Sentience

Misanthrop,

Replying to your question asked in that other thread...

There are a few problems to look out for when the project starts getting big. Some are technical, others are mental and psychological.

Off the top of my head....

Technical:
(*) Ensuring you've made regular and comprehensive backups so when you implement a change and it cocks it all up you can take a step back without losing too much work.
(*) Good framework plan. Planning the game at the start reaps massive (unseen) benefits towards the end. Behemoth and I keep wanting to implement changes to the core way the game works, and changing the framework 2yrs after it's been written is extremely hard.

Mental:
(*) Keeping your head around all the code. Sentience is now over 33000 lines of code and it becomes somewhat difficult to remember where it all goes, what it all does and how it all talks to each other.

Psychological:
(*) Keeping motivated to actually finish it. Sentience has been going 2.5 - 3 yrs now and there have been a couple of times when Behemoth and I have nearly packed it through lack of motivation. It's hard to get back into the swing of things after that. You need to ensure the project is something you want to do, and are something you're going to finish.
(*) On a project where you're not the only person, ensuring everyone else keeps up the rate of work is also an issue. If they're paid, it's easy to do as you have leverage - but if they're volunteers or a friend, it's rather difficult.

I've just woke up so that will do for now... :)

Behemoth, if you have anything to add to the above, speak up... :)

I tell you what Behemoth, that wine I was drinking last night gave me some really bizzare dreams!

I distinctly remember 2:

The first one, we (me and some other random military type guys) were fleeing from some kind of Predator type thing (invisible, firing plasma bolts at us, asking us if we wanted candy, that sort of thing) and we were retreating into this kind of bunker. The door was set in the floor and didn't open - you put your finger against this tiny hole and it sucked you in. When it was my turn I couldn't figure it out and whilst I was dillying a couple of guys got shot. So I moved out of the way and played dead whilst the others went through this hole. When the predator type thing came over and was trying to figure it out I coshed it over the head. And it turned out to be a slim brunette with a cute face and lovely little breasts. But boy did she have a surly attitude. Weird dream.

The second one was much nicer visually. I was at some kind of small town and I was looking to find an apartment to rent with a balcony. Don't know why. The town was gorgeous! It had a huge, slow moving river (more like a long thin lake really) runnin right through the middle of it. In fact the town was built spanning it. The middle of the town has this massive Cathedral (with the lake/river going underneath it). The people spoke with a French accent. It was visually stunning. I have a few images from it stuck in my mind but I lack the artistry to get them on paper... :(

I'll be drinking some more of that wine tonight... :D

Bought some more of that wine... :D

Right, I've been working on the quick build mech wotsit and added the checks to make sure you don't get aircraft with lungs and yeti claws, but it could still be improved a bit though.

At the moment it only goes of the highest might chassis in stores and tries to build a mech with it. It may not be possible with that chassis but a less mighty one have the correct components available to allow a mech to be built.

I'm going to need to put some kind of looping in, but then it cacks up the reporting from the function. This is going to be painful.

OK dude, hoping you'll get this this eveing....

A quick look at the build building screen marks it as nowhere near as nice as the SMAC one. It consists of a scrollable list of six buildings on the left along with their name and cost on the right of each of them.

40x40 images as well.

I was thinking that maybe we should expand them to 160x160 or at least 80x80 and have a single text field describing them beneath. Similar to the SMAC matrix, but with a little more detail beneath.

I can also animate the screen if required. I was thinking of doing that to the majority of screen to provide a little more movement.

Quote:

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Originally posted by Arbiter
OK dude, hoping you'll get this this eveing....
nope, went to bed as promised

A quick look at the build building screen marks it as nowhere near as nice as the SMAC one. It consists of a scrollable list of six buildings on the left along with their name and cost on the right of each of them.40x40 images as well.

I was thinking that maybe we should expand them to 160x160
we had 160x160 images for the help screens, so that might work
or at least 80x80 and have a single text field describing them beneathnice. Similar to the SMAC matrix, but with a little more detail beneath.

I can also animate the screen if requirednot a ****ing chance sonny. I was thinking of doing that to the majority of screen to provide a little more movement.

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if you get chance, try to download some of this for inspiration or ideas:

Ministry - the one and only album I have is supposed to be a classic. Try "thieves" or "burning inside"

Pitchshifter - anything before their current album. older stuff sounds kind of heavy/industrially with a sort of Ministry sound. More modern stuff is sample-laden and punky. Also, because they're really nice guys, they've given away nearly 200 samples on their CDs, which are completely public domain on the simple condition that you credit the band by name. Perhaps try "ZX81" for an intersesting drum 'n' bass / ambient instrumental

Fear Factory - the names a good start. My personal favourite album, Demanufacture is very rhythmically sound, with a crushing industrial edge. Essentially metal with technological overtones (they were described as cyber-metal in their early days), they went on to produce concept albums concerning the struggle between man and machine (sound familiar). "Remanufacture" is a comple remix album of "Demanufacture" and pushes the whole thing in a dance / dub / drum 'n' bass / techno direction. Check out "Faithless" (a remix of "zero signal"), "scumgrief (deep dub trauma mix)", or for a complete industrial head****, try "refinery" which sounds like...a refinery. oh yeah, have a listen to "HK - Hunter Killer" too. Its been used in TV ads and has a very sci-fi feel.

Pi soundtrack - its all pretty much industrial ambient drumnbass. Clint Mansell - "pi r squared", "2 pi r", or Psilonaut - "third from the sun"

Tribes of Neurot / Walking timebombs - TON have been described in the music press as "dark ambient", this album is very slow, quite disturbing, full of interesting samples. Get hold of any track off it. The track listining is: "unspoken path", "rust", "recurring birth", "march to the sun", "origin unknown", "blood and water", "edgewood", "head of the scorpion"

Misery Loves co - normally industrial tinged metal, try "kiss your boots (urban jungle mix)" if you can get hold of it. techno / drum and bass rhythm sounds nothing like the original

White Zombie - taken from their remix album, try to find "Electric Head pt. 1 (satan in high heels mix)" its a bit cheesy but its got a fantastic mechanical intro. and the remix title is cool too.

apartment 26 - blah blah, more stuff that you wont even read anyway :p. Try the intro to "dusk"

errr...Thats about it. There's loads of other stuff that didn't feel quite right (eg Prodigy, Tool), and I just thought I'd compile something for you, to get the ideas flowing. Let me know what tracker we're using and we'll play around. Good to know we've got some free samples too...:)

Oh yeah, nearly forgot, try anything from the Traffic Soundtrack for a pleasant ambient feel. Theres some nice effects in there.
oh yeah, and that drumnbass album I suggested was called "deadly chambers" by enforcers

I've got a couple of those albums on MP3 from when I burned them from you. I'll have a look/listen a bit later.

I was thinking of dynamically expanding the images to 80x80 and animating them. It wouldn't entail any extra work for you. I think 160x160's in a matrix would look a bit big at 800x600. You wouldn't get more than 6 buildings on screen, which is no different than now....

So you'd have a matrix of buildings (4x3 or something) and a text box underneath. When you click on a building, it tells you what it is, what it does and what it costs. Double clicking brings up the help screen.

Last night I expanded the messaging system for internal messages, so now you can allocate a message to a player when it's not their turn. This means I can use it for the diplomacy messaging and also to reports combat results.

I was thinking of having a message manager (as you're going to get bombed with messages when the turn starts) so you can pick and choose what messages to read. Similar in look to the help screen.

You'd also be able to re-read messages later on in the turn (something that is currently impossible).

Whaddya think?

And whaddya think to the post above as well....?

hello :)

As attached - the new build buildings screen....

Looks good, except that a lot of the images look grany/pixelized. You might wish to find someway to fix that.

They're grainy/pixelised because they're expanded from 40x40 to 80x80. It doesn't look so bad when they're animated. At 40x40 they're much too small (especially when running at a high resolution).

Behemoth,

I was also going to ask you about an intermediary screen for the quick build.

Concept sketch attached... :D

The panel on the left is the chassis genre to use, the one on the right is a list of basic types (assault, defense, stealth, spotter). The player would pick one from each of these (air defense or sea assault etc) and that would give the quick build some focus.

The last chosen settings would be remember so when they next click quick build it's already set to what they last had. They can click ok if they want it again.

I just though it would provide a little more depth. Whaddya reckon?

*ahem*

Concept sketch attached here...

I know why they are grainy, but I thought you might want to fix it...

As for the quick build selection screen, I think it would be a good idea.

Quote:

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Originally posted by Arbiter
As attached - the new build buildings screen....

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That looks kewl!

Quote:

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Originally posted by Gaming_World
I know why they are grainy, but I thought you might want to fix it...

As for the quick build selection screen, I think it would be a good idea.

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Thanks Gaming.

How do you suggest we fix the grainy images? We don't have time to redraw all the graphics at 80x80, so it would have to be some magc code.

Any ideas?

Quote:

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Originally posted by Arbiter


Thanks Gaming.

How do you suggest we fix the grainy images? We don't have time to redraw all the graphics at 80x80, so it would have to be some magc code.

Any ideas?

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You could smooth the image to blend pixels into one another

Quote:

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Originally posted by plenderj


That looks kewl!

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It looks better than the old one certainly... :)

You were also supposed to be sending me a mail yesterday. I ain't got it. Or did you send it to me work account (I've been off work for 5 weeks).

Quote:

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Originally posted by plenderj


You could smooth the image to blend pixels into one another

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Done how? And will it affect the transparency?

Quote:

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Originally posted by Arbiter


Done how? And will it affect the transparency?

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Well.
My theory on how to do it.

You have your transparency colour. So never touch any pixels with that colour.
Having said that, you would then loop through each pixel in the image starting at 1 pixel in and one pixel down, and finishing, one pixel from the bottom right hand corner too.

You would then get the colour of the $current$ pixel, and get the average of the colour between it and the pixel $above$ or $below$ or whatever.

So that should then smooth out the image.
I'll code it once I have a slice of toast.

Oh and the thing I was writing for you, well it didn't really work.
I was writing something to compress the images for you and what not, but well in the end it just wasn't worth it because it took so long to extract the images it didn't make it viable.

Well, that smoothing is the common way of doing it, but it only seems to blur the image. I'm not a great fan of that to be honest...

And thanks for looking at that picture compressing thing. I also spent a couple of weeks trying to do something similar. I can up with a decent algorithm which worked well for the images, but it took so long to decompress is was useless for using in game. :rolleyes:

Oh well.

Quote:

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Originally posted by Arbiter
Well, that smoothing is the common way of doing it, but it only seems to blur the image. I'm not a great fan of that to be honest...

And thanks for looking at that picture compressing thing. I also spent a couple of weeks trying to do something similar. I can up with a decent algorithm which worked well for the images, but it took so long to decompress is was useless for using in game. :rolleyes:

Oh well.

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I'll have a fiddle with the smoothing algorithm.
Look in my sig, at the thread "storing files in executables"
I was working off that base code.

There may also be other stuff you're interesting in there too...

we originally had the larger images stored and shrunk via stretchblit for the game, but strtchblit loses colour depth :(

Any suggestions, jamie?

Yeah, that's a point.

Stretchblt is being gay and splatting the colour depth.

The best place to see this happening is if you explore all the map and then go the world map screen, the colours are all bollockes.

If you could point us in the right direction to fix that then I'd love you forever.

I've just no idea what's causing it....

Well yeah StretchBlt makes a complete bollox of images I'm afraid.
I sincerely doubt Microsoft actually use it.

But there must be other ways around it

Though I might mention that you can use SetStretchBltMode() to increase the quality of the Stretching.

How's this ?

Actually this is better methinks.
If the colour change is big enough, then soften it, otherwise, do nothing.

This file also has the test image I've been using

Well.....

It's too slow and unfeasible really Plend... :(

The images are animated so it would have to be applied to every frame. As there can be 16 images on screen at once that's a bit of work involved and also the images change every 200ms. It's going to struggle on my P3-700. A P75 would just explode.

It needs to be quickly and one the fly, if at all.

PS - are you on MSN?

Quote:

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Originally posted by Arbiter
PS - are you on MSN?

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No, but I can be. Gimme a few minutes.
Regarding your animations, why not prepare the images before hand, then apply to each frame, and then just run those modified frames ?

Right I'm [email protected]

Other then blurring/smoothing, I have no clue how you would fix the images. You may wish to attempt to find a photoshop filter to do this (check on limewire, morphus, or naspter[?])

You can use partal transperancy (i asked a quesion about using it and bitblt in the & graphics forum). This would involve more work, but could make the graphics look more realist. The worst part about doing this would be writting the code to create transparentcies (easy enough with a basic background color; or the increaced dl size due to masks).

Plend,

Got you added to my MSN list now. Prepare for some IM abuse... :D

Preparing the images beforehand would take too long as it would need to be done for all the buildings. That's 30 frames per building * however many buildings are in the script.

Grrr....

Gaming,

How would at partial transparency (alphablend?) help?

And Sentience creates the transparencies the first time it's ran (that what the updating core files is all about). Is that what you mean?

What I meant, was that all objects have a slight blurryness to them (around the edges), you could always make it so that the edges of the pictures use partial transperancy (using bitblt) to include this in the . Hence making the graphics look more realist. But it would make it so you problably couldn't create the masks on the fly (as you would need to use a gray-scale mask instead of b&w). Not being able to create the masks in the program would increase d/l size.

Well you could do it as part of that preperation you do when the game is run for the first time ?

http://www.vbforums.com/attachment.php?s=&postid=940429

Been thinking about a map marking thing, whereby you can annotate the map with comments and stuff. We can also create natural landmarks in the map maker and label them too...

Whaddya think?

IF you're big time fed up of buildings then you could give a thought to the images we'll need on the quick build screen.

The chassis ones can come from the chassis' you've done, but we'll need representative images for the mech class

Classes off the top of my head are:

Assault
Defense
Sniper
Suicide
Stealth
Scout

Not sure of the sizes yet, depends how many come up with.

Post back with more types/comments when you get chance...

I'm on a rampage today. I've handcuffed myself to the pc and I'm going to get as much done as humanly possible.

We're seriously lagging with Sentience now, we need to get some of our thoughts actually in the game and working, or we're just going to be wallowing at this point forever.

I'll post here later with some of the correlated stuff I've found - it might help inspire you.

Was with Microsoft all day so far.
So um yeah, a map maker.

Well that sounds interesting.
I think it would look good if someone else made one for it instead of you guys, would give an impression that your app is easy to work with etc.

Would it be easy to implement a map reading ability into sentience ?

Behemoth,

I'd like to place an order for some more buttons please...

All 145x25:

add to notes (on/off)
clear note (on/off)
clear all notes (on/off)
cancel note (on)
close screen (on)

Superifically slim!!! :)

Sorry I misread your post there, I thought you said a mad maker program :)

Anyway yeah I could make the map maker and the maps if you'd like.
Just send me the latest module from sentience that contains the structure of a map etc, or specs on it.

I could make it such that its recorded in a proprietary format first, and then its converted from the map maker format into sentience format. Therefore its just a case of updating the conversion algorithm instead of re-writing the entire application

I don't think a map-editor would be good, a full blown senanior/campain editor would be better (full unit control).

I wouldn't mind making it again, as I am getting awfully bored anymore...

In theory yes that would be a good idea but its starting off a little big don't you think ?
I think a simple map editor as a start would be better.

Then as ben gets the sentience code to a level of consistency for different aspects then editors could be made

Yes, I agree that it should start off as a map-editor, but it should be disgined with the idea of adding in the features of a senanior/campain editor from the beginning. Otherwise it would take too long to implement the features, and chances are that noone would bother doing it.

Well, I can resolve the issue about the scenario/campaign thing.

Sentience doesn't have scenarios or campaigns, in much the same way that Alpha Centauri doesn't.

There is a vague idea that we'll include triggers at some point, but that's a long way off and doesn't really tie in with the maps.

If you really want to write a map maker then I'll take care of the Sentience side of it, just let me know what format the maps are in...

Attached is the main code module (which contains all the global variable declarations). There's quite a few....

In there will be the details of what the map's made out of.

Each map square is given an ID created using IEB (Ian Encoded Binary).

The square in question is classed as the centre square out of nine, as below.


OOO
OXO
OOO

Each line is interrogated to produce a number, based on whether the square is bordered by sea or not. See below.

124
SLL
SLL
SSS

As we go off the middle square we work out its ID based on...
SLL = 6 (1+2+4)
SLL = 6 (2+4)
SSS = 0 (4)

ergo the middle squares ID is 660. The graphics for the square are in the graphics directory.

Easy.

Any further questions then feel free to ask.... :)

wish I hadn't asked now ;)
i'll have a look

you have no idea what you've let yourself in for..... :D

Interesting.
Hmmm. I'll have a look at that later.

Too bored to do anything right now ;)

Quote:

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Originally posted by Arbiter
145x25:

add/update note (on/off)
clear note (on/off)
clear all notes (on/off)
cancel note (on)
close screen (on)

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I wouldn't mind attempting the map editor again.

Maybe a joint effort?

I haven't returned the favour of you letting the ToW team know what your views are, so here I am to do so.

I think the IEB idea is excellent. Is it produced at run-time or before you play the game?

A map editor is a must if you plan not to have this game's novelty wear off after they've played it for the first time. However since you said there are no missions or campaigns, I'm a tad confused. Is everything just basically a "deathmatch" like in the Civ games on random maps?

If it is, cool :)

But remember that you can make special battles with the map editor, maybe as a training map or a fun map, very much like popular games such as Starcraft has (but I'm sure you know that ;)).

One last note, you're doing very well on your game. I read a few posts back and see you have a scripting system to do your jobs, and that's excellent. One note though, you'll have to encrypt them. I didn't read far enough to see if you had.

Also, about your graphic problem (about the semi-transparent masks), you should make your own "texture" format. Sure, it will be hard work, but you can incorporate the GZIP algorithm in there, and RLE if that isn't enough by itself, to make the graphics smaller. I also suggest 4-bit for the masks as you won't need extreme detail, no?

Thanks for popping in Sas, nice to see you.... :)

Each map tile is given its ID when the map is generated. Once done, it is saved along with the map files so it doesn't have to be regenerated.

As the maps are randomly generated the novelty shouldn't wear off after the first game, but a map editor would be nice. Everything is basically as per the Civ/SMAC games, a sort of deathmatch, though there will be other ways to win than military victory.

The scripts are not really scripts per se, but a set of ini values. The games rules are hard coded, but are extremely flexible and can be drastically changed via the scripts. Sentience has changed in its goal - it's now an engine for a TBS. When I've finished applying my changes to the framework, you'll be able to completely alter the way Sentience looks. By changing the buttons, background images, map graphics and scripts you could easily make it a medieval TBS.

No idea what you were on about in the last paragraph. I got your bit on compression but the texture bit lost me...

Behemoth...

An order for 2 more buttons please...

90x30

Menu
Turn Complete (or equivalent)

They seemed to get lost when I reshuffled the graphics....

I need these before Sunday please, but any time before then is fine. :)

Ta!

http://www.vbforums.com/attachment.php?s=&postid=947559

.

Well, I didn't go to bed after all. I've sat and coded in the cool building/unit name display thing. It's pretty accurate, but at 1280x1024 the text isn't really readable.

I'll have to see if I can dynamically resize it and see where it gets me...