clyde

Mornings are dead. I've only been able to play in the afternoon and evening.

The other night I was playing Attrition and I saw a red dot in a building so I went around the building to go into a side door. As I was moving in, a friendly grunt said this as I was passing him "Be careful, he's cloaked." I looked in the doorway and sure enough, there was a cloaked player waiting for me in there whom I shot immediately, but I would not have seen in time had it not been for that regular grunt.

I really appreciate it when games look simple and easy to a beginner and include optional complexity that the player can approach when ready. I often mention how Chime does this superbly. At first the game appears to be an easy Tetris, but then scoring elements and optional multipliers become apparent through play and the perception of skill-potential increases gradually. Something I find difficult about Crusader Kings II is that it initially looks like the skill-potential is incredibly high which makes me feel like I need to know how to play it, even if it is willing to mostly play itself and allow me to optimize at my leisure.

I think Dragon Age II had an great pause/real-time system. I played the entire game set at a higher difficulty and had to pause constantly throughout each battle to queue up simultaneous attacks and synergies between my party members. Then I found out that a friend had played through the entire game by controlling only one character in real-time at a lower difficulty setting. I think it's amazing that the game can be played in such different ways.

I think that Titanfall is incredibly accessible when compared to other first-person shooters as evidenced by how much I enjoy losing in that game. I think that the significant factors are the large size of the maps; grunts to shoot at and grunts that point you in the right direction; the ability to take pot-shots at large significant targets from a safe distance; and a traversal system that encourages skilled players to take different paths than novice players. The least accessible third-person shooter I've played is Super Monday Night Combat. SMNC has made me feel like a god and made me more angry and frustrated than any other game. It's a game of incredible highs and incredible lows. Forgetting the current state of the population and its influnece on accessibility, the game was very much exclusionary by design. The ability to buy sponsorships that gave you bonuses to things like criticals was esoteric, off-putting, and just felt dirty. Because it was a Lords Management, the game encouraged half of your team to insult the weakest member until they left (to get them to stop feeding) and to have arguments about if it was a "gg" or not because you didn't have even teams. Most of the chatter during that game is about which would be worse for the team, if the new player stays and feeds or if they leave all together. SMNC also had a lot of confusing things about it for most players. It's cartoony style and apparent genre imied that it should be played like Team Fortress 2 rather than like DOTA. The grappling-system was actually an effective balancing tool for the classes, but new players had never seen anything like it and couldn't understand what it's role was. Shadowrun for the Xbox 360 had similar problems. The resurrection system was one of the most interesting parts of the game, but it required that new players sit out for the majority of every match; when killed in Shadowrun, you must wait untila teammate rezzes you or until the math is over to play again. Matches would often conclude with one very skilled player systematically assasinating the opposing team one at a time while all of her dead teammates watched. I actually considered this part of the game to be very accessible, I enjoyed switching cameras between remaining team-members and advising them on the locations of others. You learn a lot about the game by watching the best players do their thing. But I think that spending 90% of your time not playing during your first 20 hours of a game turned a lot of people off. It should be mentioned though that something about Shadowrun's early days encouraged more team-work in chat than any other game I've played.

Oculus reveals their launch date and line-up. It includes a teaser for Half-Life 3 that has no date, is not grouped with the launch-titles, but does mention that it was designed to be an Oculus Rift experience. Dragon Age Inquisition will show very well, probably receiving multiple Game of Show awards.

I have a pretty good metric on when to buy. I wait until I've had two or three moments where I literally would have played that specifici game, if I had access to it. Moments when I just think about wanting it for other reasons do not count; I have to have actually been willing to play it at that specific moment. Once this happens two or three times, it's a good time to buy. I have enjoyed my time with Banner Saga. I actually never finished it. I think the multiplayer is really fun too.

Thursday This morning, I'm trying to understand how to access variables from a class or something. It's not working. I keep getting null exception errors. using UnityEngine; using System.Collections; public class Experiment : MonoBehaviour { public class Zoo { public string lion; public string tiger; public string ape; public Zoo(string l, string t, string a){ lion = l; tiger = t; ape = a; } } // Use this for initialization void Start () { Zoo myZoo = new Zoo ("Harrelson", "Tony", "Mike"); Debug.Log (myZoo.tiger); } } NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object Experiment.Start () (at Assets/Scripts/Experiment.cs:23) Edit: [Moments later] I cut Zoo myZoo = new Zoo ("Harrelson", "Tony", "Mike"); and pasted it outside of the Start(), ran it, it worked, moved it back into the Start() and now it works fine even though it is exactly the same as the script I posted above. This is worrisome; my faith in the supposed constant that the computer is never wrong and that it's always human-error has been cracked. Edit: 2:31 P.M. I think I may need to take a nap. I'm stumbling around with classes and constructors today now that I have an idea of what they do, but the choice menu is causing me additional trouble. I had made each choice menu its own instance of a class called Choice whose fields were populated with the display messages of each choice. The idea was that by making them a class, I could easily put them into an array and then reference which ever choice menu I needed when I reached the proper page. But now that I'm planning to iterate through the fields of each instance of the Choice class when it is time (in order to put text on each choice box and somehow record which choice is made), I'm realizing that it's much harder than iterating through an array of values. I need to take a nap and come back with fresh eyes that may be willing to make massive changes to what I've done this morning. Edit: 6:40 P.M. It has been a successful day. Some stuff kind of works. I need to stop for the day because it's becoming more and more difficult to focus. I'm going to upload the scripts as they are (not finished) = line; //Flips the page for next entry. page = page + 1; } //Choices //This array will temprorarily store choices and their consequences qhich the GameObject choiceboxes are instantiated. //Thirty choices with a message and a conditional each. public string[,] choices=new string[30,2]; public int index; public void Choice(string choice="...", string whatHappens="nothing") { choices [index, 0] = choice; choices [index, 1] = whatHappens; index = index + 1; } //Now I need to make it so the choices are instantiated as gameObjects public GameObject choiceBox; GameObject newBox; void ShowChoices() { for (int i=0; choices[i,0]!=null; i++) { //Not sure why I have to say "as GameObject" here, but i do because I get this error otherwise: //Assets/Scripts/Conversation.cs(74,25): error CS0266: Cannot implicitly convert type `UnityEngine.Object' to `UnityEngine.GameObject'. An explicit conversion exists (are you missing a cast?) newBox=Instantiate(choiceBox, new Vector3(0,3-i,0), Quaternion.identity)as GameObject; //I have to get the 3D text child TextMesh textmesh=newBox.GetComponentInChildren<TextMesh>(); //Now assign the message part of the array to the text textmesh.text=choices[i,0]; //Get the MakeChoice script attached to the gameobject MakeChoice makeChoice=newBox.GetComponentInChildren<MakeChoice>(); //Assign the whatHappens part of the array to the conditional makeChoice.whatHappens=choices[i,1]; } } //Subscribe to MouseClick void OnEnable(){ MouseClick.MouseSelects += Write; } void OnDisable(){ MouseClick.MouseSelects -= Write; } // Use this for initialization void Awake () { //Here we store the textbox GameObject textbox = this.gameObject; //Now we store the component for the textMesh textMesh = textbox.GetComponent<TextMesh> (); Say (character1, "Well Weblow"); Say (character2, "Miss guised"); Choice ("Go swimming", "You get wet"); Choice ("Eat bannanas", "YOu get bananna-mouth"); ShowChoices (); //Last line in Awake() will be resetting the page number back to 0 now that the dialogue array has been populated. page = 0; //These are all Debugs I did while writing this script //Step3 //Say (character1, "first"); //Say (character1, "second"); //Say (character1, "third"); //Debug.Log (dialogue [2].sentence); //Step2 //Say (character1, "My my, I wonder if this will work or if page will have to go public."); //Debug.Log (dialogue [0].sentence); //Step 1 //Said example = new Said (character1, "Why hello there!"); //Debug.Log (example.sentence); //Debug.Log (example.speaker); } //This will be the method that moves the text along when the mouse is clicked on any item not taged "clickable" void Write(GameObject clicked) { //Debug.Log (clicked); //I'll have to figure out how not to let the page advance if they click on nothing when making a choice if (clicked==null) { //Debug.Log (page); //Textbox text is the sentence from the current page's Said textMesh.text=dialogue .sentence; //Flip the page page=page+1; } } void Start(){ } // Update is called once per frame void Update () { } }

I draw in my sketchbook, read the forums, psuedo-code, listen to podcasts, write down ideas for games and such.

This cyberpunk movie is so good that I feel like I'm going to get creased for watching it. I love the rubix-cube part.

I gave myself a gaming allowance of $40 a month; it's awesome. I really enjoy picking and choosing based on limited resources. Steam sales don't hit me as hard as they used to because I look at all those games and realize that I have 50 that I haven't even begun to play. I enjoy buying no games for two months so I can have enough for a big release, or having extra and deciding to put it towards my oculus savings. It's become an enjoyable meta-game for me.

Yeah, I realized that after I posted it. I think I've been wanting to say that anyway and I hadn't had a good reason to yet. I guess I still haven't had a good reason to.

Actually, snorkeling has given me the impression that some fish are somewhat aware and have personalities. I think that captivity makes them dead to most stimulus. Following through with my hypothesis, because we are typically only exposed to fish when have been trapped in a small container and fed artificially for the entireity of their experience or when they have been impaled and removed from their breathing medium, we have false impressions of what they are actually like in normalacy.

I want to hear about your tour of Ommegang. Where does the magic happen?

It's a systemic problem; we need more trains, possibly catheters.

What do y'all think about the dialogue UI in this game? I'm trying to figure out if the offset, tall format in Shadowrun Returns has advantages over the typical visual-novel format where a large text-box appears at the bottom of the screen and then choices overlap the screen with separate, centered boxes. I enjoy the temporary speech bubbles that happen in the game-screen for flavor, though I've missed a couple of them.

And so the week begins. Tuesday I listed my priorites for the visual-novel template. http://instagram.com/p/n8BlT1x-d4/ Wednesday Trying to work out the specifics of stage 1 (text-boxes and choices). http://instagram.com/p/n_Nezjx-Xa/ http://instagram.com/p/n_Nsh1R-Xw/ http://instagram.com/p/n_N6oLx-YE/ I'm starting to think that I'll be learning about classes and constructors and function members all day tommorow. I'm thinking that I'll want to make a class called "Choice" which will have a destination page number and a message to display? Possibly a couple of values that can change? I don't know. This is harder than I thought it would be, but I'm trying to avoid using GUI.Button

I will enjoy reading it. ...assuming you post about it on the forums.

Progress Report for Week #14 What were my goals for this week? Which of my goals did I accomplish? -I did in fact learn about delegates and events and feel somewhat confident in using them now. Accomplished! What happened? -Early in the week, I watched a few videos on events and delegates and looked at the written tutorial I've already mentioned. I'm sure that I had absorbed some amount of understanding from week #12, when I watched , it largely came together for me. Armed with a decent understanding of what I was doing, I combined the parts I liked from the video and the previously mentioned written tutorial in the sequencer game; specifically, I used it for the mouse click's ability to select GameObjects. I saw that it was successful, and it led me to clean up some of the code a little bit. I hadn't cleaned up the sequencer code much yet. Because of the written tutorial, I started feeling like I knew what singletons were for and I realized that I could make the class that kept the sequencer's information such as gridHeight and clockSpeed a static class and then make all those values non-static (before, I had it so that all of those values were statics). Seemed like a good idea. Really, I just wanted an excuse to try and make a singleton because everyone is like "singleton this" and "singleton that". The point here, is that I think I understand statics and singletons a bit more. using UnityEngine; using System.Collections; public class SettingsValues : MonoBehaviour { public static SettingsValues settingsValues; public int gridWidth=16; public int gridHeight=12; public float clockSpeed=1; public int octaveDivision=4; public int beginningOctave=1; //Singleton void Awake(){ if (settingsValues != null) { Destroy (this); } else { settingsValues = this; } DontDestroyOnLoad (this); } } Then for the rest of the week I played Shadowrun Returns with my computer-time. Oh, except the part when I made gridHeight and gridWidth display dynamically in the settings menu (which I did by subscribing the assignment of textMesh.text to the mouseClick event by the way). using UnityEngine; using System.Collections; public class SetText : MonoBehaviour { GameObject textObject; TextMesh textMesh; void OnEnable(){ MouseClick.MouseSelects += Select; } void OnDisable(){ MouseClick.MouseSelects -= Select; } // Use this for initialization void Start () { textObject = this.gameObject; textMesh = textObject.GetComponent<TextMesh> (); textMesh.text = SettingsValues.settingsValues.gridHeight.ToString () + " X " + SettingsValues.settingsValues.gridWidth.ToString (); } void Select(GameObject g){ textMesh.text = SettingsValues.settingsValues.gridHeight.ToString () + " X " + SettingsValues.settingsValues.gridWidth.ToString (); } } What I really like about events is that I don't have to put everything in Update with conditional bools anymore. I don't know why I care about that, but it just feels more direct this way. I hope it is more efficient. Also, I realized that I think I fully understand how to save components as local variables now. At some point I was getting a frame-rate drop from 70 to 20 every time I clicked something and I said to myself "Oh that is probably because I didn't store the component as a local variable" and I stored the component as a local variable and then the frame-rate stayed at 70. This is good because I've been struggling with understanding that one, and the experience made me think that I've integrated the knowledge into my process. I still don't understand why storing the address of a component can make that much of a difference since I feel like I'm telling it exactly where to look with GetComponent<> anyway, but one way obviously works better and I know when to use it so that's a step forward. I'm really glad I make progress reports because when I sat down to write this, I thought I had just watched a couple of videos and the slacked off and played Shadowrun all week. This makes me look like I actually did something. What are my goals for Week #14? -Make a visual-novel template. Shadowrun is making me want to work on something more narrative based. The sequencer isn't done, but I want to work on progressing toward narrative games. It's been a while since I worked on my visual-novel template, and it's going to be a lot of work to figure out what I was doing with the cameras. I'm just going to rip some of the methods out of that project and make a new visual-novel template. I'm choosing "Make a visual-novel template" as my goal even though it sounds ambitious because I just want something that I can kind of work with by week #15. If I end up with something that is just a background and a couple of GUI.Buttons then fine. I can make something more complex later, I just want to be able to make a little story during week 15 and right now I have a broken weird thing that lerps in and out. What challenges might I face and how can I prepare for them. -I'll get ambitious for sure. What I'm going to do tomorrow is write down everything that I want and then order it by priority. On Wednesday I'll start with the highest priority. Also, I think I'll write more than the Monday progress report. A couple of weeks in a row, I've been nervous about writing this on Monday when I'm tired, and confused about what it is I did in the week prior. More frequent reports may be what I need to stay motivated throughout the week and remember what my process of learning has been. I feel irresponsible about just saying my goal was "learn delegates and events" and then coming back a week later and saying "I learned delegates and events!" Reporting on the iteration may be more useful.

I was a decker in the campaign and it was a disappointment. In Shadowrun Unlimited I chose adept and now there are terminals everywhere thay I can't hack. I used a karma point for decking and then went to buy a Sony. It's like 5000 nuyen. I like the fact that it will take effort.

I played a little bit of the Shadowrun Unlimited mod this morning. I think this may be the first mod of anything I've played. The tonal difference between this and the main campaign is immediately apparent. While in the campaign I was being treated as someone who paid admission for a fun ride, Shadowrun Unlimited is more alienating. Early on, an NPC says "What, you don't want to do fetch-quests? Take a fuckin hike. If you want to be a runner, you got to pay your dues." I don't think that the official campaign could have pulled that off, but this mod totally does. There is a feeling that I can truly fuck up in the mod and that it owes me nothing. That's particularly appropriate for a cyberpunk setting IMO. I went into a run-down apartment complex to buy some spells and there were a bunch of unlocked doors that looked to be the doors to people's apartments. If it had been the campaign, I would have gone in every one of them, but because I don't trust that the mod is going to make sure I have a good time, I just went to find my contact and left. I didn't want any trouble. I still have no idea if those rooms were just loot-lockers or if my street-smarts were rewarded with no news. Another thing is that you subscribe to an insurance plan that takes you to a doctor to get revived if you are killed. I have no idea if you lose your character without insurance, but I'm not taking the chance (and I don't really want to know). So every pay-day gets 100 some nuyen deducted from it for insurance so someone will care enough about me to keep me alive. Cyberpunk. Another example is mission specific Now if I can just figure out where this stupid Jackal's Tavern or whatever is. My little yellow objective compass isn't telling me.

I also finished last night. I would have rather talked to characters about interesting things than fought a bunch of enemies that required a new pattern. Still, I hadn't used an adept all game and having one be mandatory showed me how much fun they are to use. I took both members that were recommended and had a great time increasing crit-chances as a team. I subscribed to the highest ranked steamworkshop mod whose description sounds ambitious.

I play it frequently, but it's hard to say when. I think it would be fun though.

I love Awesomenauts. Every once in a while, I forget that I ran into lag-issues, so I start playing again. Then I have a great time for a few days, run into problems where I get dropped from games and the cycle repeats. I think it must be the specific combination of my internet-provider and something about Awesomenauts net-code. You've inspired me to try it again. It's a great game.

I just went on a run for some Aegis. On an unrelated note, I find myself enjoying the text writing in the game frequently. For instance, on the Aegis run