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Competition Progress Logs

Graue 14:20, 06 Mar 2006 GMT About that last-minute bug... Amarillion suggested I upload a fixed version of my game, explain the problem to the TINS mailing list, and ask them to test using the fixed version and maybe give me a small penalty for the bug if they feel like it. Which sounds more than fair. So I've done that, and for anyone who isn't reading the mailing list, you can get the fixed version here: http://oceanbase.org/graue/data/railblaster-20060306p0.zip (source & data only) http://oceanbase.org/mtails/tins06/railblaster-20060306_fix.zip (also includes a Windows binary) Only the one-line fix I put in a previous log message is different here, nothing else was changed. So, try it out, why don't you? I bet you'll enjoy it.

Graue 12:32, 06 Mar 2006 GMT Anyways, here's a screenshot of what the final game looks like, even though it's buggy. Also, you can download a copy with a Windows executable included at http://oceanbase.org/mtails/tins06/railblaster-20060306.zip

Graue 12:25, 06 Mar 2006 GMT [Duplicate post, ignore.]

Graue 12:24, 06 Mar 2006 GMT Agh. I want to be swallowed up by the earth. I just turned in our entry a few minutes before the deadline, and now find out it has a stupid trivial bug added at the last minute that totally ruins the game. You can kill the same squirrel multiple times by shooting it while it's in its collapsing animation, so the "Squirrels Left" counter becomes unreliable. Not only that, if this counter becomes negative, the level will never end. I basically ruined our game by bungling five lines of code (out of 2102) at the last minute. That sucks. Edit: No, sorry, not five lines of code, *one*. May I please cheat by changing a single line of code? diff -rN -u old-tins06/game.c new-tins06/game.c --- old-tins06/game.c Mon Mar 6 06:47:56 2006 +++ new-tins06/game.c Mon Mar 6 07:22:38 2006 @@ -186,7 +186,7 @@ if ((mon = monsterinspot(bullets[bt].y, bullets[bt].x, -1)) != -1) { remove_bullet(bt); - killmonster(mon); + if (monsters[mon].alive > 0) killmonster(mon); return 1; } return 0;

Graue 06:28, 06 Mar 2006 GMT [I made a duplicate post accidentally. I'll edit this next time I actually have something to say.]

Graue 05:56, 06 Mar 2006 GMT Just working on polish and the like at this point. The game now has a title screen as well, and a title, "Rail Blaster." The title screen has more help information on it, so with that and the during-game legend, the help screen rule should be doubly satisfied.

Graue 04:00, 06 Mar 2006 GMT We have 12 levels now. Well, actually, 12 level segments: levels are assembled at random out of segments. If my math is right (which is unlikely, given how tired I am), we have in effect 4^11 = 2^22 = 4194304 levels now. It would be 4^12, except the levels wrap, so these arrangements of segments are all the same: AB CD BA DC CD AB DC BA 4194304 is still a lot, though, you gotta admit... If we don't make any more, that's an average of 58254 levels created per hour!

Graue 02:14, 06 Mar 2006 GMT My teammate, Ashrilyn, has been making some extra level segments, so now the game has a variety of levels. It's starting to look very nice. I also added a game over banner, the last major thing that was missing... now time to test it.

Graue 01:06, 06 Mar 2006 GMT Sound effects implemented. The finish line is in sight... Curious how everyone else has become so quiet lately.

Graue 00:09, 06 Mar 2006 GMT

Graue 22:53, 05 Mar 2006 GMT I added a couple colorful themes to the game, so now it's no longer all black and gray.

Graue 21:50, 05 Mar 2006 GMT It works! For the first time, I actually played our game with its final objective and such. It took me several minutes, and I killed all the monsters with one minute to spare, which probably means I should lower the initial time limit -- which rises when you kill monsters. So, this is now a playable game satisfying all the rules. I still want to add sound effects, a real game over / winning screen (as opposed to the game suddenly quitting), and more variety to the level generation. And give the game a title.

Graue 20:33, 05 Mar 2006 GMT Now the game has a "help screen", or rather, the game *is* a help screen, because it has a legend on the side of the screen telling you what to do. There is now also a time limit, and you have to kill all the monsters within the time limit. So the game satisfies all the rules at this point. There's still much to be done, however.

Graue 17:28, 05 Mar 2006 GMT I added bullets to the game, so you can shoot the enemies. All that's left now is: timer; randomly assembled levels; help screen. The game hasn't been freezing lately, so hopefully I unintentionally fixed the bug while improving stuff. I also added a bunch of sanity checks all over my code. Everything is sane.

Graue 16:12, 05 Mar 2006 GMT The game froze on me three times, and I have no idea why... I'm trying to reproduce the freeze with debugging enabled and get a core dump, but no luck so far. Now it's getting lucky and not freezing... I've checked my code repeatedly and don't see anything wrong.

Graue 05:26, 05 Mar 2006 GMT

Graue 04:12, 05 Mar 2006 GMT Monsters are implemented now. They don't actually do anything, mind you, other than just walk around. But they walk around very nicely. And soon, you'll be able to shoot them. But now it's time for a sleep break for me.

Graue 23:30, 04 Mar 2006 GMT w00t! This thing is really starting to look *nice*. Scrolling and wrapping are implemented, so now you scroll and wrap around, and with an interesting level, it's actually pretty fun just to mess with already! Like a crazy maze. I'd post a screenshot, except that I tried to make one, and the colors were all screwed up, making the train invisible. Oh well. It really does look good, though. Also, this now has more lines of code (1185) than all but two of the games/programs I've ever made. A dubious honor, because a lot of it is just "library" code and/or repetititive nonsense. But that's how it goes when one is in a hurry to finish.

Graue 21:17, 04 Mar 2006 GMT Making progress. Ashrilyn made some 24x24 train bitmaps that look way better than mine, and those are in now, so you can actually tell whether you're turning left or right now. And, oh yeah, I changed my mind about the whole concept. Instead of a bunch of trains, you'll be just one train, and you scroll around a randomly assembled level shooting stuff to get more time. And there's gonna be a help screen. Stay tuned.

Graue 17:49, 04 Mar 2006 GMT The music is now sounding okay, though not great. I probably set a record for most CPU ever wasted generating 8-bit sound, what with my waveshaper.

Graue 16:30, 04 Mar 2006 GMT I'm wrestling with the music, can't get it sounding right. At least not in 16-bit. If I use 8-bit sound, it works, but it's really noisy. In 16-bit, it's all distorted. Since I have no experience using the sound routines of Allegro, I am clueless to what might be going on here. I've tried increasing the buffer size, and that did no good, so it's not a sound card starvation issue. I've tried lowering the volume, and that did no good, so it's not a clipping issue. I've tried swapping all the bytes, and that did no good, so it's not an endianness issue. I've tried writing the generated audio data to a file, and the file sounds fine, so libmodplug's rendering is not an issue. So, darn. I do not know what I am going to do. Maybe render at 16-bit and then raise the volume and apply a limiter and then convert it to 8-bit.

Graue 14:54, 04 Mar 2006 GMT So um, overnight, while I was sleeping, my buddy Ashrilyn made a song for the game, so it now has some background music, so the game will soon have music. I think the biggest problem right now is the 8x8 train bitmap: it just isn't working, you can't see what the hell is going on. I'll have to either draw my own, larger, font, or abandon the ASCII-art tracks idea and use ASCII art in some other way instead.

Graue 03:49, 04 Mar 2006 GMT Well, I did get this running, and as promised, here is a screenshot, not that there's much to see. The train crashes if it moves into an empty space or back to the $, which is its starting point. The @ is a reflector that turns the train around. It should hopefully be more fun with more trains.

Graue 01:00, 04 Mar 2006 GMT This has been a pretty lame first day for me. I was originally going to write my game in Scheme, using some Chicken Scheme bindings I'd written. "Amarillion", the guy hosting this contest, had told me this would be okay per rule #6 even though it was code I had written in the past four weeks. But, Scheme was working against me. I just got sick of all the matching up of parentheses, all the crazy ways of structuring expressions, etc. Admittedly, I'm not that familiar with Scheme, so perhaps I just don't know how to use it properly. Anyway, I got sick of that. I went through my Scheme code and saw that there was barely anything in there making use of Scheme's advantages over C. I was just writing C code in a language ill-suited for it. So I rewrote it all in C. This was mostly just boilerplate code, like: decent timing functions (Allegro's interrupts have horrible granularity on Unices, so I use a different approach), random number generation that doesn't suck (the statistical properties of rand() are sometimes too bad to even play games with), and so on. After doing this, I finally came up with an idea. Levels will be an assortment of various ASCII-art railroad tracks, and trains will be moving around the levels, and you control which way the trains turn when they reach a junction. (You'll have to control multiple trains at once like this.) The point is to get all of the trains into exits without them crashing into each other or running off the tracks. As for the pervasive time theme, I'll figure that out later. I am *almost* at the point where it basically runs, and when I get to that point, then maybe I'll post a screenshot.

Graue 17:07, 03 Mar 2006 GMT Crud! I didn't know TINS was starting today, I thought it started tomorrow. I'm totally unprepared. Oh well, better get to work, then.

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