Games

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Number one thing I like about auto saves: not shouting profanities when the game crashes.

Number two thing I like about auto saves: when they’re frequent enough that I don’t shout profanities after the game crashes.
Because even if your name has Final Fantasy in it: you’re probably going to crash on some players.
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Steam Summer Sale – VN Titles and Markdowns

More than a few entries on this sale list warrant a gander for anyone interested in Visual Novels, or you may already own half of them :P.

A few lesser known ones worth mentioning:

  • One Small Fire At A Time
    • Short but well worth it.
    • This is currently the only entry on my VN list that ranked a 10/10.
  • The Letter
    • If you ever read a Choose Your Own Adventure book than this is for you.
    • The post credits scene may disturb you far more than the horror story :P.
  • An Octave Higher
    • Set in the same world as One Small Fire At A Time.
    • Players of the former will appreciate a certain side character ;).
  • Ladykiller In A Bind
    • Highly abnormal and twisted sense.
    • Come for the story not the adult content 8-).
  • ACE Academy

Thoughts on Android Game architecture

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Games for Android are a little different than writing for PC or console, really seems to be less of the dull grundge as well. But at the price, for more advanced efforts there are less resources sitting right there on Fresh Meat or Source Forge for the hunting up. Me being me, of course, I aways have an interest in cross platform portability (as well as a general disdain for Oracle Java).

One thought that occured to me, is why not do it the same as I would on a PC?

What is the activity to a game? What the user sees. All it really needs to know is processing input, rendering output, and talking to the big cheese. That’s it. Hell, before we talk communication methods, step back and think there: an Android activiy and a Windows executable could both function as clients, talk to the same server, and have a cross platform multiplayer game. Or even a screen like detach/reattach feature where you could begin playing on your mobile phone, then switch to a PC with way better graphics. Threating the user side of the app as a “Client”, it would be possible to have a low-end client for basic phones and a high definition client for sexy tablets.

To make it work, we need a service program to communicate with. On a PC, I would probably use shared memory for offline play and sockets for network play. In favour of shared memory, would be the ease at which C++ code would likely be tweakable to use a shared memory allocator to store command objects, rather than having to do as much extra leg work to serialize the information within across a process boundry. Android land makes most issues a moot point. Network wise, I’d probably just use JSON.

Something that interests me, is how much of the core game design be implemented in such a way, that it could be used off Android by reusing the same library. C code, whatever C++ code the NDK can compile, or Java code should all work, as long as long as one watchs what non-portable bits are stuffed in there.

Putting this much thought into it, can probably be blamed on poking around the FreeBSD and Q3A source trees over the years, and finding the possibilities fascinating lol.

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In cleaning out a hard drive, I stumbled across a personal DokuWiki I was running. It has various stuff in it, ranging from stuff such as a guide to making Live Operations and tryout info. For momento’s sake I guess, since [SAS] was such a big part of my life, I’ve adapted the Service History part of my own wiki entry.

It can be found here.

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Another sign that I spent way to many years on training/teaching CQB concepts over at [SAS], is when in the event of congestion at the hatch, my instinct is still ride the door for threats and clear the fatal funnel ASAP!

Sadly, that portion of my brain gets better exercise at Airsoft than at Work, lol. Hmm…

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Last night was some awesome rounds on Killing Floor, which eventually became an effective 2 versus like upwards of several dozen zombies at a time: including the dreaded Fleshpound, which is basically the run for your damn life if you don’t want to lose it, kind of Big Mother of all Big Ass Zombies! A single fleshpound can easily neutralize an entire section if it catches them in an unwary crowd, and usually you find them in pairs with plenty of support!

We had some very close games but also some impressive successes against the Fleshpounds and their accompanying chainsaw wielding cousins. My teammate was running level 4 berserker with a katana, while I was running as a level 4 field medic, armed with a MP7 and DE.50. Perhaps between surviving the hordes of lesser zombies, we got into the grove by the time the big nasties entered the fray.

It was like a well choreographed dance that just came together on the fly: berserker tanking in with her katanta and my MP7s healing darts and medical syringe for help; then Ran’ would fade out to heal and I’d step in as a human shield and in between whomever not dealing with the fleshpounder, picking off the lesser zombies. Between the two of us, we basically kicked major zombie ass, lol. It was kind of impressive  to see such teamwork, because normally, two players are gonna be dead meat in a game like Killing Floor, not mopping the floor. Although of course, more than a few onslaughts we only escaped by like 3-5 points of health left… hehe. At least for me, it’s a pretty natural flow: heal my friend to starve off death, then slip in front as the fleshpound charges, then cycling back before I’m dead, lol.

Somehow, it’s part of how I am wired up, that I’d rather be support instead of the highest score. In real life, well, all I can say, the zombies would have to eat my friends over my dead and gnawed body. That point of view wouldn’t surprise most of the people that know me either.

Killing Floor

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Yesterday I stumbled over an interesting game, perhaps the first to offer a positive ROI since I started with the Left 4 Dead series: that is to say, I’m really enjoying this game lol.

Killing Floor is similar to the zombie mode in Call of Duty but without the run & gun feel; which is rather surprisign considering it’s built off a modified Unreal Engine 2.5. It actually makes RvS/SWAT4 look more like a R&G game IMHO. The jist of the game, your rag-tag squad is dropped into wave after wave of “Specimens”, the most basic of which resembles a vampire out of I Am Legend and behaves like a Night of the Living Dead zombie; the majority however, are closer to mid-level Strogg from Quake II/IV.

For all the specimens you kill, you earn Pounds Sterling that can be spent on weapons, ammunition, and body armour between waves. Although it is only a co-op/horror type game, it’s not as team work oriented as Left 4 Dead, which was designed to *force* you to work together. It is however extremely fun when played with a good team. Also unlike Call of Duty’s concept for co-op, it’s not oriented towards competitive co-op but more realistically, completing the objective and living to tell the tail.

Me like 🙂

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Unwinding to a little UrT, reminds me of one of the reasons that I generally forgo adversarial game types these days.

Essentially, I ended up in a quaint little 2v2, and could probably have taken the other team on 1v2 and won. I was doing fine with it as a 1v3 before the server auto balanced the teams in the first quarter. Successful enough to be called a “Hacker” by the player that would end up my team mate. Once I noticed the other team was outclassed, I decided to sling my preferred weapon for something less ideal, in order to make the handicap a bit more even. What got my goat however was, when the rather insulting team mate I got thrown with not only kept dying, but started copying my loadout: then leveraged my streak of killstreaks to go spawn rape the other team for a good 12-16 frags. Then having to put up with said team mates rude behaviour at being told to stop laming. I do admit to being tempted to snipe him in the back of the head and exit, but instead focused on the remaining half of the game.

Morons.