blogging from my new vista super ultra pro machine. It didn’t take me long at all to get used to vista, and now I have a hard time going back to xp. I even have my netbook dual-booting to Windows 7. Vista is really flying on my machine, thanks to a fairly new core-2 duo and a generous heap of ram (haha computer-nerd humor).
The funny thing is that the onboard sound is noticeably better than my old “Sound Blaster Live 24 bit” card on my old computer. Is Sound-Blaster even around anymore? How can they compete? I guess we’ve reached the point where most machines have enough hardware power laying around to process sound without needing to rely on an external device. I don’t predict this happening with graphics cards, as GPU’s and CPU’s are designed for two very different jobs.
Been dealing with a bit of insomnia lately. I’m hoping that staying up a bit later will make a positive difference. I guess I shouldn’t go to bed until I really feel tired.
did a bit more coding today. more than anything I felt the need to fool around with the project, because i haven’t worked on it all week. One problem that I seem to have is that the project is already to big, and I usually forget to update code to new standards until I run into errors.
Not to long ago I tweaked the hitboxes for bullets a bit so that I could have the bullets move about twice as fast as they used to (currently 30 meters/second). In response to this I changed a variable in the class for the MP40 submachine gun so that its bullets moved at 30 me/s. However I forgot to update the other main weapon, the Kar98k battle rifle. The significance of this will become apparent within the context of the next paragraph (why did I say that? because its my blog dammit!)
One of the first things I did today was change the definition for the basic german squad to include 4 soldiers with kar98k rifles and 1 soldier with a Mp40. To keep things competitive, I upped the russian squad size to 4 soldiers carrying Mp40s (no russian weapons in game yet). I was expecting the german squad to win, because their rifles have approximately twice the range of the submachine guns, so the russian squad will have to advance under fire before they can shoot back. However, I was suprised to find that the russian squad was consistently decimating the german squad.
After a bit of debugging, I realized that the problem was the Kar98k’s were still using the old 15 meter/second bullet speed, and as all bullets die after 4 seconds of flight time, they could not shoot as far as the mp40’s, and therefore the germans had a range disadvantage, as well as a damage per second disadvantage (a rifle can put far less lead in the air then a mp40).
After updating the Kar98k file, I also changed bullet lifetime to 10 seconds to allow a bullet to travel the full engagement range for the kar, which is currently set at 300 meters. Although a real life kar98k has an effective range upwards of 800 meters, 300 meters is probably the most common range that a target could be accurately engaged with iron sights. I set the mp40 at 100 meters, because I can’t imagine those tiny 9mm bullets being lethal anywhere past that range.
insanity is spending five hours working on matrix math for fun.
game development will drive me nuts before long.
polar bear
every time I see the phrase “mayo clinic”, I grin. Couldn’t they have chosen a name with less negative health connotations?
(probably named after some guy named “john mayo or something. I’ll look it up sometime)
did a ton of programming in the last couple days. I did something with about every part of the engine, but the main things I worked on were:
1. Implemented german squad AI (Russian will be coming next, and will be initially identical). units will now move and fight as a squad, and the squad as a whole will decide where it should be on the battlefield. this involved quite a bit of AI work, as units had to be able to evaluate several variables, such as distance from the squad and distance to target when evaluating what to do. I can’t easily explain how huge of a leap this current iteration of German AI is from the previous version. It’s definitely the most intelligent and efficient AI that I have ever personally created.
2. changed distance calculations in AI routines so that they don’t take height into account. This had previously been the cause of several bugs, because large changes in elevation had the effect of making the AI think it was a lot farther away from where it was supposed to be then it was.
3. added new “radio” and “local communication” managers. the idea behind this is that local communication will only show up on screen if you are in ear range of the emitter, and radio communication will only show up if you are in/near a vehicle with a radio.
4. wrote a class for the luger model so that it can be used in-game. I decided to give it only two clips, because I really don’t think that anyone carries around more than that. (most ww2 games usually give you about 4-6 clips for pistols).
5. Added dispersal patterns and timings for guns so that when the AI shoots, it will be in 3-4 rounds bursts, as opposed to cooking off whole clips.
Links.. of Interest!
Rock Paper Shotgun one of the best gaming news sites... ever!
Creators XNA Microsoft's XNA site. excellent tutorials
gamedev.net Your one stop shop for game development help.
.Net Perls Good site for c# tips and tricks