Day 247: Express Yourself

As mentioned yesterday, in the Bad Old Days (i.e. those before today) you had to name something and then give it a descriptive tag which was often just the thing name re-branded. Well those days are over!

The 'auto' button now takes the name and creates a tag for it. So:

Name: The Best Player in the World is from a City in an Arboretum

Becomes:

Tag: player_best_player_world_city_arboretum

So the tag is based on the type of object, plus a scaled down version of the name. As you no doubt noticed, I took out a bunch of connector words there (mainly articles). This involved regular expressions.

At first, I was doing something like this:

name.gsub!(/\sthe\s/,' ')
name.gsub!(/\sa\s/,' ')
name.gsub!(/\san\s/,' ')

Yes, I had one line for each thing I wanted to remove, which is of course silly. So I made a list of all the excluded words and tried again, only I ran into a problem. It's not a string I'm using for matching here, it's a regular expression - meaning I couldn't just throw the current loop value in the middle and expect it to work!

Luckily, there's a way to do exactly that:

exclusions.each do |x|
excludeMiddle = Regexp.new("\s#{x}\s")
name.gsub!(excludeMiddle,' ')
end


Regexp.new takes a string, from which it'll create a regular expression. And I can do all the manipulating I want within strings!

Also I made a few more planets using the new autotagging feature. But that's not as exciting.

Day 246: Checking In

This time, I've been half working, half slacking. Though I did take a few days off, I also continue to face the fact that "Made some planets and tagged them" remains a very boring blog entry. So I'm trying to split my time up even further - 30 to 45 minutes for the planets, then 15 to whatever else I feel like doing for one of my many features I haven't yet implemented.

Today's feature was putting an 'auto' button next to the 'tag' input. So now, instead of naming something "Monster Island" and then having to click down to 'tag' and type "planet_monster_island", you can now just hit the 'auto' button and it'll come up with that for you. Well, it would if it worked - right now it just says "You clicked the auto button!"

Features I did previous to today include accidentally creating a planet I didn't mean to and then realizing that I had no way to delete planets. You'd think I'd have learned my lesson after making the exact same mistake with Sectors.

Day 239: Mass Effect

I started this blog because I saw a number of my fellow developers making dev-blogs for their projects. I had two thoughts:

1. I won't have anything to blog about: This was the primary reason I haven't blogged in the past, I'm just not that interesting. In this case, though, I can blog often because this is a daily project. Lately, as you've no doubt noticed, this practice has fallen by the wayside. I've continued to work, but writing up the blog post takes a lot more time and so I've tended to skip it.


2. Nobody will read it: How I'm developing my game is of little interest to anyone except pretty hardcore game developers who are familiar with ruby, rubygame, and interested in my game enough to read about it instead of working on their own. This set is maybe three people, five tops. I've since discovered that having the blog is invaluable - I've searched through it a number of times to find how I did something earlier, and the fact that I blogged about it made it simple to look up. Even if no other living soul even glances at this blog, it's already been of enormous use.

So that said, the slow pace of blogging may continue. When I'm writing code, I often have something to say about how I implemented it. When I'm developing content, what I have to say is pretty much "Created a few sectors".

Now, however, I'm coding. I created a ton of sectors and a few planets, and it occurred to me that later, when I've made a "standard array" of ships I want the player to be able to buy, I'm going to have to go back to every single planet I made and put those ships up for sale there.

The upside to being the author of a game editor is that if you don't like how it's doing something, you can change it. Today I began work on the "Mass Distribution" system. Each object has labels (like tags, only I call them 'labels' because I'm already using 'tag') that group it, and the Mass Distribution system will allow you to take a ship, a weapon, a mission, etc, and give it to everything that shares a label. So if I, while creating these new planets, label them something like "alliance, standard, human", I can go back and easily give the standard array of weapons,ships, etc, to all the planets which share whatever tags I want.

I may modify the random mission generator to use this technology as well.

Day 232: Re-re-port

It's been a while since I blogged but unlike last time that happened, I've actually been busy in the meantime. Here's what I've been up to:

• Ported everything to new-style events. This was fairly easy and straightforward


• The player can now give their pilot a name. Eventually this will be rolled into savegames, so you can have more than one pilot per module


• I fixed a Rubygame bug where if your application was minimized and lost focus at the same time, it'd crash.


• A freaking ton of map work! I have to say that creating maps is a lot easier with an editor. Coming up with ideas for a ton of sectors, however, remains difficult. I made the mistake of giving my initial generic filler sector a description, and so now have to go out of my way to explain how boring the other dozen filler sectors are.

The map descriptions I've written already depict a lot of lore pre-game. There was a time where humanity didn't know hyperspace lanes could go to empty sectors, for instance. After that, the Sandwall spurred the invention of shielding. There was an alien invasion scare at some point. All these are completely divorced from the plot, just things I've come up with as I made the map.

I was asking myself the question: Should I write this down somewhere so I remember it? Then it occurred to me: I just did!

Day 228: Demo!

So today I fixed a bug. It was less a bug and something I didn't realize was missing. I mis-clicked while making the map for the new scenario, and ended up creating a sector I didn't need. That's when I realized the map editor didn't have a 'delete' button!

What an accomplishment! I'm totally spent.

Oh, yeah, and I made a demo.

DEMO!!!!!!!!!!

That's right! I loaded Fedora 9 onto my VM and tested the file I just linked to right there. On a pristine Fedora 9 load, it works with no issues. It also runs on Ubuntu! It even runs on both at the same time! On the VMs it chugged down a bit during the combat, which says to me that I've still got more optimization to do, but it may also have been due to the fact that I was running it on a VM while I was also running it on another VM.

That link may not be permanent. It's my home server, so be gentle :)

Day 227: Execute!

My current build does not work with the current Rubygame/dev-2.4 branch due to one of my patches having not yet made its way in. It'll die the moment an AI-controlled ship attempts to figure out how to move. This will hopefully change soon.

This should hopefully not matter; the demo itself is looking even more likely to come out this week. Rubyscript2exe is everything I'd ever hoped for and more! Mainly because it will use whatever libraries I have on my system, including my already-patched version of Rubygame. I unintstalled Rubygame from my system entirely, as a matter of fact, and the executable still ran. I'm waiting until I can get it to run on a pristine Fedora VM, and then I'm releasing the demo to you, the public.

Rake can now make .tgz files out of the entire distribution (actually, it could always do that, but I only just figured out how today). This makes my life even easier, because it means I can use rake to build the executable and then put it in a .tgz file for distribution in one step!

Finally, it turns out that Rubygame 2.4, which I'm now targeting as I can't live without my mousewheel support, has the new event classes that will one day be part of 3.0 and which I just finished moving all my code away from. Luckily, I knew I'd have to switch back and made a giant list a few posts ago about what I changed. And I did, in fact, tag the last commit before changing over in git, so a (very) careful merge may turn out to be the easy answer.

Then again, I seem to remember that it's never easy!

Day 226: The Coming Storm

Instead of doing all that releasey stuff I mentioned yesterday, I instead started creating the map for the module I intend to include with the game when it ships.

It was yesterday, actually, that I started writing up the outline, and three hours later it was included; those who don't want the plot spoiled for them should avoid poking around too deeply in the Github repository.

Oh, did I mention? Kuiper's on Github now. It's nice having a backup of my work that's not just another machine in my house. Right now if you want to play the game, you'll have to use Rubygame's 2.4-dev branch, and to be perfectly honest I haven't exactly tried downloading it and integrating with it. That's a task for Soon(tm).

Anyway, the point of the post is that the new module is called, creatively enough, "The Coming Storm". The short description is:

Humanity is alone among the stars and, as always when humanity has only itself to deal with, war is constant. An inner circle of systems are allied against separatist rebels who seek their independence. It would be a tale told a thousand times, if there were not much worse in store....

Yeah? Seemed like I was going to go with a typical empire vs. rebels thing there, but then I promised it totally wouldn't go down that way! Remember that when you're playing Part I and being all like "This is a typical empire vs. rebels thing!"