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31

Chit-Chat / Re: Whats your favorite radio station?

« on: November 01, 2016, 08:56:40 am »

I like techno music when I code; it's not unusual to find me on di.fm, I like the many station options. Pandora works for me also, and you can find a lot of good music posted and playlisted together on YouTube too.

32

Chit-Chat / Re: ProcJam 2016 (Nov 5 - Nov 12 UTC)

« on: November 01, 2016, 08:55:07 am »

Thanks for sharing Donni; I hadn't noticed that.

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Chit-Chat / Re: ProcJam 2016 (Nov 5 - Nov 12 UTC)

« on: October 29, 2016, 01:44:22 pm »

Quote from: merrak on October 29, 2016, 01:25:14 pm

I've been meaning to play with that algorithm for a while. This may be a good opportunity to experiment with it. Handcrafting hundreds of rooms one at a time is such a pain

Notably, the description assumes nothing about the actual content of the room. You could create a generator to fill the rooms with whatever is needed, or hand-craft room templates to match every possible scenario and just slot them in to the appropriate points. The main point here is to ensure that progress is gated with key/locks of some kind (actual keys, bombs, tools, etc), and that the player is able to (eventually) path through the level to the goal (by not putting a key behind it's lock!).

Quote

I liked the idea of taking a genetic algorithms approach--generate levels based off of a set of parameters ("chromosomes"). Harder levels would be created by assigning a high mate probability to levels the player has difficulty beating. Unfortunately, I don't think it would work well unless I had some sort of server that multiple players could contribute data to. I don't think data from just one player would be enough.

Yeah, doing "fitness" tests can be trained and are very interesting. It reminds me of the game Warning Forever; each time you beat the boss it adapts to your technique used. That's the primary challenge, in fact, adapting to the boss' adaptations.
You have to be careful about that also though, as the players that train the algorithm are the ones that it will cater to. My daughters have a very different playing style and skill level than I do, for example.

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Chit-Chat / Re: ProcJam 2016 (Nov 5 - Nov 12 UTC)

« on: October 29, 2016, 12:29:38 pm »

I created this earlier to share in Discord so I'm posting it here for it's relevance. This is a simplification of the lock/key game design (frequently used Zelda games) for the purposes of level generation.

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Chit-Chat / Re: ProcJam 2016 (Nov 5 - Nov 12 UTC)

« on: October 29, 2016, 11:24:07 am »

Yes, exactly. Procedural Generation would be where you code something that decides placement, features, properties, etc. of things in the game instead of hand-crafting them.

Rogue or NuclearThrone both generate levels procedurally, and that's where most people see the use. No Man's Sky, of course, generates a great many things procedurally.
Spelunky generates the levels procedurally, but interestingly they're based off of templates which the game modifies. This is an example of mixing procedural and hand-crafted content. The Binding Of Isaac or Enter The Gungeon are similar in that rooms are handcrafted, but the placement is procedural.
For more subtle uses though, you could do things that are not immediately apparent to the player. For example, if you reduce the difficulty of a level (lowering all enemies' health, perhaps) if it seems the player is having difficulty in beating it, you've just created a procedural (and adaptive) difficulty generator for your game.

36

Chit-Chat / ProcJam 2016 (Nov 5 - Nov 12 UTC)

« on: October 29, 2016, 07:06:56 am »

ProcJam is a jam about Procedural Generation; making stuff that makes other stuff. I enjoy this kind of stuff and encourage other people to learn more about it too!

www.procjam.com
https://itch.io/jam/procjam
ProcJam 2016 Talks (YouTube)

Note that the start and end times are pretty much just a guideline and everything else is pretty flexible too. From the official page:

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You can start early, or finish late. The dates are there really as guidelines to let you know when other people will be jamming. Some people can only work on weekends, some people can only take an evening here or there. Last year I spent four weekends instead of jamming through the official days. Do what works for you - let us know if you need a late submission code.
If you think it's a PROCJAM entry, it is. Don't worry if it's a game, or if it's really art, or if it's 'proper' procedural generation (that doesn't exist). If you made something and want to share it with us, please submit it!

Quote from: Donni11 on October 31, 2016, 03:50:11 pm

The organizers of the jam set up a channel on Discord.
You can join here:
https://discordapp.com/invite/BHd7ndk
https://itch.io/jam/procjam/topic/45445/procjam-slack-discord

37

Ask a Question / Re: tween seems to break physics

« on: October 26, 2016, 02:15:34 pm »

You could tween an invisible actor and then have the visible one follow it for the duration of the tween (move toward). Stop following after the tween ends and let full physics take back over.

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Ask a Question / Re: Array of Actors?

« on: October 25, 2016, 08:47:38 am »

пожалуйста

39

Ask a Question / Re: Array of Actors?

« on: October 24, 2016, 07:45:21 am »

Something like this works if you're just adding all of them from a scene right at the start. The do-after is recommended because sometimes the code for the behavior is run before the actors are created, IIRC. Waiting a fraction of a second after the scene gets built means you can delay checking for actors and ensure they're all in-scene and ready to be detected.

Code: [Select]

When Created
set MyList to New List
Do After .1 Seconds
- For each actor of type MyType
-- Add Actor Of Type to MyList

Alternatively, if you're doing something like creating projectiles or waves of enemies, just add then when you create them.

Code: [Select]

Create actor of type Enemy at...
Add [Last Created Actor] to MyList
// do stuff with your list of Actors later...

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Ask a Question / Re: SSD vs HDD with Stencyl?

« on: October 22, 2016, 08:21:04 am »

My laptop has an SSD and boot times are awesome. I haven't really paid attention to any other speed increases but fast booting is a nice touch

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Ask a Question / Re: Why isn't collision always being detected?

« on: October 13, 2016, 11:51:22 am »

Are your projectiles sensors? It occurs to me that maybe the collision isn't caught because the projectile "bounces off" of the enemy (e.g. stops colliding) before it has a chance to run it's own collision code. Typically I prefer to have all the code for a collision happen in one place (easier to work with when you can see it at once), so I'm not even sure if that's possible - but it's a thought.

42

Chit-Chat / Re: Unable To Answer a 4th Grade Student [Complete-Off topic]

« on: October 11, 2016, 06:22:02 am »

To be clear, this is more of an English-language question than strictly a math question. It comes down to a matter of how you are describing the value in question. I could say, for example, "How many ones do you have?" if talking about a plural quantity of a singular value. On the other hand, someone could say "I have a two." to describe a singular quantity of a plural value.
We describe fractions as plural because they're naturally being divided into multiple units; "three-fifths" or "six-sevenths" are each saying "I have X quantity of Y possible total." As a result, we treat them as plural.

Regarding his second question; again, it's how we describe it. By saying "I have two halves." we are describing a value that is equal to a single whole, but we are discussing it in fractional terms - thus it is plural. Imagine cutting a pizza into eight pieces. You take two of those pieces. You now have "one quarter" or "one fourth" of the whole pizza; but if someone were to ask you how much pizza you ate you would say "two slices".

Again, math is not the same as language. Language is notoriously imprecise and full of variation!

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Stencyl Jam 16: "Spooky" / Corruption Eruption (Hectate) for StencylJam2016

« on: October 08, 2016, 03:33:27 pm »

Ok so I couldn't help myself from starting something. I'm thinking breakout right now and I've been doing waaay more with the Image API, etc, than actual gameplay. On the upside, here's a fun GIF for your pleasure!