Tilting at Windmills

Still not doing active development on the CRPG… My next post will be the 100th post I’ve done, so it WILL have some CRPG content of some kind!

I’m about 95% unpacked and placed now. I have a bunch of utility stuff (cleaning supplies) that still need to be organized and put away properly, and my office is still in boxes that need to be unpacked and sorted into a system. I’ve been pretty lax in the past about dealing with paperwork, having stuff stack up into huge piles. My goal with this new place was to stop that habit by not allowing myself a great deal of desk-room for such nonsense. So far, though, I seem to be able to live with growing piles of receipts and statements just fine. Drat.

My biggest annoyance is that I really have NO space for any retro computing in a permanent fashion. I could set my TI up in my office, but it will take up a lot of room next to my PC, and to be honest, I don’t fire it up often enough to justify it. In my old place, I had a side table set up for the TI and a PC. My downstairs rec room would be ideal for that, except it only has a single electrical outlet, and I would need to move out a couch before I’d have the room to make it co-exist comfortably with my gaming table. So, for now, I’m just trying to find a place I can pack my stuff in an accessible location to dig out and set up on an as-needed basis.

Anyway, having a new place, I’ve also found I have less interest in just sitting in my computer room/office and gaming… there’s a lot more to do now, and the computer will be there when I am ready.

Still here… just been really busy the last two weeks moving into a townhouse condo!

Some things I’ve learned from the moving experience:

• Don’t trust big banks to close when they say they will. Mine was one business day and weekend late, and as a result I ended up having to move during the week rather than on the weekend
• Load up or down stairs if you must, but try and unload at the same level
• When swapping locks, just put the same brand/type that’s already in there. Otherwise you may find yourself in for more of a project than you bargained for (Hole-cutting, chiseling, etc.)
• With condos, any repair work the inspector advised on should be checked to see if the Association handles it

I’ll put a photo up of the place later on this post.

It’s going to be awhile before I turn my attention back to CRPG development. I still have a ton of boxed books to unload before I feel that I can relax and actually start doing something again. I’m also uncertain as yet where my TI will go… I have a nice rec room in the garage area, but it doesn’t have a lot of plug-ins. Also, the natural gas water heater is right there, and I’m a bit nervous at the idea of having electronics so close to it…

It’s interesting how history repeats itself…

Eight months ago, Yahoo shut down their blog service, Yahoo 360. Given that it wasn’t a very good blog service in the first place, I didn’t shed many tears. However, I was left with the problem of where to locate my blog. Yahoo generously offered transfers to WordPress, but I had it in my mind to move to Blogger instead. Several of my friends used Blogger, and it looked like it had a lot of flexibility and control.

Moving over wasn’t easy, though. Blogger had no support for importing Yahoo 360 blog entries, so I had to actually create a WordPress blog first, and then transfer from that! And then Blogger didn’t get any of the comments for my older posts. Still, I was willing to forgive and forget.

And now, Blogger has decided it’s too much trouble to offer FTP services. Instead, they’d rather make all their users use their web hosting services. Since the majority of their users use it for free, it’s not a total surprise. However, a lot of FTP users were that way for a reason… they had a lot of custom content that required their own server, or they already had domain space to use, etc. I think Blogger’s going to find the fallout from this move far worse than they thought it would be. In addition, the fact that Google owns their servers may hurt them as well; Google’s reputation for security has gotten rather tarnished of late…

Anyway, I’ll be updating the CSS for this blog in the next few days to make it something more unique and to my tastes over the standard appearance. WordPress looks like a good blog service, I hope to stick with them. And I like that I got all my old comments back as well!

Well, my initial attempts to transfer comments failed… it seems BlogSpot requires an ID for each post, and does not permit anonymous ones. I could just post the comments under my own ID, but that would be messy and misleading.

I’m also re-thinking how I want to do hit points in the game… I’m favoring the idea of a wound/fatigue system. Wounds and fatigue would be static; classes would not have different values. Fatigue is used for combat actions and spells, and damage is done in the form of fatigue as well. When the threshold is exceeded, a wound is inflicted, which does not recover with time, and must be healed with spells, potions, or a trip to the healer.

I’m still trying to work out the details in my mind… I need to find a way fatigue comes into play with action points and defenses. A friend of mine suggested looking at Hero Quest, an old board game / computer game that used a body point system. It gave me some good ideas, but left others undefined. For example, how do different types of armor affect damage and defense, and what makes a mace attack different from a sword attack?

Spending so much time in design is annoying, since it does not produce code, but it’s a better place to hammer out ideas… nothing is worse than having to strip down and rebuild code because you changed your mind. I’m having to do that with the prior builds and it’s grunt work to say the least.

Okay, I’ve uploaded all my old posts. I still need to upload all the comments, but I’ll take a break for the night and get to it later this week.

I also took a stab at modifying the template a bit… I wanted it a bit wider on the screen, and to throw some of my own graphics up. This will be an ongoing thing, probably.

CRPG design work continues; I’m still reworking the character data out for the changes to the spell system. In particular, I decided to add more spells, to bring the total to 64. I ended up keeping the generic school, but half the spells are very simple, and the other half are very powerful. Hopefully I have the code space to implement all the spells.

I may also change how states are tracked so that instead of tracking every potential state it just tracks around eight per character (four good, for bad). So you could only have up to four “buff” spells on any one character at any given time. This frees up some space in the data array, and introduces a decent game limitation as well.

In case you’re wondering how old blog posts are appearing, I’m having to transcribe my old Yahoo blog entries… So far I got about 13 out of 60 done.

I do intend to go back and add the comments back in, but I’ll do that after all the entries are populated. Then I’ll just make a filler comment for each one and feed the others in via import.

The Blogger Import tool is incredibly unreliable, incidentally.

You may have noticed the format’s changed a bit… I decided to publish to my web domain instead of on Blogspot. I have the space, so why not? I also changed the URL and threw an index page on my original domain to direct here.

My old Yahoo blog is gone; I deactivated it earlier. I have back-ups of the entries, and I”ll get them in here by hook or by crook…

Also, this is NOT the final appearance, I plan on customizing it when I have time.

Additional: I’ve been thinking about getting rid of the Monk… he’s kind of a dull class, since he can’t use any equipment at all, and I’d have to special-code some kind of advancement system for his melee damage into my now level-less system.

Actually, I think I need to alter the magic system as well. My original plan was that certain classes had certain schools of magic (originally one each), and that tomes of spells would be equipped like weapons or armor that would give you your current spell list. If there were spells in the tome that were restricted from the character’s class, they would not be available.

I wrote up the code for spell list determination, and it was pretty nasty… a lot of complicated error checking. So something more simple seems ideal. Instead I may have each tome “teach” the player all the spells he can learn when he uses it. Each character then has their own “known spells” list.

I’m also considering eliminating one school of magic, the basic one that has the weakest spells that anyone can cast. Instead I can either add additional spells to the other schools (which is problematic because there’s seven other schools, and adding a seventh spell brings the spell count to 49… off a byte boundary), or I can maybe add multi-school spells…

Got to mull on this one for a bit.

Welcome to the new home of “Tilting at Windmills”… since Yahoo is finally killing their blog services, I decided to pull up stakes now and relocate.

I was never that impressed with Yahoo’s service anyway… it only allowed a single picture per entry, and only in JPG format.

I’m hoping I’ll be able to port over my old blog entries here, but Yahoo 360 is being very unhelpful in this… I set it up to download files and I just get an error page when I go there.

Anyway, stay tuned for further updates on my CRPG development.

Well, Yahoo 360 (this blog service) is coming to an end in a month or so. So I’m moving over to Blogger.

You can find my new blog at: http://adamantyr.blogspot.com/

I’ve posted a new article, on my recent endeavors with sound. I also made some cosmetic changes to the site. Be sure to let me know here via comments what you think.

The link can be found at http://www.adamantyr.com/crpg