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[timmeh]

Will free be soon?

What?  Sorry, don't follow... I'm a little slow this morning...

If you mean progress on Tower of Azari, it's coming, sorta.  I'm definitely still trying to figure out the scripting, but a friend of mine is big into javascript, so most of my free time yesterday was spent learning from him (and DANG has Javascript progressed a lot since I last messed with it 5+ years ago!!!)  On the upside, my website looks a lot nicer than it did before...

Anyways, I finished all my homework until more is assigned tomorrow, so I've pretty much got the day off once I get a list of remaining college stuff to my dad.  Should be able to figure it all out pretty soon, and then fun things can happen

[timmeh]

Okay... sorry for the seeming lack of activity, but after I wrote the world info converter, I was inspired to start a secret project.  It's been in the works for a couple days, and it's almost done, but I want to clean it up some before I release it, so it probably won't be up until either late tonight or some time tomorrow.  Either way, when it is done, I'll create a new topic for it, and announce it here as well.

Also, I've got a camping trip this Friday-Sunday, and I will not have access to my computer, or the internet, for that time.  Although I'd still appreciate any testing/input on the secret project, once I get it up.

[Outcast Orange]

Ooh, sounds interesting.

I'll be watching out for it.

[timmeh]

  Thanks.

Anyways, it's done   It's a sort of sister project to my world history/site and population parser.  Feel free to check it out

[EDIT]:  I will be out camping from Friday the 12th through Sunday the 14th, I will not have any access to a computer, the internet, or any other electronics, so I won't be checking any of my projects.  However, please do comment while I'm gone, I'll get to the replies as soon as I get back.

[EDIT2]:  Been plugging along at a great many things... I'm thinking I may go with Google's V8 (C++ Javascript engine) for the scripting, as it looks incredibly simple to set up with C++ classes/objects...

[timmeh]

Okay, there's some good news, some bad news, and some fairly ugly news...

The good news, I got my laptop back from my friends after a complicated series of Momocon (anime convention of sorts) related events.

The bad news, I probably won't be returning to my normal projects for a bit, as I'm supposed to have something hands-off (tech-demo or something...) to show off at graduation, and I only have a little over a month to get something awesome put together...

The ugly, my computer seems to be really glitchy... not sure if it's something about being left in the car for too long, a virus (I'll run a scan tonight...) or what, but the screen is flickering black a lot... I can still use it (obviously), but it's a pain, so I won't likely get a lot done until I get it fixed.  (It seems to only happen when something tries to refresh... happened just now when my Facebook chat updated...)

I'll keep everyone posted though, once I figure out what the heck I'm gonna do for the graduation display, I may be a little more productive with ToA and such...

[Outcast Orange]

Take your time Timmeh,
 don't get burnt out feeling bad about not working on your game.
That almost happened to me this week.

[timmeh]

Thanks Orange

Unfortunately, due to my laptop's screwing up even worse now, I'll be taking an enforced semi-leave (I'll probably still lurk via the PS3 ) until I can get it fixed... and since the warenty is out, and I'm not only broke, but hard up for cash for several other things, I may or may not be able to get it fixed soon, depending on weather it's a software or hardware issue...

Either way, hopefully I'll be back soon, but I can't make any guarentees...

[timmeh]

I've discovered that the laptop only screws up when plugged in... as irritating as it is to have to use it in 1hr-1.5hr bursts cause of the short battery life, it's better than nothing.  I've managed to throw a couple fairly interesting programs together, that will be on display at graduation.  The exe files (and one text file describing the tic-tac-toe program) can be downloaded in a .zip file here.

But I'm not really here just to post those.  I'll have the source code up eventually, but first I need to fix a few things.  Primarily, in the Mastermind AI program, it tends to guess the same pattern multiple times, and I have no idea why... theoretically, they should be eliminated by the first guess.  Anyways, if you want to take a look at it, see what you can figure out, it's source code is here.  Note that it is dependent on Allegro (my first remotely decent graphical app, and I didn't even use any external graphics xD).  All this means, is that you have to have allegro installed some place it can find the header file, and then link it to "liballeg.a".

If you have any problems running the programs let me know, I haven't tested them on any other computers, so there may be a missing DLL, particularly for the master-mind program...

[Outcast Orange]

I'm happy to see you posting again!
The projects sound interesting too.

BTW, how many of these 1.5 hour bursts have you spent playing DF 2010?

[timmeh]

I'm happy to see you posting again!
The projects sound interesting too.

BTW, how many of these 1.5 hour bursts have you spent playing DF 2010?

Depends how quickly my battery recharges... oh wait, total?  If I answered that question honestly, you'd probably call a psychologist for me

As far as the projects, I think they're pretty interesting, but I'm rather biased   There's three of them at the moment, and I'm trying to decide if I want to refine the Sudoku solver (and write a generator for it) for a fourth....  The first is a tic-tac-toe AI example.  The computer plays games of tic-tac-toe against itself, using perfect AI.  It's both interesting to watch the reasoning behind the moves, and as an example of how a game can be too simple, such that perfect AI can be written by a relative "newb" in a matter of hours

The second is a combination maze-generator/A* tech-demo.  It basically makes a standard maze (much like you would find in a news-paper, child's McDonnals meal or maze-book), then creates a start and end point, and solves the maze using A*.  The third is a graphical app (using Allegro), unlike the other two which are PDCurses.  It plays games of Mastermind (guessing the peg-pattern game) against itself, although the AI there is far from the best.  Apparently, it's been narrowed down to 5 or 4-6 (depending on the algorithm) guesses, but that was as a college thesis sort of project, and is probably more than a bit beyond my abilities right now

If anyone tries them, please let me know if you have any trouble running them (missing DLLs, errors, etc.).  I won't have my computer to run them on come graduation, and I really don't want to find out during set-up the day before that one or all of them won't run....

[Alexhans]

Many of these things look really interesting.  I have practically no time right now so I'll check them out later (maybe after the 5th of May  ).

Anyway... I don't know how you implemented the AI but you need to be careful when there's a relatively short number of combinations so that it's possible to give an answer to each of them... Good AIs are supposed to be general... Not that I've implemented anyone though (and the lame finite state machines I tried to do, definetly don't count)... Just what I hear.   

Good luck.  You seem to be progressing a lot.

[timmeh]

Thanks for the input!  I don't actually remember how I managed the AI, although from what I remember it's fairly rigid, and will probably need to be re-worked at some point.  Mostly just moves and attacks for now though, so it's not too complicated.

Good news though, I've managed to get Allegro and PDCurses set up with MSVC++ 2010, and got both ToA and cirCA-Sim to compile   Work should resume, although perhaps not today, since my prom is tomorrow....  Anyways, hopefully I'll have better luck with the scripting stuff as well, although I'm currently thinking that what I'd really like to do, is make magic a bit less predictable and straightforward than that, although I'm not quite sure how yet....

Since I'm rather torn on the way magic will work, I may go back to room descriptions, and see if I can get the flavor-text and such in there.  Shouldn't be too difficult, as soon as I figure out how I want to load the information used to generate it.

[EDIT]: Okay, while I think on magic and room descriptions, I'm going to go back and do some remedial work that should have been done in the first place.  In addition to that, since my memory is so horrible, I'm going to keep a list of all the changes I make here, as I make them, so I don't forget what I've done

• Changed item weights to floats (decimal values)
• Added functions for getting the maximum weight the player can carry, as well as the amount currently carried.
• Added display of the carried and maximum weight to the inventory display.
• Player cannot pick up anything beyond what he can carry.
• Added display of the carried and maximum weight to the shop display (buy and sell).
• Player cannot purchase an item that would put him beyond his weight limit.
• Fixed a bug causing all enemies on the first floor to be "Blobs".
• Fixed a bug causing all enemies to be spawned in the first room.
• Fixed a bug causing non-blob enemies to be spawned with negative AP, effectively preventing them from moving or attacking.

Continued in later post...

[Ottofar]

It's great, but it crashed when I equipped halberd.

[timmeh]

Hmmm... that's strange... did you have another weapon equipped at the time?  Did it crash immediately when you pushed the enter button to equip, or was there some delay?

Thanks for the input!  (Oh, and I probably won't reply to this until tomorrow afternoon.  Have to leave for prom in about 10 minutes, and then have an after-party that'll go until tomorrow, shortly before lunch...)

[Ottofar]

I had just sold a sword, without unequipping it first. I also wore a shield.  It crashed instantly.