James's OHRRPGCE Thursdays!

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Bob the Hamster
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James's OHRRPGCE Thursdays!

Post by Bob the Hamster »

My new Canadian life is very good, but my new Canadian life is also very busy!

In order to make sure I actually work on OHRRPGCE stuff, I am budgeting a block of time time every week, henceforth, Thursday evening will be "OHRRPGCE Thursday" (for about an hour)

(This doesn't mean I won't ever work on ohr stuff on other days and other times, this just means that to make sure ohr stuff doesn't get squeezed out of my free time, I have put it on my calendar like a responsible adult ;)

Here is my Sunshine and Rain for tonight's session:

Sunshine
* Linux nightly builds are no longer having troubles with plotdict.xml (tmc actually fixed this a week or two ago, but I had to manually apply and test the update for it to work) and I also fixed an unrelated bug in the plotdict.xml file
* I finally got Virtualbox downgraded to the correct version so that i can actually run the Mac build virtual machine again. Yay! I can't promise that the Mac nightly builds are working right just yet, but now it is at least actually *possible* to build them again

Rain
* I didn't get a single dang pixel done in Wandering Hamster. Maybe next Thursday?
Last edited by Bob the Hamster on Fri Oct 05, 2018 1:44 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by woahpotato »

i guess we're not far enough into the season for snow, eh?
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Post by Bob the Hamster »

woahpotato wrote:i guess we're not far enough into the season for snow, eh?
Nah, right now we're just having the kind of days where you wear a nice warm coat and go outside and think "Huh, this isn't so bad!" Crisp, but pleasant.

That being said, I am stressing about getting winter tires this weekend because I don't want to get caught without them when the first snow comes!

Also, Monday is Thanksgiving here! I haven't figured out Canadian Thanksgiving yet. There is definitely turkey, but nobody seems to get excited about the turkey-- at least not in the same way they do when they talk about Shawarma Poutine.
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Post by RMZ »

Just saying, I totally miss the updates on your Patreon about Wandering Hamster. Was always a fun surprise!
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Re: James's OHRRPGCE Thursdays!

Post by TMC »

Bob the Hamster wrote:* I finally got Virtualbox downgraded to the correct version so that i can actually run the Mac build virtual machine again. Yay!
Great, Mac builds have been down a really long time. I would say this was holding up declaring release candidates... but we all know what is actually holding it up :)
Hey wait, looks like the Mac build process failed to run yesterday! I don't have a build log.
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Post by Bob the Hamster »

Opps! I forgot to update my crontab to point to the ohr_nightly_vm.sh script.
it was still pointing to ohr_nightly_vm_no_mac.sh

Fixed!
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Post by Bob the Hamster »

Happy OHRRPGCE Thursday!

Tonight's session:

Sunshine:

* Actually worked on Wandering Hamster
* I'm probably never going to stop enjoying pixel art :)

Rain:

* I don't have any interesting screenshots to show off
* The first few steps of scripting a mini-game are possibly the lest fun steps of scripting a mini-game. That bit where you have the idea, but you don't have any of the logic ready to actually start testing
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Post by Spoonweaver »

Yay mini games!
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Post by Bob the Hamster »

Tonight's session:

Sunshine
* my "move slice to" script operating on 24 slices at once worked on the first try, and looked good
* scripting, scripting, scripting (Wandering Hamster mini-game)

Rain
* no engine work tonight (but I did take a look at your zone_costs branch tmc. Looks promising!)
* boy I wish we had arrays and dictionaries in plotscripting! (I think if we ever get actual objects with methods, I'll die of happyness)
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Post by kylekrack »

Oh cool, tmc started working on the zone costs thing? I'm happy to hear that.

I definitely relate to that sentiment about arrays and dicts. If those were added, hspeak would be unstoppable!
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Post by Pepsi Ranger »

I've been clamoring for arrays for a while myself. I've just defined my 16,000th global variable this week. Glad I got that 50,000 limit now, 'cause I need it! Hopefully that'll be enough.

Speaking of, I think hspeak would be unstoppable if we had multiple transcript options beyond tracing values to g_debug. If we could trace values to any text filename we want (or Word Doc or Excel Spreadsheet or whatever; example: "trace value to file (statistics.txt, data1, data2, data3, ..., data30)"), we could create external "backstories" for our games that we could save and archive. That's definitely my new unattainable want for Entrepreneur: a recorded history of data and decisions the player makes, along with a backstory report of comings and goings in the world before the game begins. This would serve as a memorable account of one's gameplay experience, but also serve as a reference to player and/or AI behavior, making it possible to locate trends in gameplay. Now that I know how arrays work, I could see tracing to text files of our choosing as a nice way to store those data tables that we could reimport back into script (or another script for another game!) for later reuse in an array. I wonder if others would want a similar feature.
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Post by TMC »

It's Thursday already??

I'd love to dive back into working on replacing the script interpreter/upgrading HamsterSpeak, but I'm working on so many other half-finished things already. I really should have prioritised that higher though...

I'm surprised how many people want the ability to read/write files. James and I did want to do it, and I did write up a list of script commands to implement. Mostly a question of finding time for it. Would be a good project for someone else to implement. Adding script commands is straightforward.

The zone_costs branch: initially I wasn't happy with it and wasn't really planning to merge it as it is; I wasn't sure about how to allow different costs for pathing different NPCs/heroes. Maybe I should... err, maybe I should just merge it, since it's useful and it works.
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Post by Bob the Hamster »

It is useful, and it works, and merging it now would not make any future improvements like per-NPC or per-hero overrides harder to implement.

We all want arrays, but prioritizing other stuff higher is the right thing to do.

My prioritization sense tingles when I hear about Joystick work ;)

Here is how I think writing text file should work:

Code: Select all

write text file($0="filename.txt", $1="This is the text that goes in the file")
or

Code: Select all

append text file($0="filename.txt", $1="This is the text that gets appended to the file")
The main thing that has stopped me from implementing this in the past is concern about games writing files in places where they shouldn't.

Here are some thoughts:

* I could restrict writing files to a specific folder. This is very easy and very safe, but it makes the feature less versatile. it is also difficult to decide exactly which folder that should be.

* I can allow writing to more locations, but there would be a pop-up confirmation the first time a script tries to write to a location. The user would have to confirm that it is okay to write the file, and then the question would not be asked again for that folder or filename. This is a little bit like how apps ask for permissions on your phone the first time they need those permissions. This is safe, but might be a but annoying. This is also more work to implement.
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Post by Pepsi Ranger »

Well, maybe this will help:

What I envisioned (for Entrepreneur, at least) is for the game to prompt the player to designate a filename into which he or she can save external data (the .txt extension could be automatic), similar to what most games do when prompting a player to save. Basically, let the player decide what to call the file, and if that file already exists, warn him, but also give him the ability to override it (unless he calls the text "g_debug," "whatsnew," or any other filename matching the "don't override" string). It would be up to the designer to figure out how, what, and when to write to the file. I think that would provide the least amount of risk and the most amount of versatility for such a feature.

The request to name the file could work the same way that naming the hero works. Just prompt it at the start if the designer selects it as an option (but have a scripting counterpart for anyone who wants to wait until a later time, like at the game's ending, to prompt it).

Those are my thoughts on the matter.
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Post by Bob the Hamster »

Ah, yes, prompting for a filename is an important option too! Thank you for reminding me :)
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