Useless Slashdot Articule

Today I read a useless slashdot article. It was about developers and motivation. I thought it would be worth a look. Turns out, all the comments were completely useless. I don't know why that someone would ask that of the wonderful "community" The RTFM crowd is not a place to find motivation, its more like the community of do not even bother. No, they will not help you with your project. I don't know what it is about the mean nerd community, but they tend to enshrine the tenants of "how to ask smart questions" and other stuff like that, encouraging others to be discouraging. I saw quite a lot of reply s promoting obviously useless things like the over-advertised prescription drugs and giving up on the project (either temporarily or permanently).
Other communities are not like this. It seems that nerds have a lot of time to tell someone useless dis advice, and not enough time to actually program anything useful.
I wish now that I had not wasted my time reading that article. As if I don't have enough to deal with learning C then having to read something nice like that. For those who don't listen and like to waste time, here it is.
Slashdot Timewaster

Wograld History, not as easy as it seems.

One of the reasons I think I initially put off the website is because I wanted some kind of world lore that made sense for the game, I had this idea of four races and nine stupidities, but then I had really no back story. For instance, I wondered, why were the stupidities important to the populace? How did the four races come to exist in the world. Try as I might, I could not answer those questions. About a year or so ago, I seemed to have written up something about a tyrant who united all the races and that the nine stupidities were a bunch of vague principles that originally tied to common sayings in the realm, but solidified into a set of principles that were used to defeat the tyrant. As far as the races went, I knew that orcs and elves could become the other race, same with humans and undead, and that undead and elves were originally considered immortal while orcs and humans were mortal, whatever the heck that meant.

One thing I have realized that as I have gotten a more in depth view of history than what i had in school. I have come to realize, that people today do not really understand the past, or even how people of that time may have thought or seen the world. I often speculated especially about ancient magic and what it must have been like. Was religion and magic always so closely interwoven? Were the gods really demons? Were the demons really gods? Why did the mysteries disappear? People can only speculated based on the writings and art that they find, but so much would not have survived the ravages of time, particularly in hot and humid climates such as Africa and the Americas. Also, a lot was destroyed by war, with a new king or tyrant removing the face and symbols of his predecessors in order to make it so that he was the only history that ever existed, and that the past did not. People like to think that certain things are or were timeless, but was that truly so? I feel it is not enough to say that is always the way it has been, one can only go further back and farther away.

One thing about the setting of Wograld, after the tyrant king, people are on an upswing. It is not falling into a dark age where people forget how to do even basic tasks, but rather, suddenly can craft new weapons and armor that they could not before. There is an enhancement in the learning of combat techniques and magic.

But the new skills and powers are not without their detractors, in fact, after the tyrant, it is almost an uphill battle to learn new things, since the races of Wograld seem to be afraid of it. This is where the demons come into play. Demons are an idea that I had after thinking about what to do about the skill system. What if, in order to raise your skill caps, you had to summon demons and ask them to train you in various skills? Wouldn't that be neat. Typically people think of demons in games as either monsters to fight, or little familiar creatures for warlocks and summoners to use in combat. But I like the idea of a whole new take on that idea. (well, actually a very old idea)

Working on the Project Website

A long time ago, I started work on the project website. I managed to upload the first page. Then I got the brilliant (actually stupid) idea that I should make it look nice with CSS or something. That simply led to it not getting done as I tried to fool around with how it was supposed to look in CSS. People don't really decide to play or not games based on how great the website is. The main thing is find the information you need and go download and run a copy of the game.

I had wasted a lot of time prior to that trying to figure out how Drupal works. Drupal is this really bloated content management system that you don't need to display basic information about a game, but one of my friends used it extensively for his website and recommended it. This is before I ever heard of CSS. Of course his website is a whole different animal from making a game website. A game website is just basically information thrown up on the web and organized in some kind of manner. In fact, I just went to a website today that was basically just a wiki for this game engine I was looking at. Wiki's make it look like it is very in progress and anyone can just add anything. However, wikis don't really have the polish of a more traditional website.

Structs and typedefs

My learning of the C code hasn't been an easy thing, as many other people who have tried to learn C programming on their own can recall. I came across an old message board post today when just glancing at some FLOSS websites. It was a discussion about someone giving C programming tutorials. Realistically, I don't think programmers for this project are going to come from the free software community of already existing programmers. If someone is already that good with free software and programming, they probably have numerous, harder projects to actually work on. I think it would be better to find a bunch of retro gamers and teach them to program in C.

The big problem is finding any good programming material on the web and in books. I have already read 4 books on the subject, Problem Solving and Program Design in C by Jeri R. Hanly, Elliot Koffman and Frank L. Friedman is the one I am reading from now. This big blue book is more about teaching algorithms than just teaching the syntax, something that is needed if you want to go ahead with the code. Some the examples are very poor though. There was this problem where they used a bunch of doubles, but then had it scanf as a float. In addition I have also worked from the infamous K&R, Joy of C and a C primer. The primer book was the one that was most geared towards complete newbies, while the rest of them were more advanced and really needed some prior programming experience.

I have started looking at the code for the X11 client again. It looks like a bunch of structs and typedefs. Not really knowing the x11 function calls as well as not really knowing the rest of the code make it hard to figure out what it does. I really have not gotten much help from the other team members as I would like. I think that is why it may be better to look for more programmers in that community rather than trying to get the current programmers to work on the project. People don't really get commited to anything without a personal stake in the end result. On the other hand I do know how much I want a 2d, pvp, skill based, mmorpg. I doubt it is the most in demand
game ever, but there is probably enough demand to get a few other people involved at least.

I'm already thinking of the fun of writing quests and sticking tilesets on the map. I just wish the user interface and current crossfire gameplay didn't suck so bad. Last time I tried to play test it a week or so ago, I ended up crashing again by going into the wrong map. I started to looked a the difference in some of the files, but my lead programmer changed a lot of things, and didn't really document his changes, this being his first free software project as well.

Learning C the hard way

I thought that the C coding job was just something I could assign to another project member. I was wrong. I also though that you could read C programming books and then dive right into the code. I was wrong about that to. Apparently, unlike things such as version control and ht ml, learning the C programming language is going to take a long long time. Part of it is because the books written about programming in C are very bad. And the other part is unlike other things, there is just so much to learn before you get a working knowledge of C. Every semi-colon, every comma makes a difference in being able to compile and run the program. Also, functions don't necessarily work the way you think they should. Take scanf for instance. The whole deal that spaces meant a new entry with scanf took me a while to figure out. Also, you have to be careful that you are not inputting things in that you don't mean to. String processing doesn't work like you think it should. And I haven't even done an in depth study of structures yet, something I will need to do to be able to understand the wograld code. The problem with most programming books is this. they give you examples, but when you try to build something on your own you are left in the dark. Then, other books have algorithms in them, but those algorithms will give you no way to implement that in the C code. You end up spending your time hunting down syntax errors because you can't implement the algorithm.

Why Quest based games are stupid.

I'm really tired of all these Quest based games. Basically, the idea behind the quest based game is this. You run around and do quests for various npcs. They have a checklist of things for you to do, like gather ten rat tails. Then they give you a prize Most of the time, it is not very good, even when it is good, it quickly loses its useage. You could fill the game up with numerious useless quests to fill up a characters quest roster. Then, after you have finished them, you are given several more.
The quest systems seems to be combined with the equally lame level system in order to keep the level grind intresting. Actually, I often feel like quest based games are too much like my life. One tends to pick up a whole bunch of them, and as soon as you stop doing quests, you find there is really nothing else to do in the game, because the rest of the game and its content wasn't filled out.
Now, I am not wholely against the ideas of npcs handing out quests. I just think that it should be a side thing rather than the whole meat and bones of the game. I do not want players to feel that they are checking off a list of things to do for some npc in town. Now, I know some people seem to like that, but then there are 99999 other games for them to play that have that sort of thing.
I think, orginally, the purpose of quests was to give an epic feel to the game, but instead of feeling like some great hero, I end up feeling like some errand boy doing stuff for the townsfolk who sit in the tavern and drink, while I am running around from dawn till dusk killing rats and other vermin.

Losing House Keys, Even when you don't die.

This last couple days, rather than being able to work on much of anything pertaining to Wograld. I have been searching for my house keys. This is one thing that games can easily fix that cannot be easily fixed in meat space. That is losing your means of entering your house. In addition, the bad guy who looted the keys from you can break in and take all your stuff. In my case it isn't so bad since I can (mostly) rely on family members to let me in, since usually someone is home here. It still sucks though because I also lost keys to my storage unit, a dresser drawer key (that fortunately wasn't locked) and my favorite irreplaceable key chain.

I remember when I played Ultima Online in the early days, besides pk stat loss (Crossfire is worse because it has stat loss for everyone not just pks), boring gold only monster loot and terrible lag, it also had this problem that when you lost your house key, there was no way you could get it back or change the locks. Therefore, once someone stole and/or looted the key, there was no way to ever make the house safe again for anyone to store things. The looter could not have it be safe, because you probably had a copy of extra keys as well. The only way to fix this was to demolish the house and start over, but since every time someone used a key on the house, it refreshed it, well you can guess what happened, griefers (intentionally or not) filled the landscape with virtually useless houses.

Anyway, later versions of UO, as well as many other games, don't have that annoying feature. You can have a ban list, and those characters can not enter your house at all. It is like a magic force field just doesn't let them inside, another method is to have an invite list, letting only thosse people you allow access parts of the house. In Uo there were four tiers of permissions owner, co-owner, friend and guest (or something like that) the owner was the only one who could demolish the house, the co-owner could add people at the lower tiers as well as move containers that were locked down around the house, friends were allowed to access certain containers that were marked as friend. It was handy to friend your guildmates and put extra supplies in those chests. Finnaly, on private floors there was a guest status that allowed you to enter into areas you might not otherwise be allowed inside. This level did not allow you to access any containers or anything, just walk around the building. While this was fun and very convenient, some people missed being able to have all out battles in homes without the I ban thee going on. Dueling areas still worked very well, however the maximum housing size was not ideal for some types of combat. In addition archers could stand in windows, shoot arrows out, and be perfectly safe from looting. Since in crossfire, the internals of houses are seperate maps, I can't imagine this to be an issue, although I supposed someone could run between maps to avoid dying or something.