This is an amazing presentation (warning, it IS a powerpoint presentation recorded on Youtube) ... describing both how we think about Game AI.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD9HGw1ZTZY

Any time I try to look up material on predicate logic or the other propositional formal logics, just about anything I find rapidly devolves into a cryptic and difficult to read notation involving symbols I've never seen anywhere else. It's frustrating, but before I whine or complain about it too hard ... I remember that I've learned harder. It's just that I also know that it can be a long while, and a lot of hard work before you can begin to read a new syntax without having to yank up a cheat sheet every other term used. *ears flat pout*

is(lua,syntax).

is(datalog,syntax).

is(idea,valid) :- can(cerolas,implement,idea), can(cerolas, combine, syntax).

has(datalog,promise) :- is(idea,valid).

? is(cerolas,sane).

?...

[ Continued ... ]

Bugs in code meant to be written robustly are still bugs. I'm both shocked and pleased at how well the bug catching code is working ... and I'm feeling the ever-common frustration that comes with debugging.

[ 11/18/11 21:11:48	 ] [Option: [No Title][!] ] Option Parent was not provided a valid table.

[ 11/18/11 21:11:48	 ] [Option: [No Title][!] ] Option Parent was not provided a valid table.

[ 11/18/11 21:15:33	 ] Starting

[ 11/18/11 21:15:33	 ] Option cannot be a nil value. Dummy option used.

[ 11/18/11 21:16:20	 ] Starting

[ 11/18/11 21:16:20	 ] Option cannot be a nil...

[ Continued ... ]

I'm not used to this, but I'm not complaining.

Working on the UI ... and for the first time I'm laying out a major system in a preplanned design (with UML) and then implementing each part ... I'm missing dual display, because I'm constantly flipping back and forth between my code and the design, and considering the way the objects are interconnected, coupled with my short attention span, I can't simply go down and knock out one class at a time, as each class is dependent on other classes behaving in specific ways, so I'm going step by step, making sure it all fits together the way I've laid it out.

The most frustrating part is the fact that it takes me days of rolling over 'what I want to do' in my mind before I find a structure of objects (pattern, design,...
[ Continued ... ]

I have a plan made out for writing all of this ... it's a good plan ... but so much of it is ... reinventing the wheel. There are other options out there, options beyond using something simplistic and ready made. RPGMaker is not my style, and I'm not very attracted to game-maker as a platform. Not that either of the aforementioned frameworks are bad in any light. I've had people suggest Lua, rather than C# ... the latter being primarily the realm of business development, whereas the majority of the Roguelike development community seems to enjoy using the Lua scripting language.

I've stubbornly clung to the few environments I know well, rather than keeping an open mind. The only reason I've avoided Java, Lua, or any other environment is the simple facts that I've become...
[ Continued ... ]

Right, for various reasons, I'm going to be renaming my humble little project DreamForge ...

Starting to work on the text graphics stuff proper, should be more exciting once I get things working.

WorldForge Design Guidelines

I admit, I've set some ambitious goals for this project. I plan on designing for a level of game world complexity that far exceeds the bare essentials to produce a 'Roguelike' ... as I have a massive interest in emergent behavior, both on the part of the player, and in the Artificial constructs that the player interacts with. I don't want to aim for 'realistic' so much as engaging, surprising, unpredictable, and even endearing.

My thoughts go to the iconic Barney Calhoun of Half-Life, who began his existence as a humble cardboard cutout enemy, nameless and largely faceless ... Valve decided to test path-finding by setting him as friendly to the player, telling him to follow the player about as best he could. Of course he would...
[ Continued ... ]

Simply put, Designing things can be boring ... there is an urge to implement, experiment, 'cowboy code' ... I've started this project as an experiment to hopefully teach myself to resist these urges in order to produce solid coding practice, and a better product as a result.

Before you get to designing the 'fun stuff' you have to focus on the mundane ... in this case, the UI, what the player really interacts with ... and that's what I'm slogging through now. I've gotten a better picture for my abstraction, adhering to the practice of only referring to interfaces that expose only that which I want the program to directly influence, avoiding direct calls to the rendering code, and generalizing such interfaces and the information passed through them so as to avoid conflicts with...
[ Continued ... ]

*screams like M-Bison watching Guile getting the dust pummeled out of him*

YES! YES!

Just broke my coder's block ... word wrapping and word masking may commence ... a simple and elegant solution too. I'm just thrilled that I can finish up with the text bit and move on to actually making the UI ... I was afraid I was going to be stuck figuring out how to implement parsing a string so that it intelligently distinguishes spaces and #multiple# kinds of %test masks% even if the text masks have %spaces in-between the mask markers%, the text in-between the markers %, # gets counted as part of the mask, yet words without markers get chopped out properly. I am so freaking happy.

/ Right … final stretch … this is taking longer than I expected (with far more text than I expected).

Poetry In Motion


Right, I've got a lot laid out so far, but it's far from a complete picture. Let's get to the centerpiece of this display.

Status

I last left off talking about Aspects. They're meant for describing passive systems that are always working, health regeneration, hunger, physiology … things that don't change about a Tangible Element. Aspects help, along with Stats, to describe what something is. Status describes what is happening to it. This covers a broad range of stuff, but I'll try to cover the most important parts.

Statuses carry context concerning what is happening to a Thing....
[ Continued ... ]