Work Post

1:30pm - So I'm down at the McDonalds today to work. I was planning on avoiding the McDonalds this month and I still am, in general, but I figured it would be okay today since I'm doing some for-pay work for a change, and I was already out to run another errand.

I probably shouldn't go into details on what I'm doing since it's for someone else but I'll still keep a work post going for what I can say, and hopefully if I finish it and still feel like working, I can continue with my Roguelike game.

1:50pm - Having trouble FTPing into their site. But on testing, I'm having trouble FTPing into my site too. So I'm going to make sure I can FTP into my own site before I try theirs again.

2:11pm - Well FTP is either blocked or FileZilla is borked. Either way I'm not having any luck so I'll have to work on that later. I want to get some work done while I'm here at the McDonalds at least, so I'll switch gears if I can and work on my Roguelike Game.

2:31pm - On checking, I'm ready to mark my last task as done; collisions work. The next task is to create the ChaseBrain. It'll be a simple brain with a Chase type AI. Basically I'm moving into AI now. I should probably organize this into subtasks though, since I still have to make some way for Actors to sense one another and pathfind to one another.

2:59pm - Alright I spent the last half hour diddling about and also some of it talking to folks on the RoguelikeDev Discord for advice regarding my Core Mechanic.

Now then, let me take a look at the code and see where the actors actions are processed right now.

3:06pm - Hokay so it's gotta be in the Brain that this sensory search takes place.

3:34pm - This is pretty complicated stuff. I'm spending a lot of time just thinking it out. I wrote some basic logic in comments in the brain, but to perform each step I need to call on other classes' methods.

First up is sense. I'll start with the most direct sense in a game, which is sight. Now I have to figure out how to do that...

4:10pm - Still doin' research on how to do this kind of thing.

I figure there are two ways to do it. Either do a straight Line of Sight test between the Brainholder and its target, which could potentially be anything, or...

I can make it so they do a Field of Vision test in their general area, and then have them decide how to react based on what they see around them.

Yeah that second option seems ideal for the sort of game I'm making.

I'm worried about the main 'loop' of the game though. Right now I've got it so that once every frame it does at least one update on every actor on the turn order, until it runs into an actor with no brain (a player controlled actor) and then it waits for input. If I have too many NPCs or especially, NPCs doing high processing tasks during the update function, it might burst out of the time allotted for one frame.

Heck, now that I think of it, if for whatever reason there wasn't a player controlled actor, it would be an infinite loop inside a single frame that never ended. That would be bad. o.o;;

I really hate to get distracted from my task of developing the FoV sense code, but this is kind of important. It may change everything. o.o;;

4:24pm - I don't think I'm ready for this kind of change right now though. I think I'm going to pack up and go home, play some video games, and then if there's time left I'll go to the Library to work there.

Toodleoodleoo!

Work Post

7:57pm - I played some games for a while, though there was some strange graphical glitches on the PS4. We turned it off and let it rest and it seems okay now. I think it was overheating, though I'm not sure why. Spiderman might be just too pretty?

Anyways I checked the FTP here at the Library and it works to connect to my site, but I can't connect to the website I'm to work on, so that's not good. I think they must've accidentally reset the password after getting it from TekSavvy, so I've asked permission to reset it.

Oh! I just got permission to reset it. I'm surprised I got a reply so late at night.

That said, I'm really keen on working on my Roguelike project some more after what I did earlier, and I don't think I have the time to do justice on this, so I'mma put it away and work on what I want for now.

8:08pm - Oh yeah I just remembered, despite all my excitement to continue on with detection algorithms, I still have to deal with the 'everything every frame' problem.

8:18pm - Still thinking.

I saw a talk on ADOM recently and it's got me thinking. As I recall from the talk, they've seperated the actions from the actors. So, when I press left, it interprets what that could mean, figures out that it should move the player west, and puts "Move Player West" into an action list. In that action list there'll be all sorts of actions that should take place in that turn.

But no, while that might be a good solution for some other issues I'm thinking of, it won't seperate my game processing code from the Update function, which is really meant more for graphics processing. I think what I may need to do is the other thing the ADOM fella mentioned in his talk. I should put the game processing code in a second thread, and have it tell the graphics thread what to do. I'm not sure how to do that though. I've barely done any multithreadding...

8:48pm - Well I'm about out of time so I think I'll return home and do some research there.