing making.

There will also be some kind of a preference, where different places prefer different goods.

The preferences is the most complex of any of the systems, I think.

"This city has the skill 'potato': +5 to food and +3 to winter reserves."

Odd, but could work out fine.

6:59 PM

Preferences will include stuff like "novelty", where they just want stuff.

Yeah, maybe.

The most common trades in the era I'm looking at were clothing, spices, and metals.

Food was sometimes used as "ballast", basically tucked on the ship to fill up the ship.

But it wasn't the primary thing.

Oh, and slaves...

Tobacco/ opium were also common trade items.

Sugar was actually considered a spice, which is odd to me.

"This city has the skill 'Slaves': +10 to workers, -15 to public order"

Yeah, maybe something like that.

I'm not sure that slaves would be a skill, but...

Right, they would be considered trade goods.

I'm thinking of having the city have some kind of a value that is a percent of labor force, that might be dependent on the climate somewhat, or the foods grown there.

Hmmm... I think I need to start with a paper design of things, and play with it.

Are you making something like The Patrician?

7:09 PM

Might well be, never heard of it.

Sounds like a really interesting approach, yeah, I'd say the economy at least of that game seems like something I'd want.

I like the part where you can choose between buying low and selling high to make money vs providing what the town needs in order to grow it.

Yeah, that is something interesting.

Although in my barely existing economic understanding those should basically be the same thing.

Yeah, it's not quite economical, but there were historical analogs.

If you tend to buy tons of, say, sugar, then it can wreck the economy, encouraging them to not make enough food to feed themselves.

I think I need to start by figuring out how a single city in isolation should work, including a few typical stereotypes.

The stereotypes would be the Spice islands, Netherlands, other European cities, Carribean Islands, US colonies, South American colonies, and Africa.

And something in the Middle East.

Oh, and China, and India.

Those are the different types of cities, in essense.

@PearsonArtPhoto That might not necessarily be bad. Buying food from money made by selling sugar might be more efficient than growing food. That way you can actually increase the wealth by not making the sugar city waste production on growing inefficient food.

7:19 PM

It can be, but it can still be problematic to some extent.

And it can tend to enrichen a few people, and make the rest of the people poor.

If the ship suddenly stops coming that would indeed be problematic. Maybe the amount of sugar overproduction and food underproduction can depend on the number of times you visited, contracts and trust/time.

Yeah.

It might also lead to you taking over the city. "Either you elect me as major indefinitely or the food ship stops coming".

Well, I think I'm going to start by writing the characteristics of each of the colony types I included above, and seek feedback to see how well I'm understanding it.

If that leads to "play and counter-play" you may be on your way to an interesting game.

Q: Creating a pure blueprint-based text adventure in Unreal Engine 4

7:24 PM

Yeah, there's some potential here.

I'm realizing more and more that I really didn't do enough work in this aspect of my game earlier on.

And while there are parts that I like, the core gameplay just isn't there...

Well, I think I'm going to write up a bio of each of these economies, and use that for my next blog entry.

Push it far and wide, and see what kinds of interest I get.

Meanwhile, I'll have to figure out a way to make it all work.

Free Internet Points

8:40 PM

0

I would like to start with that even if I wanted to use code, I can't. For some reason the college computers don't have Visual Studio or any kind of compiler/debugger for programming. I can literally ONLY use blueprints. So, in my course we're doing a large game project that spans a few months. ...

unreal-4 text-based