MnemonicRL

Hotel Solipcyst - Official Teaser Trailer

2010-08-17T16:14:00.001-05:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYWCLx9pKiA

Well, there it is. The culmination of another summer's work. Thanks to Paperjack for post-processing the audio, and sorry for my horrid narration.

Well, as I've hinted, I start college in a few days. The time I've spent on MnemonicRL has been drastically dropping even before this point. Basically, the project is being shelved for now. All along, I haven't developed to create a game people would enjoy. I don't game much myself anymore. The fun in this for me is playing around with algorithms for monster behavior or dungeon generator, or dabbling in procedural animation or networking. Even some level design forces itself out every once in a while.

I've never enjoyed the step from transforming a tech demo into a game, though. The code for combat's there, I made up visual effects and rules for many attacks, but when it came time to get the numbers right for leveling and damage and such, I quickly grew bored. With Hotel Solipcyst, I tried to replace combat with other gameplay elements -- exploration, dialogue, treasure hunting, even a version of Snake where you herd a guest's unraveling thoughts into new patterns. But after implementation, tweaking them to be fun to play was again a boring task to me.

So the lesson I've learned through all these years of off-and-on roguelike development: I can't do this alone. Thankfully I'm about to be surrounded by a large group of wonderful, talented new people. I've never done a team project before for lack of a partner, but I look forward to it. Therefore, this is not my parting message from rgrd or game development. I am much more interested in simulating traffic than developing games, but thankfully games (or at least game-like things) happen to be a great place to showcase and play around with new algorithms. The next project will come, just maybe without masquerading as a game.

Thanks for reading, unknown readers. It's been a fun trip. I'll keep this blog updated with my exploits at UT Austin. Until then,

~ Dustin / Da-Breegster

Quick update

2010-08-15T22:40:00.000-05:00

Hrmm, I'm really not good at this. In the last few weeks, I've been preparing to move, working with my company on web development (of the server-side sort, of course), and -- yes! -- filming the trailer. It's in "post production" now, I guess, which means that I have to record the narration, or sucker somebody with a better voice and no lisp to do it for me. Overall, it hasn't turned out anywhere near as good as the first did last summer. But I'll explain more in my message with the trailer... which should release in two or three days guaranteed (because after that, I won't have time for this sort of optional project.) Woo!

3 Weeks

2010-07-31T09:18:00.000-05:00

I guess I should really get back into my old pattern of updating regularly (and having things about which to update?)... there is news though. It finally has a name... your delusions manifest in Hotel Solipcyst. The word comes from solipsism, this desperate idea that only your mind surely exists. The beauty is that this paranoia is not even enough... the whole point of this segment of the story is that memories are as mutable as anything as well. So what can you trust? Oh, and "solipsist" became "solipcyst" by an esemplastic whim -- "cyst" has that excellent parasitic connotation to it. Yeah, I saw Inception recently too -- but I've had these ideas for millenia prior.

In my last three weeks (officially yesterday) before moving, I will produce a trailer to something that isn't quite yet a game, something that won't be finished. I have a vague inkling why a trailer could still change things, but for all purposes, my motivation is the same as ever -- my own enjoyment. As always, I like creating effects, ideas, behaviors -- not necessarily fun ones or those with win conditions.

My goal right now will be excellent if it works how I envision -- basically, think spotlights for mood lighting. More later...

Floating Points and Floating-Point Arithmetic

2010-07-25T23:54:00.000-05:00

My Java experiment, which has been eating much of my development time lately, should soon be playable. Frame-independent movement (don't move 1 pixel per frame, move 15 pixels per second and track dt) and rounding issues were finally remedied, and I got my logic improved for jumping from rising platforms. I also briefly implemented a scrolling background layer that doesn't seem to eat too much more CPU. Net effect of all this work? I could have my falling Santa game going within the week. Which means I could bug people who won't have time to help for sprites.

Mnemonic-wise, I haven't done anything. I really would like to turn out a trailer before school starts -- making the one last summer was really fun. As for making an RPish game playable and -- more importantly -- fun in three weeks, it won't happen. That doesn't bother me, so I guess if anything, my goal would be to finish fleshing out the environment for a future fun experience. My sense of time and haste will be inverted a bit tomorrow, so I'll try to focus on Mnemonic instead for a day, see what happens.

Another Return, not a Yield

2010-07-19T23:27:00.000-05:00

I haven't done enough parallel programming to really make that joke in the title yet. But anyway, I am back from UT Austin (technically have been for a few days, but stayed really busy until today). I remain astounded by orientation, the OAs (student leaders/RAs there, basically), the friendliness of everybody I met, my own unexpected socialness, the city's breadth and the campus's depth, and the spectacular advisors and students from Dean's Scholars and Turing Scholars. I'm taking 17 hours this fall -- Vector Calculus, CS theory, CS data structures & algorithms, a philosophy of the arts, and two two intriguing classes associated with DS. I guess that means Mnemonic really will fall on the wayside. Nevertheless, I will work on it when time is available. More importantly, the work I do continue all started here... ultimately I've created a playground for multi-agent experiments, a bestiary of pathfinding techniques, a home where a few people hung out, if only for a few minutes in passing...

But it's a month too early for sentiment. In my few days back, I tweaked guest crowd behavior again to time their routes through the Hotel better. I'm not happy with their "pace around aimlessly in a room for 30 minutes" behavior yet, though. Since I'm diffusing this bloody useful influence gradient from each staircase/exit on each level at init-time, I decided to use it not only for pathfinding between rooms but also for wandering around. Pick a staircase and a random scent level (not 0, which would be the staircase itself) and hill-climb up or down to reach that point. Continue for as long as needed. This works for the most part, but I'm observing lots of agents getting caught in local minima -- they'll spazz out between a few tiles. Gotta examine the scent levels there to figure out why.

I've also been continuing my Java experiments. Today I got "frame-independent" movement going... rather than trying to run the game at 60FPS by sleeping variable amounts of time, I'm having the thread/game loop sleep a constant time and tell movement functions dt -- that's change in time since the last tick. This lets me specify velocities way easier anyway -- 50 pixels per second? No problem, it's been 349/1000 seconds since last tick, so a touch of dimensional analysis (fancy-speak for "multiplication" in this case) and some floating-point positions, then things are moving consistently no matter how well the game is running. Sadly, my collision response-fu isn't quite as strong -- my trick to fix overlap by the axis over which the instigating entity was originally trying to move, it isn't working so great when you're constantly falling and also trying to move left/right. Once I fix that, hopefully the other major issue will clear up too -- movement isn't fluid at all. My numbers are probably way off -- and the keyboard repeat rate bug isn't helping (more on that another day) -- but acceleration due to gravity feels clunky still.

Well, it is late.

Cyclic Graphs, Rejuvenated Lifestyles

2010-07-09T22:04:00.000-05:00

I haven't vanished. Today I felt claustrophobic in the Hotel, so I finally filled out two areas. First we have the vending hall...

Followed by the laundry room, with animated washing machines! The phrases floating around are relevant and will eventually be animated and helpful as well. For now, little jokes in Latin are sufficient.

Lastly, we've got the gift shop. I wanted that Earthbound-esque mall look, hence the second floor. A valid use for escalators! Not sure how the 'interact' command will work with things like shelves of items yet... it's no fun to go press the spacebar next to each shelf until you find the clue you need.

So what else has happened, and will happen? A new joy has entered my life in an unexpected way and remains on a distant pedestal for good reasons. This next week, I shall be away from any form of a computer, so sorry, I will be composing ideas only. It's for university, though, so I'm quite happy! I suppose once school starts and I have less time to work specifically on MnemonicRL, I'll tag some posts as UT (UT Austin, that's my home) so I can show off my baby steps in the world of formal Computer Science education. Anyway, I'll be working harder than ever once I get back so I can release something by the summer's end. Await with curled toes!

Oh, and Java. I'm liking it. Sometimes choice is a bad thing -- SDL, Allegro, OpenGL with a 2D perspective matrix...? Swing and AWT just work, and they just work everywhere. I fixed the flickering issue in the detangle-the-strings applet, and I'm about to start on a new idea for a game. More tomorrow, hopefully, before my great journey begins.

Appletizing

2010-07-06T23:50:00.000-05:00

Eh, today wound up with my eyelids numb and pupils dilated. Curse you, optometry! I wound up playing with Java much more than working on crowd behavior. Finally appletized my detangle-the-strings game. Click and drag the circles till no lines intersect. Try it? Server might go down anytime, and the flicker is a known issue. Guess I'll start tagging non-MnemonicRL posts, since as university starts, I'm sure to be talking about different projects. No fears, I'll get back on track with the Hotel tomorrow!

My own Personal Army

2010-07-05T23:04:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I just have to start with a picture. Basically I've got 100 guests running around the Hotel (which still needs a name, blast it!). Already it adds mood. Once I time their movements better and create a cyclic logical graph for them to traverse and add waiting regions near tables and such, it'll seem much more immersive.

I'm going to be very busy next week (more on that later) and indeed my summer's hours are spiraling away, but I'm going to try my best to get both a new trailer and a complete, playable, and fun game segment out by August.

Java Adventures, Mostly

2010-07-03T23:53:00.000-05:00

I somewhat sheepishly offer a screenie of the new ripple effect in the Atrium.

I also began drafting the first guest's schedule, personality, and backstory. I think they'll have the appropriate balance of intrinsic creepiness and charm.

Most of today I have spent beginning my first experiments in Java. I love the concept of interfaces and am still working my current idea of callbacks and the observer pattern into this. My first project is to implement a simple tangled strings puzzle, where you move little "knobs" around to detangle the attached strings. I've got the knobs moving by mouse, presently, after an hour or so of work. The Java API is clearly the toughest part for me, so I'm still learning lots of details about AWT and Swing, the drawing and GUI libraries. But I'm really enjoying it -- it's a fresh idea for a project to do, and a new language... one that I'll be using extensively at university in... well, less than 2 months now!

Animating ASCII Water Ripples

2010-07-02T22:36:00.001-05:00

See rec.games.roguelike.development for an explanation of my algorithm.

The results are reasonably pleasing. The wave interference passes at a glance. Here the effect can be seen in the hotel pool:

The aqua ~'s expand in a random blob shape outwards, and interact with other ripples.

Improvements are still needed. Large areas with many ripples bottlenecks, but this can be alleviated by giving ripples a certain lifetime rather than permitting them to expand until they exhaust the body of water. Tomorrow I shall try to connect more of the hotel and work on guest pathing behavior. Excitement soon!

A new overworld

2010-07-01T00:42:00.000-05:00

Because the old one wasn't cutting it. I mean, it had no hotel vibe at all. So I present... the Atrium.

A grand staircase, tiled floor, two floors.

And there's the fountain... look familiar? Gonna work on a few effects for it. From the atrium are connections to the elevator, giftshop (working on this), laundry/vending room (another new one), kitchen, ballroom, pool, and themed guest floors. I really feel that this area has a better hub vibe to it. I'm working on connecting all the areas and fleshing out a few more, so guests may be trodding within the walls this weekend. Feeling much more enthused about the project again.

New Places

2010-06-29T23:52:00.000-05:00

After a haze of Bioshock, reading, and sketching, I've regained some momentum. Lots of new ideas for hotel layout, slowly being converted to ASCII. Also a more logical graph of the layout:

Once more of these places are set up, I'll get started on the Hotel's first special guest... he should be a familiar one. Guests follow a scheduled path, so how should they react to collisions? How definite should their path be? I'm voting waypoints, to allow them to sidestep players. Well, not quite waypoints, but connected-regions. Ah, this brings me back to the good old days of science projects... I can't wait to return to pathfinding. Anyway, your task is to interrupt their schedule with relevant diversions. Hopefully there should be several different sub-activities to that part...

combat
conversation, followed by hunt-down-clues
ESM tracing at night for more clues
kitchen minigame to upset their stomach
snake minigame to help sort their thought-stream

I also separated the MnemonicRL content and hotel content a bit more strictly. The server running now only has MRL stuff, although I could make it run in Hotel-mode just as easily. This first chunk of the game doesn't involve Cyphen quite so immediately, so it's better for me to encapsulate my thoughts strictly within the Hotel. Well, off to it.

Return, Barely

2010-06-28T14:55:00.000-05:00

My surgery (wisdom teeth) went fine; I've technically been back since Saturday. Code hasn't captured me, though -- focus is lost. The multiple projects thing doesn't seem to help. I also tried playing with Perlin noise, which could greatly help with animating water or clouds, but I'm missing some of the math background. All I've really managed is a half-hearted stab at a ballroom:

But where's the old sense of charm? The magic is in detail, not breadth. Gameplay-wide, I'm split among traditional roguelike combat, the herding puzzle in the kitchen, the snake sentence-munging, and the guests trodding their eternal paths. Bleh.

A brake

2010-06-24T23:24:00.000-05:00

I'm taking a brake for a few days due to some medical things. Train company's gonna be pissed, but they don't need to stop anyway. Server should stay up, but in my painkiller-induced haze, who knows. I started work on a snake-type creature (think the old game, snake); got an idea or so on how it can be used in the hotel. Also worked a bit on (ideas for) combat mechanics, but no new revelations that'll help. Ultimately, what's the most comfortable way for non-programmers (read: you) to tweak monsters' stats up or down a bit?

Editing a self-explanatory text file
A web interface with nice forms
Some built-in editor... most work for me, I'd have to draw up a nice interface for that.

Ideas? Well, I'm out.

A Different Pace

2010-06-22T23:00:00.000-05:00

I tried something new today to escape the rut, and it worked rather pleasantly: I didn't touch Mnemonic till an hour or so ago. Instead, I worked on my heat distribution Python program -- tomorrow, I'm going to generalize and implement a strategy for partitioning a map among N processors, complete with ghost zone handling. Next I delved into openscenegraph and emerged with 10^4 colored cubes arranged properly. I could never get ogre deployed properly on Debian. Tomorrow I hope to get my own camera controls going. Oh, and I started exercising more as well -- that greatly helps my state of mind.

Oh, I guess if you're following this blog, you want to hear about Mnemonic. Well, too bad, because you're going to see instead.

Oh, nothing new, you say? Go login. It swings. To and fro, parabolically... I might animate the candles, make them aflame...

And then here's the lobby in general, touched up just a taste with some color and a tree. I haven't figured out how I want to animate the fountain yet, nor will the lobby remain so plain-looking.

So tomorrow? Who knows. Within Mnemonic, I'm splitting my focus between adding new maps to the hotel and stabilizing combat for normal gameplay (oh, did I mention the revamped battle bar? Still a few tweaks I'm working on though). We'll see.

Direction

2010-06-21T20:20:00.000-05:00

Well, I gave up on the web layout and 3D dungeons. Got it working more or less, but realized it wasn't what I was shooting for. Worked instead on adding real-time lag back in. After you move, individual maps can control when you can move again (don't worry, this is always in the milliseconds). I vaguely want to get combat stable to a point where people might play, but I'm not sure if I want to work on this or not.

Beyond Mnemonic, I cleaned up the Python code for heat equations that I wrote during camp. I'm challenging myself to get it working in parallel properly. I'm also struggling with OGRE yet again... Zombissault has been on hold since I returned to Mnemonic. I'd like to get myself in the pace of working on a few projects at once to avoid stasis in any. More later, maybe.

Time and Again

2010-06-20T12:34:00.000-05:00

Home has become a place of sleeping, eating, and showering the past few days, but my schedule is winding down again. I vaguely remember getting the web-type dungeons working a few nights? days? ago, but it doesn't seem that I've written about that yet. I was waiting to get 3D dungeons working, which aren't tough at all -- I'll elaborate tonight with results, provided I don't wind up with friends again. Ah, the busy life.

Well, something

2010-06-16T21:20:00.000-05:00

Another day with an ample magnitude in the time category. Camp got me thinking about collaborative diffusion (an old pathfinding technique) in a new way at least... the concept of ghost zones and "adaptive mesh refinement" sound suspiciously like fancy terms for things I've ended up figuring out for myself in previous years.

I didn't too much today, but I do have a sample random curve:

My algorithm is recursive. Breshamn (misspelled and verbified!) a line between the two points. Unless the line's shorter than a threshold, then find the center and project a third point perpendicular outwards a little bit. Then draw two lines, instead. It certainly does produce... unique paths, perfect for the level style I have in mind. The problems:

Gonna have to modify my current border() cellular automata method to handle paths this thin. I don't quite remember why I ever wanted " . " to not become "#.#"
Sometimes the path isn't continuous, and I'm not sure why there are breaks. My guess is rounding errors; grid's limited to integers
The path can end up crossing itself because the angles and amplitudes permit this. Actually, I guess that's technically permissible -- not for a curve-generating algorithm, but within the context of the maps they'll be used in, it'll add flavor.

So that's about all. I have a vague idea in my head to use cellular automata (or similar) to produce a random curve, but only time will reveal how useful this may be.

Exhaustion

2010-06-15T23:28:00.000-05:00

Camp is now taking away from my develoment time, ironically enough. Python frustrates me with its awkward syntax, intrusive print statement, wacky data structures. I'm biased from my Perl/C++ background, but by the end of the week, I will have a justified list of complaints. :) We start MPI / parallelism tomorrow, although I won't exactly be there for that lesson.

Anyway, I have so little time this week to do anything. I've got an hour or so before exhaustion (and the dusty overlords shall claim me for the next chunk of days), so I'll see about those new guestroom maps. The pace will pick up again, I promise.

Lexical Jiffy Cult Bees

2010-06-14T22:05:00.000-05:00

Ehem, or technical difficulties. It's been a long day. "Boot camp" proved sufficient, provided the other four days of it pose better challenges than haggling with a new associate. So I come home without a parallel computation mindset, but with a nice sketch of my final idea for the area preceding random guestrooms... a maze. Picture winding corridors, twisting and bending and diverging constantly, overlapping in three dimensions... imagine tracing an Esemplasma (if I haven't explained this before, I will later) trail through these paths. Imagine that your means of detecting ESM must be fueled by vanquished memories. Oh, and imagine that the room becomes more angry and potent if you wander off too far.

You've got my idea.

So although the server is down and I have no access to anything (currently fixing Western Digital's wretched sector alignment bug from a live CD), I am working on some "simple" code to generate a sin wave between two points. The geometry of rotation is proving slightly fickle, but I shall prevail because there's nothing else to do.

A boring 30th post

2010-06-13T14:50:00.000-05:00

No fun extras yet, sorry. Old dungeons are reopened -- had to fix a staircase and map generation regression. Auto-explore mode should be mostly working once again, press the "O" key on a map that isn't lit up yet. I've had several confirmed cases of the Windows install working just fine now, so if that's been holding you back... now's the time to play.

Except there's still not much to do yet. What's the quickest way to balance the game? Should I focus on old monsters and items and the old dungeons, or work on just the kitchen puzzle and guestrooms...? I could really use some help.

Early update means more later

2010-06-12T19:41:00.000-05:00

Well, swimming was refreshing. Remember that wretched screenie last night? Yeah, forget it and take a look at what I've cooked up today:

Don't the stoves and tiles look better? I'm chasing the green ingredients into the yellow pots... or trying to. Their movement is still slightly buggy, but the local minima should be easy to fix. Herding actually doesn't take an influence map... it's easier to restrict the vegies' path to a linear one. That makes sense visually, anyway... you don't want vegies near the sides. Anyway, I need to come up with a good placement for the pots to make compiling dishes fun. More later? Quite possible.

Deceptive beginnings

2010-06-12T00:08:00.000-05:00

Today, I made minor changes to the map editor; fixed the standing wave implementation for wavy paths (thanks to simcop); successfully got a Windows friend running the game; and transformed a perfect maze into a perfect maze... of stovetops! The others are outright banal, so that last one... Yes, yes...

If that's not disorienting, I don't know what is. So once I get the ASCII art right, you'll basically be in a maze of connected stovetops. The hotel has a kitchen, after all. You will chase/herd ingredients towards a destination pot to create different concoctions for guests. Meanwhile, the staff will be pissed.. chefs can pop out of nowhere, spring traps on you. I hope this'll be a good blend between combat and puzzle. If I get the visuals right too, then hey.

I'm going to engage in recreational activities outdoors tomorrow, and this upcoming week I'll be attending a series of lectures and workshops on parallel computing. But I'll see what I can cook up in my spare time.

Abstractions only, please

2010-06-10T22:45:00.000-05:00

No pretty pictures today, sorry. I accomplished three simple but vital tasks today...

An in-game clock that'll run at whatever rate I tell it to, and not necessarily a consistent one.
Regions within a map that may print descriptions when you enter them. There's that interactive fiction element.
And also an interact command, currently bound to the space key, that may trigger something within a region.

Random guestroom dungeons are still bugging me. I had a few ideas for the bulk of the room before you get to the giant silhouette furniture. There could be a floating path to follow, a maze... but underneath is a giant colored checkerboard. A second maze is superimposed there. You have to solve the first maze while minding what sort of large tile is beneath you. To ~~complica~~ make things more interesting, the path could sway back and forth... I have a great visual image of this, but it turns out to be a taste tricky to implement. I was going to use a standing wave with 3 stationary nodes (the path sways by pivoting around you) but my parametrization of this isn't working out too well. Plus, I'm not sure standing waves with a moving center node even exist, let alone a nice equation to model one. I have consulted my old physics teacher with this problem...

But anyway, the issue stands -- what should happen in a randomly-generated guestroom? Bugger if I know, I'll figure it out tomorrow.

Quite a bit more than yesterday

2010-06-10T00:30:00.000-05:00

Maybe I was just being wicked and saving the good stuff for today. First off, I forgot that I've never posted a picture of the Lock & Key Suite... so here it is with the new auto-generated doors and room numbers:

I promise it really looks like a key, it's hard to capture zoomed-out renderings. More interestingly, each of these doors leads to a randomly generated "guest room dungeon." Two instances:

So right now, it's just some randomly chosen and placed furniture. Boring, I know, but I'm still trying to work out how to make the moving walls into a good puzzle. There will be combat in the guestrooms, but not with traditional monsters. I'm also playing with interactive fiction-style regional descriptions and an interact command.

Next plans are more suites (I really need mappers, pleaase?), coloring in everything to give it atmosphere (oh, and I haven't forgotten about lighting effects either), and the clock. Recall, the same 24 hours loop... I want to wrap a game-time system around my POE timers and configure things so that game-time might slow down/speed up in player-time. Once this and more of the hotel are fleshed out, I can begin implementing guests and their memories... this means actual gameplay at last. Try to control your salivation.