btw, if you were not aware, i have a dev log section of my real website that i've actually been keeping updated with what i do every week: https://eev.ee/dev/

vacation day six

i wrote some more of my little story, in an actual physical eevee notebook. mel seems to enjoy it so far

i wrote a blog post

and i fixed some teeny bugs on floraverse

wow that's all!

vacation day five

i wrote a few pages of a little story, and now actually know where it's going

i tried some character design whoa and drew a thing, with moderate success

wow those took a lot of time actually!

vacation day four

finished the patch for that doom map editor's obscure problem with handling moving lines around; it was merged already, woo

drew some beautiful artwork

wrote a little bit of a short story, then realized i hadn't yet figured out what happens next, sooo we'll see where that goes i guess

figured out how to fix floraverse's homepage in webkit, but didn't actually fix it yet

yeargh, where does the time go...

tomorrow i want to do more writing, get out some little stories and also figure out where triple monday is headed. i can do it, but it's hard for me to sit down and focus inwards like that i guess

vacation day three

oops, bit late

finished the prompt, which is now on floraverse, wahey

set out to do some doom mapping, but instead of doing that i fixed an awkward architecture bug in the doom map editor i use 8) there are like four major ones i'm aware of and i've been vaguely intending to fix them for ages now

did some doodling, mostly of another pokémon/move combo

more starbindery work: instead of hardcoding how to render tiles, i found that it's all described by declarative rules in the game assets, so i wrote a little interpreter for those, and now i render pipes and platforms correctly too. also i sped up the whole load/generate cycle by like 30 seconds, which is nice for me.

vacation day two

i put some effort into starbindery (an autogenerated starbound reference) in the form of a javascript implementation of material rendering

which basically means i did this

which is pretty cool

also i played with LMMS, a linux music studio thing, and figured out enough to recreate four chords. then i stopped because i didn't actually have any song ideas

i doodled a tiny bit but nothing really finished or presentable

i worked on the itchy itchy prompt for a while. most of the time went to cobbling together a file format (well, json format) for storing a cutscene. so far they've all been written in code, which is convenient for me, but not really data. the prompt will be just json, which is a huge step towards being able to write an editor for these damn things.

that's all i got! where does the time go wow

vacation day one

slow day.

i drew a vacationing eevee yesterday, and some shameful pornography today, which took a surprising chunk of the day. then i hung out with mel for a while, and then it was kind of late already

and i woke up early so now i'm drowsy and probably going to bed haha

vacation 2015

I'm off for the next two weeks!

I'm gonna make a proactive effort to actually write about the stuff I do every day, because maybe that's interesting or something.

Things I want to work on include:

Stay tuned for what all I'm up to...

i super slacked on this blog oops!

but here is the thing i worked on for yelp's hackathon last week: flax, my roguelike

i did a bunch of work on terrain generation and the UI, cleaned up some internals a teeny bit, messed up some different internals a teeny bit more, and made it possible to actually win the game \o/

if you are a super nerd you can play it but you need python 3 and not-windows and some other things.

hackin on quixe

which is a javascript interpreter for the glulx interactive fiction engine

what does that mean??? it doesn't matter don't worry here's all that matters

before: http://eblong.com/zarf/glulx/quixe/quixe/play-remote.html?story=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.eblong.com%2Fzarf%2Fglulx%2Fsensory.blb&enter=Play+it!

AFTER: http://stuff.veekun.com/quixe-demo/play-test.html

i added support for images and sound, and wrote a new stylesheet for it

i think this is pretty cool

i think i want an early area in flax to be foresty so i'm workin on that

i've been trying to make forest paths work for a couple days and finally got something i like! went through a lot of false starts but this is working pretty well

the rules were:

(note that atm only areas with short grass — the green dots — are considered, so in this screenshot there's an orphan area at the bottom)

i tried some A* and looked into some other graph-traversal algorithms for a while but eventually settled on something a bit different

the forest itself is generated with perlin noise, which is an algorithm for producing an n-dimensional "plasma" pattern, varying from low to high with distinct peaks and valleys. all i do is make a grid of noise, then treat low values as short grass, high values as trees, and medium values as long grass.

so what i did was flood the forest. not like a floodfill; like actually pouring water into the terrain, treating the noise values as a height.

upsides:

downsides:

next up: RIVERS

i've been making a point of keeping up my GitHub Streak™, which is just a count of how many days in a row i've done something — made a commit, filed a ticket, maybe something else idk.

the result is that flax has moved along incrementally every day for almost a month. and because the rules are flexible, i still do something even on days when i don't have time or energy to do anything significant — even merging someone else's pull request counts as committing. and when i have absolutely no ideas for what to do with flax, i do something with floraverse instead.

it's a pretty slick little reward system. only downside is that i've also been pretty eager to work on IF and flora stories and my programming book, and those don't count because i don't have them on github. but i'm fitting them in here and there.

unstoppablecarl answered your post: entity-component

i have the most elegant solution to your problem but this ask box is too small to contain it

re: entity-component

jamesnvc answered your post: entity-component

i'll pretty much have to have some form of pub-sub anyway for equipment and the like

but one thing i hate having to deal with is "remembering" to remove event listeners and effects and what-have-you when an object is destroyed or removed or otherwise disabled. (a running theme i've seen in nethack bug fixes is "poison resistance got confused when it came from two places at once".) and completely freeform pubsub tends to exacerbate that, since there are no rules about who can subscribe to what and when. so i'll probably end up with a fixed handful of "directions" an entity can subscribe to — the tile it's on, the creature it's equipped to, the creature whose inventory it's in, etc. then when the entity goes away, the listeners automatically go with it.

(originally i was just going to copy the DOM event model but i immediately discovered that something designed for a nested hierarchy doesn't work too well for, say, tiles)

entity-component

flax now has combat, whoa, amazing

allow me to ponder aloud for a moment here

as with my previous attempts at a roguelike, flax is built with an entity-component system. rather than having a rat's nest of classes inheriting from a zillion mixins, there are a couple layers

the interfaces also know how to adapt an entity to its appropriate component. so if you called IPhysics(player), you'd get a Solid object. it's a little inverted from how EC usually works but it plays more nicely with a dynamic language.

this might seem a bit astronauty, but there are good reasons! roguelikes are intricate complicated things, and i would like to avoid having interaction lint strewn all over the place, as is largely the case with nethack's source code. consider also that roguelikes tend to have extreme world-altering effects, like polymorph and polypile, which can change an entity into a completely different type of thing altogether. with the above setup, i can just switch out the type and i'm done.

anyway, so. this is all well and good so far.

i also have baby event handling. any action or instant effect is implemented as an event, sort of like in a browser. so when you try to take a step, that fires a Walk event at everything in the tile you're trying to move onto. anything with a Solid component has a Walk event handler that just cancels the event. if nothing intervenes, the event has a default_behavior() that actually moves you to the new tile.

so far so good still.

but now i'm doing combat and things are getting a little fuzzier. MeleeAttack is an event which fires at a creature. its default behavior is to fire Damage, which then ultimately inflicts the actual damage with ICombatant(creature).damage(amount).

so. there are now three places to put the actual implementation of an action: in a component, in an event handler on a component, or in an event's default behavior. so when does code go where, and why? i'm treating ICombatant.damage() as just a dumb method that should modify health, but should that all instead live in an event handler that handles Damage? it seems reasonable; what if a component wanted to treat damage completely differently? so then is there any reason to ever have default behavior for events, or should it all be implemented by the target's event handlers? does that mean all actual game behavior should live in event handlers, and components are primarily a way to bundle event handlers together?

another thought: what do events actually fire on? e.g. Walk right now fires at everything on a tile, but that seems weird; surely an event should only have a single target (in this case, i suppose, the tile itself). this'll get more complicated later, too, when there's equipment that wants to intervene on certain events on the wearer. so i suppose... entities should be able to register temporary event handlers on other entities, and unregister them when they leave (e.g. when equipment is taken off)? i guess that would make sense. tiles will probably still be a special case, since they're just part of the map implementation, not entities.

idk, thoughts??

NEW EXPERIMENT: i'm trying to make and push at least ONE COMMIT to SOMETHING every day. github shows a streak under your contribution graph, so. number to max out.

anyway over the last few days i've been tinkering with flax, a flora-themed roguelike. not a whole lot exists atm but i've been dicking around with map generation and well: https://twitter.com/eevee/status/478056263838752768

that's pretty basic too it's just perlin noise converted into a few types of terrain tile

i want to randomize eeeeverything and i'm excited