Monday Updates
Friday, December 10 2010 @ 07:46 AM UTC
This is your Monday Update for... um, 3am Friday. This is where I yammer on about what I've done this week. I've been doing this in the forums for the past few weeks as it was pointed out to me that I never actually write about what I release - and then I noticed that oh, hey, I've got a blog. Look at that.
(hey, some things are more fun when we sneak them out! Some of the best things we've ever written have been sneakily, silently released - and it's always nice for the player who finds them, knowing that she's the first to know...)
This week, I fiddled with the chat system and made it all AJAXey and lovely, so you don't have to wear out your F5 key. Behind the scenes, I did a whole bunch of optimization work and a few minor bug fixes. Not-yet-released, graphical updates.
When I say "graphical updates," I mean the sort of graphics you'd experience in a text adventure game - better descriptions of setting, more ways in which those descriptions can change according to game state, and so on. In other words, graphics that you read.
Text-adventure games can be both easy and hard to do. On the one hand, if you're already a writer, it might seem like an ideal job. But consider this...
Emily and I are writing a time and weather system for the Island. The objective is to give the player a greater sense of being a part of a living, breathing, changing world. Time is broken into seven stages: Dawn, Sunrise, Morning, Afternoon, Sunset, Dusk and Night. Weather is broken into seven steps - steps one to three are decreasing intensity of rain-free weather (cold at night, hot in the day), four is clear, calm and pleasant, seven is a torrential thunderstorm. So, forty-nine potential time and weather combinations.
We can cheat a bit, here. For instance, if we do something like this for Squat Hole:
"Nearby, a Midget scowls up at the vivid orange-red sky. It always seems to make him angry, although it does take his mind off the weather."
That can apply to fourteen potential combinations. We don't talk about whether the sun is rising or setting, just that the sky's red and hey, look, there is weather. Weather exists. We can give it a little more fidelity if we check whether the weather is stage four or below, and if it's not, we can talk about the raindrops dribbling up the Midget's nose - we can, in fact, cheat quite a lot and still give a decent sense of space, and of the passage of time.
Of course, we don't actually do that, because we're a pair of nutters who think that we can write 392 different Outpost descriptions and have them all be at least half-decent. Oh, and another 392 descriptions of terrain on the world map.
One thing I really did want to write was the way Kittania felt just after it had stopped raining. Kittania - and this has never been made clear from the current, rather sparse description - is an Outpost set in the middle of the jungle, where nobody bothered to chop down the trees before building a town. The thick ceiling of leaves and branches means it stays dry longer, but once it starts, it keeps raining in Kittania long after it's stopped elsewhere. The weather system stores the last weather condition alongside the current one, and moves one or two steps up or down at a time. Adding transition data to each time pattern means it's 7 * 31 possible combinations, 217 descriptions per Outpost, 1,519 descriptions in total. Yeah, those would be excellent graphics - but the only time it really matters is just after it's rained and the player's still getting wet from the trees shaking themselves in the wind like wet dogs.
It gets... exponential. But this is exactly what text-adventures are for - making you feel the cold, making you smell the lightning.
In a text adventure, you can tickle all five senses. You can smell the wet KittyMorph, taste the foul Midget beer. You can feel the high-voltage prickle of static charge arcing between the hair on your arms when you get too close to the Improbability Drive, the scent of ozone, the dry, metallic taste in your mouth. You can't do that in a graphical game.
On the other hand, if you want to make it rain in a 3D game, you only have to do it once; lines fall out of the sky, terminate in small animations or particle effects, reflections are enhanced, white noise comes from the speakers. A big job, but one that you don't have to repeat for every area in the game.
I really hope this weather thing actually works. :) It'll make things interesting for the Robots, certainly. The races are due a rebalance, and having one race powered by the sun has interesting possibilities.
Until next time, have fun!
(hey, some things are more fun when we sneak them out! Some of the best things we've ever written have been sneakily, silently released - and it's always nice for the player who finds them, knowing that she's the first to know...)
This week, I fiddled with the chat system and made it all AJAXey and lovely, so you don't have to wear out your F5 key. Behind the scenes, I did a whole bunch of optimization work and a few minor bug fixes. Not-yet-released, graphical updates.
When I say "graphical updates," I mean the sort of graphics you'd experience in a text adventure game - better descriptions of setting, more ways in which those descriptions can change according to game state, and so on. In other words, graphics that you read.
Text-adventure games can be both easy and hard to do. On the one hand, if you're already a writer, it might seem like an ideal job. But consider this...
Emily and I are writing a time and weather system for the Island. The objective is to give the player a greater sense of being a part of a living, breathing, changing world. Time is broken into seven stages: Dawn, Sunrise, Morning, Afternoon, Sunset, Dusk and Night. Weather is broken into seven steps - steps one to three are decreasing intensity of rain-free weather (cold at night, hot in the day), four is clear, calm and pleasant, seven is a torrential thunderstorm. So, forty-nine potential time and weather combinations.
We can cheat a bit, here. For instance, if we do something like this for Squat Hole:
"Nearby, a Midget scowls up at the vivid orange-red sky. It always seems to make him angry, although it does take his mind off the weather."
That can apply to fourteen potential combinations. We don't talk about whether the sun is rising or setting, just that the sky's red and hey, look, there is weather. Weather exists. We can give it a little more fidelity if we check whether the weather is stage four or below, and if it's not, we can talk about the raindrops dribbling up the Midget's nose - we can, in fact, cheat quite a lot and still give a decent sense of space, and of the passage of time.
Of course, we don't actually do that, because we're a pair of nutters who think that we can write 392 different Outpost descriptions and have them all be at least half-decent. Oh, and another 392 descriptions of terrain on the world map.
One thing I really did want to write was the way Kittania felt just after it had stopped raining. Kittania - and this has never been made clear from the current, rather sparse description - is an Outpost set in the middle of the jungle, where nobody bothered to chop down the trees before building a town. The thick ceiling of leaves and branches means it stays dry longer, but once it starts, it keeps raining in Kittania long after it's stopped elsewhere. The weather system stores the last weather condition alongside the current one, and moves one or two steps up or down at a time. Adding transition data to each time pattern means it's 7 * 31 possible combinations, 217 descriptions per Outpost, 1,519 descriptions in total. Yeah, those would be excellent graphics - but the only time it really matters is just after it's rained and the player's still getting wet from the trees shaking themselves in the wind like wet dogs.
It gets... exponential. But this is exactly what text-adventures are for - making you feel the cold, making you smell the lightning.
In a text adventure, you can tickle all five senses. You can smell the wet KittyMorph, taste the foul Midget beer. You can feel the high-voltage prickle of static charge arcing between the hair on your arms when you get too close to the Improbability Drive, the scent of ozone, the dry, metallic taste in your mouth. You can't do that in a graphical game.
On the other hand, if you want to make it rain in a 3D game, you only have to do it once; lines fall out of the sky, terminate in small animations or particle effects, reflections are enhanced, white noise comes from the speakers. A big job, but one that you don't have to repeat for every area in the game.
I really hope this weather thing actually works. :) It'll make things interesting for the Robots, certainly. The races are due a rebalance, and having one race powered by the sun has interesting possibilities.
Until next time, have fun!
