Update #23

Alright, so last time I said I was going to set aside time specifically to work on this game, ya, that didn't happen. Some things have kind of cropped up in real life that I need to deal with and I'm going to have to put this game on the back burner for awhile again. Further more I'm not sure I can or even should continue these once a fortnight posts until I'm ready to come back to work on the game. I know this will break the hearts of everyone who reads these posts (all zero of you) but I'm afraid literally everything else in my life has to come first. That said I'm going to continue to my art studies and am thinking of posting some piece of art that I make on my minds account every week or so. so until next time, have a good one.

Update #22

Man, it doesn't feel like it's been 2 weeks, but according to the calendar it has been, so guess it's time to make another post. I'm still not quite fully caught up, but I've gotten though the high priority stuff. I've also been thinking about how I want to handle this project going forward, at this rate I'm probably never going to have a version 0.2 to release. So going forward instead of working on the game just when ever I feel like it and have free time to do so, I'm going to start designating part of my week specifically to working on this game. Hopefully this slightly more structured approach will actually see results. Well I think that's pretty much it for this post, hopefully I'll have something more to report for the next one.

Update #21

Alright, so no progress to report this week, I had some unexpected things crop up and that has put me a bit behind on everything that I need to do. As a result there likely won't be any progress for awhile as I play catch up.

Progress Update #20

Alright, I have decided to take a step back on the animation system and not have it physics enabled. I think it's pretty clear that I was biting off more then I could chew, so the physics and animation systems are once again separate and the animations won't be physics enabled. At some point in the future I intend to change that, but right now it's holding back actual progress on the game so needs to be shifted to the back burner.

Update #19

Well, we have another post with no progress to report, shocking I know. the reason is partly the same as last weeks, things are too hot focus most of the time, but also because I've been trying to learn a new artistic concept and it's not really taking yet. I've been bashing my head against this wall and it's been quite frustrating. Some times I think that if I just work really hard at it for a few more months then I'll be able to start drawing interesting things, but then there are times like now here where I slam into a brick wall and fully realize that nope, this really is going to take years. And the worst part is, this still isn't fun, I imagine it's like what math homework is like for normal people. I probably could (and am sorely tempted to) write several pages about how frustrated I am, but it might be best if I end this post now, with any luck I'll be though this wall by the next one.

Update #18

So for this post I have no progress to report I'm afraid. The temperature is now in the triple digits where I live, so I've been largely spending my free time snuggled up with a block of ice in a heat induced stupor. About the only good news I have is that I've not stopped learning how to art by drawing during the relatively cool night hours.

Progress Update #17

Alright, so my current progress for the passed 2 weeks is I have been working on the animation system and I'm not very happy with how it's turning out. Apart from the animation system not yet able to do ragdoll, it has a very hackish feel to it. Now I'm fine with small bits of hackish code here and there to speed things up a bit, but I don't really like it for large chunks like the animation system, so most likely after I get ragdoll working, I'm probably going to go back and just rewrite the whole thing. As much as I could use the money, times like this make me glad I haven't set up patreon for this game yet, I'd feel real bad if I had been charging people for the amount of progress I have made.

In learning how to art news, I'm starting to learn figure drawing and have ordered a small drawing mannequin to help me with that. That's pretty much it for this post, hopefully I'll have more for the next one.

Progress Update #16

Alright, so what have I been up to these last 2 weeks? Well I have been working on character hitboxes, more specifically trying to figure out how to export hitbox physics information from Blender into my game. So far I've made absolutely no progress on that front. What I think I'm probably going to do is actually hardcode it into the game for now just so I can get the other parts of my engine working and then try again later when I have fewer points of failure to deal with.

In other news, I discovered this game called Space Station 13 and I'm probably going to shamelessly steal things from it because it solves my problem of how to make my game fun during the alpha. Basically how it works is the game has rounds that last 1-2 hours. At the start of each round everyone gets a random character and job to role play as. During the round random Space Balls like events can occur that you try to survive though. Because of the large verity of things that can occur, no one really knows how a round is going to play out and as a result you end up with rather interesting stories being crated. By adding this as a gamemode to my game I can have a game that's fun to play sooner, the features that would be needed for said gamemode would also be needed for my final game, and I wouldn't have to worry about players getting attached to their characters or worlds because everything will just get reset at the end of the round anyway.

Well, that's it for this post, hopefully for the next one I'll  actually have a ragdoll in the game, which probably wouldn't be all that interesting to watch, but it'll be something.

Progress Update #15

Whoops, completely spaced making a post (that no one will ever read) yesterday. anyway, I have decided the next thing I'll work on for my game will be the animation system. I don't really know how this should work, so I'm kind of making it up as I go along. The first thing I want it to be able to do is ragdoll, I think after I achieve that single actor animations should be fairly simple to implement. But the problem I've run into is ragdoll is a physics based animation and with my physics system and my animation system separate, this would be difficult to achieve. After some thought I realized that physics is a form of animation and should probably be merged into the animation system. This has numerous advantages and will solve a lot of the problems I've been trying to work out and allow all my animations to have physics enabled. Although I've not quite figured out how to translate my animations into something the physics engine understands yet and I strongly suspect I'm going to wind up writing my own physics engine before this game is done.

In other news I'm currently putting the finishing touches on my best drawing yet and have found my old digital camera, so when it's done I intend to post a picture of it to Minds.

Progress Update #14

So this time I've finished making the memory allocation manager work and have gotten it to generate and unload chunks dynamically around the player (a much more difficult task then it sounds). As for what I'm going to work on next, I'm not sure, my todo list is long. But I've been kind of thinking about the direction I want to go in for the alpha, originally what I was planning on doing was start out building the tutorial area and then move into the actual world a lot closer to the beta when most of the basic systems were in place, but I'm kind of changing my mind on that. It makes more sense to just let everyone into the game world right from the get go and build the tutorial area later. And with that I think I'll end it here, since no one is ever going to read this anyway.

Progress Update #13

Happy Easter everyone, I'm happy to report for this update that some actual progress was made on the game (although not much). I found myself with some free time and worked on the way memory is allocated for chunks and am nearly done with that. I have also decided that I've been away too long and while my life isn't quite where I need it to be, I'm going to start allocating a bit of my time to work on this game. I have to keep this short because of mandatory family stuff, but hopefully I'll have more progress and something interesting for next time.

Town Placement AI

Alright, so I'd like to start by announcing that I have created a minds account and can be found at https://www.minds.com/TheWrongHands, I have no idea what I'm going to do with this account, but it's now there for what ever I feel like doing with it. Now for this post I would like to talk about the mechanism I intend to use to place cities in my procedurally generated worlds, but we need to work our way up to that by starting with resource distribution.

In Minecraft the resource distribution is in such a way that that you have a little bit of everything everywhere. By that I mean that if you dig down anywhere your likely to easily find every resource you might need but in small pockets. This is perfect for a game that is primarily about construction and exploration as that anywhere you go you can easily find any resource that you might need to get started, but need to do a bit of exploring to amass the amount of resources needed for large scale construction. On the other hand for an RPG, this isn't so great. For the early game I want to force the player to run around and have to interact with NPC's in order to get the resources they need, while in the late game make the player figure out how to build where they need to instead of giving them the freedom to just build anywhere or in anyway they wish. To achieve this I want to put mine-able resources into large deposits that are big enough that if your can lay claim to one, you won't be needing any more of that particular resource for awhile and infrequent enough that if you just randomly dig down, your unlikely to find anything of value. This will give a reason to build mining villages strategically and incentivize trade between the the player and NPC as well as between NPCs. So with that in mind, village, towns, and cities can't just be placed any where and expect to receive a benefit, which leads us into the topic I was to talk about, AI city placement.

Alright, so the best way to get an AI to do what you want it to assign numbers to things, in this case places. Now while you could calculate things on a per-block level, that kind of resolution is unnecessary, so I'm going to use a chunk unit of measurement that's actual size is unspecified because it's not very important.

In the image above you can see I have made a 16x16 grid and placed a badly drawn village in one of the squares. There is also a yellow circle that represents the distance one can reasonably walk in a day. The optimal place to build another village is somewhere on that yellow line, the reason being that halfway between that line and the village is the furthest away someone who lives at that village can travel and expect to be home before sundown and thus is the furthest away they would be willing to go to farm or gather resources. So villages placed that far apart can optimally use the land without risk of overlap. This also gives travelers a fortified location in which to sleep at night, which benefits trade and the flow of resources. Now, there might be a resource or some other reason to not build perfectly on this line, so a little bit closer or somewhat farther might be acceptable. So now lets apply numbers to this so that an AI can understand it.

Ok, so I have gone though and applied a value to every square based on it's distance from the village and gave that yellow line a value of 300. Now because none of the squares are perfectly on that yellow line, none of them got exactly 300, instead the square with the highest value got 295 and is highlighted in red. I have also given any square too close to the village a negative number so that the AI will never build another village there. So now lets look at a resource.

Ok, so this image just shows the kind of effect I think a resource like copper should have. I gave it a value of 50 and as you can see squares within proximity get the full value after which the values rapidly deteriorate. The reason is that a village build close by or on top can easily harvest the resource, but the further away the village is placed the more difficult it is for them to harvest it until it just gets to be not worth it. So lets look at what happens when we combine the 2 grids.

So now we can see that the best place to build a new village (highlighted in red) is still close to the yellow line but now has the copper resource we just placed within it's range. So now what if we place down another resource, call it iron, and make it 3 times as valuable as copper?

Alright, now as we can see the best place to build a village now is by the iron deposit and that resource was valuable enough to justify building a bit further away from the yellow line. This might have the effect that travelers going between the 2 villages might have to walk in the dark a little bit, but hopefully won't be that big of a deal. Next lets talk about rivers.

Rivers are extremely important for trade, so as you can see in the above image I made them worth 250. I have also given them a much longer reach so that they will naturally pull new villages towards them. So lets see what happens when we combine it all together.

As you can see the river has pulled the best place to build a new village closer to it and further away from that yellow line. Although the village is still close enough to the yellow line that travel shouldn't be an issue, travelers may have to spend an hour or 2 in the dark when going between villages. On the upside, that iron is now much closer to the new village and much easier for it to harvest. The next village built after this one will quite likely be on the bank of that river.

I'm not sure what more to add to this, I just made up the numbers and rules on the fly, so there is quite likely lots of room for improvement on everything, but this should be enough to give you a rough idea of how I want this to work. For anyone wondering how I calculated and numbered every single square without fellating a 9mm, the answer is I made the following python script for GIMP:

# this is so i don't have to press enter
import math

townD = 200
oreMin = townD / 3
oreMax = townD * 2 / 3
riverMin = townD / 3
riverMax = townD * 2

def render(name, map):
    img = gimp.image_list()[0]
    # pdb.gimp_selection_none(img)
    layer = gimp.Layer(img, name, 512, 512, RGBA_IMAGE, 0, NORMAL_MODE)
    img.add_layer(layer, 0)
    biggest = 0
    for y in range(0, 16):
        for x in range(0, 16):
            if(map[y][x] > biggest):
                biggest = map[y][x]
    #couldn't get this to work, but i'll leave it in in-case i need it later
    #pdb.gimp_context_swap_colors()
    # for y in range(0, 16):
        # for x in range(0, 16):
            # if(1):#map[y][x] == biggest):
                # pdb.gimp_image_select_rectangle(img, 2, x * 32 + 1, y * 32 + 1, 31, 31)
                # pdb.gimp_image_select_rectangle(img, 1, x * 32 + 2, y * 32 + 2, 29, 29)
                # pdb.gimp_edit_fill(layer, 1)
                # pdb.gimp_edit_bucket_fill(layer, 1, 24, 100, 0, 0, x * 32 + 1, y * 32 + 1)
    #pdb.gimp_context_swap_colors()
    # pdb.gimp_selection_none(img)
    for y in range(0, 16):
        for x in range(0, 16):
            if(map[y][x] == biggest):
                pdb.gimp_context_swap_colors()
            text = pdb.gimp_text_fontname(img, None, x * 32 + 2, y * 32 + 2, str(int(map[y][x])), -1, 1, 10, 0, 'Sans')
            if(map[y][x] == biggest):
                pdb.gimp_context_swap_colors()
            pdb.gimp_image_merge_down(img, text, 1)

def dis(a, b):
    return math.sqrt(math.pow(a[0] - b[0], 2) + math.pow(a[1] - b[1], 2))

def initMap():
    map = [[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
    [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
    [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
    [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
    [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
    [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
    [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
    [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
    [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
    [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
    [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
    [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
    [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
    [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
    [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
    [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]]
    return map

def calMap(map, rValue, rPos, rule):
    for y in range(0, 16):
        for x in range(0, 16):
            testPos = [x * 32 + 16, y * 32 + 16]
            for pos in rPos:
                v = rule(testPos, pos, rValue)
                if(v < 0 or map[y][x] < 0):
                    map[y][x] = -1
                elif(v > map[y][x]):
                    map[y][x] = v

def mergeMaps(a, b):
    map = initMap()
    for y in range(0, 16):
        for x in range(0, 16):
            if(a[y][x] < 0 or b[y][x] < 0):
                map[y][x] = -1
            else:
                map[y][x] = a[y][x] + b[y][x]
    return map

def townRule(testPos, pos, value):
    d = dis(testPos, pos)
    if(d <= townD * 0.75):
        return -1
    elif(d < townD):
        return max(math.floor(((d - townD * 0.75) * 4 * value) / townD), 0)
    else:
        return max(math.floor(((townD * 2 - d) * value) / townD), 0)

def oreRule(testPos, pos, value):
    d = dis(testPos, pos)
    if(d < oreMin):
        return value
    elif(d > oreMax):
        return 0
    else:
        return max(math.floor(((oreMax - oreMin) - (d - oreMin)) * value / (oreMax - oreMin)), 0)

def riverRule(testPos, pos, value):
    d = dis(testPos, pos)
    if(d < riverMin):
        return value
    elif(d > riverMax):
        return 0
    else:
        return max(math.floor(((riverMax - riverMin) - (d - riverMin)) * value / (riverMax - riverMin)), 0)

town = [[341, 21]]
iron = [[433, 309]]
copper = [[80, 108]]
river = [[16, 319], [56, 329], [93, 338], [130, 353], [161, 370], [191, 388], [221, 410], [254, 428], [288, 441], [323, 445], [357, 451], [389, 465], [424, 486], [455, 505]]

townMap = initMap()
copperMap = initMap()
ironMap = initMap()
riverMap = initMap()

calMap(townMap, 300, town, townRule)
calMap(copperMap, 50, copper, oreRule)
calMap(ironMap, 150, iron, oreRule)
calMap(riverMap, 250, river, riverRule)

tc = mergeMaps(townMap, copperMap)
tci = mergeMaps(tc, ironMap)
tcir = mergeMaps(tci, riverMap)

render('town map', townMap)
render('copper map', copperMap)
render('river map', riverMap)
render('tc map', tc)
render('tci map', tci)
render('tcir map', tcir)
# this is so i don't have to press enter

Dark Times Ahead

I had hoped to be able to keep political stuff out of this since this blog is supposed to be about a game I'm making and contain only fun things, but it appears that the real world isn't going to let me or people like me just have fun. As you may or may not be aware Google has recently caved to the pressure of the perpetually offended and has announced plans to make their platform a haven for the intellectually dishonest, just as Twitter and Facebook have done before them. You might be wondering what this has to do with my project, well Blogger (the site your currently reading this on) is owned and operated by Google. Now I'm small and generally insignificant, so I might be able to just fly under the radar, but as that I intend to add a lot of fun things to my game and as the perpetually offended hate fun, there is a chance that at some point in the future I'll be forced to take this project down.

Thank you for your time, I'm now going to go sit in the corner and rock back and forth creepily for awhile.

Update #12

I'm afraid I can't write much for this update, an old hand injury of mine is flaring up making it difficult to use the computer (perhaps I should do a bit less faping). Anyway, I'll try to make up for it with my next post by putting in some actual effort and some shitty ms paint drawing.

Update #11

    Alright, I'm still a little sick, but I feel well enough to write something for this post. I'm not entirely sure "Progress Update" is the right thing to call these posts, so I'm just going to start calling them "Update" since for the time being I'm not actually able to work on the project. I probably shouldn't actually even be allocating the time to make these posts, but it's important to me that I don't forget about this project since I really want to make this game.

Learning to Art:

    My drawings are starting to get somewhat alright, I've still got along way to go before I'm able to make anything fap worthy, but it's getting to the point where I'm seriously considering buying a scanner and sharing them.

Game Ideas:

    Ok, so new section that I'm not entirely sure what to call it, but this is going to be where I talk about things I want to do for my game. For this post I was hoping to delve a little bit into math, but I seem to have misplaced my notes, so we're just going to cover the basic idea. For this post I would like to continue talking about sky boxes, or more specifically that thing hello games promised for No Man's Sky but apparently couldn't figure out how to do, realistic orbiting celestial bodies.

    There are two ways to have realistic orbiting celestial bodies, the first of which is to make it part of the physics simulation like the way universe sandbox did. This will produce accurate results and will even allow bodies to interact with each other and affect one another's orbits, but is very cpu intensive, must be run continuously even when no one is there to see it, and can't handle large skips in time.

    The other way to do it (and the way I intend to) is use mathematical models (I don't remember which ones or I would specifically name them) to predict where an orbiting body will be at any given time, like how Kerbal Space Program dose. How this basically works is if you know the mass of the object being orbited, the mass of the orbiting object, and the initial position and vector of the orbiting object then you can predict where that object should be in it's orbit at any given time. The advantages of this is it requires very little cpu time compared to the physics based method, it only needs to run when it's needed (such as when the player is looking up or the game wants to know what season it is), and it can easily handle large skips in time both forward and back. The only real disadvantage of this is that celestial bodies won't really be able to interact with each other, but that shouldn't really be an issue as I don't intend to place them close enough to one another for them to interact.

Progress Update #10

I was originally planing to get into some maths for this post, but I'm sick and can't really focus right now, so perhaps next time.

Progress Update #9

Well, as I have sadly been too busy with things to work on this game since the last update, but I have been at least setting aside time to learn how to art. However just leaving the post at that seems kind of lame, even though no one reads these. So after some thought, I have decided I'm going to talk about some thoughts and ideas that I have for this game as filler. Hopefully the occasional person that accidentally finds this project with think it interesting.

To start off with, I would like to talk about the shape of the world. As I stated in the first post I made, I'm going for a voxel box aesthetic kind of like Minecraft. It's a simple look that is easy to code and simple to art. But unlike Minecraft, I would also like to have a planet that is about the size of earth and is a sphere but voxel box worlds don't really do round. So how do we solve this? Well we can start by connecting the east and west edges of the map, turning it into a cylinder (or more accurately a conveyor belt). This gives us a roundish map that if you travel east or west long enough you'll eventually get back to where you started, but isn't a sphere. The first thing that dose come to mind to make it a sphere is to pinch the ends, but buildings built on the surface will start to look kind of weird as you approach the poles, so we can't do that. The only solution I have been able to think of is actually to just fake it. By that I mean we take the X, Y, and Z position of the player and convert that into Longitude, Altitude, and Latitude and then use that to figure out what angle everything in the sky should be at if you were on a sphere. The problem with this is that the closer you get to the poles, the more the illusion breaks down. At the pole it's self the illusion would produce such a horrid nightmare that I think it might be best to set up an instant kill zone long before the player reaches it. But between the north and south of a particular latitude (which should be further north/south then any player would have reason to travel) it should look quite nice as the position of the sun, moons, and other planets change to reflect your current position.

With that I'm afraid I need to get back to work and will have to wait until the next update for more of my thoughts and ideas.

Progress Update #8

once again I've had more unexpected things pop up that i need to deal with, so i haven't had much time to work on this and at the moment it looks like there might be a few more of these updates where i won't have much to show.

Code Update:

    I've started working on a memory manager for the game. The reason is that when your dealing with allocation and deallocation of small bits of memory, fragmentation isn't too much of an issue. But if you need large chunks of memory, you could potentially wind up with large chunks of wasted space. I'm hoping to really did into the chunk system soon to begin work on the world it's self, but for that I'm going to need gigabytes of continuous unfragmented ram.

learning to Art Update:

    I've picked up a book on drawing, so hopefully I won't be wondering around blind anymore and it will speed up my learning.

Progress Update #7

I'm afraid I've been a little busy with other things, so haven't had much time to work on this project the passed few weeks. So Happy New Year to everyone and hopefully I'll be able to make some progress for the next update.