Bruce Perry's Blog
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I have a 'bit' of an idea
This is where my megalomaniac, narcissistic delusions of fame become a problem, because I would like to say 'See what I did there?' but you won't until I've made my game (perhaps not even then depending on how the design evolves) and it's not as if anyone will actually go back through my blog posts at that time.
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It's not meant to be curved!
I pixelled my approximate idea of what all those retro 8x8 fonts should have been. Then I made a shader and did some stuff to make it look all scanliney.
And then, I tried to flout the laws of physics while simultaneously learning a whole new branch of maths from Wikipedia. Honestly I'm surprised it didn't just explode on me, but I really wasn't going for the old-CRT-style curvature you can see here. I'm categorically perplexed as to how that happened.
I might sleep now. Haven't quite decided yet.
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High-Risk SpeedHack
After sleeping from 6 till 12 and struggling with maths from 2 till now, I cannot tell you how relieved I am to see this shape. It means my particle system's hideous equivalent of your particle system's "pos += vel;" is finally behaving itself.
Well, this is one of the points of SpeedHack, isn't it - doing something new? I think this is the newest thing I've ever done in a SpeedHack. (That bears repeating. "I think this is the newest thing I've ever done in a SpeedHack." There we go.)
I hope I'll have time for the game.
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Explosion in hyperbolic space!
There! Finally built and tuned the effect on top of all the maths. This explosion does not obey the normal laws of physics.
2D hyperbolic space is the opposite of what happens on the surface of a sphere. Instead of a tessellating pattern of hexagons having to be broken up with pentagons like on a football, it has to be broken up with heptagons. In 3D hyperbolic space, it could be dodecahedra instead of cubes. What you will see watching this explosion is that everything appears to get much further away and further apart from everything else than it should.
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A little more about hyperbolic space
Two posts ago, I was testing what happened if all the letters went off perpendicular to the screen-shaped rectangle they started in. When they finally traced out circular arcs which approached the surface of the bounding sphere (the Poincare ball) at right angles, creating that apple core shape, I knew I'd got it right.
In the final effect, the camera is placed in the middle of the ball so that you can't really tell it's a ball, as with a sky box.
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Here's a derivation I did earlier
In this derivation, I was trying to derive C given B (with A and the hyperboloid fixed) so that I could project points from the Poincare ball, here represented as a line, on to the hyperboloid. The equations I needed were on Wikipedia, but were failing me.
I should have known better than to doubt the accuracy of Wikipedia, right? My problem was that my point B was outside the bounds of the Poincare ball. I was ending up with my point C below the horizontal axis. I'm curious about whether my C would have been on the lower hyperboloid or on the line through A and B, but I'm not going to spend time on that - at least not now - so I'll probably never know!
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Gameplay progress
Now implemented:
- Core gameStill to do:
- Difficulty progression
- Annoying sounds
- Scoring
- Game end condition
- Think of a name!I can see it becoming a bit tight. But now, sleep.
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Bawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww
I'm now synthesising some annoying sounds. It sounds remarkably like when those old BBC computers used to crash. That might be because that's what I was going for, of course.
We also now have difficulty progression, time restrictions and a game end condition, and with all those things, I think the gameplay has worked out rather well.
So, still to do:
- Scoring
- Think of a name! -
Finished!
The source is uploaded!
I have a larger zip with binaries, screenshots and a git repository too which the site hasn't accepted yet. I assume it's too big even though it's under the stated 10 MB. Working on it ...
Here's a screenshot of the finished game (o_o).
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The Human CPU Experiment
The full zip, including executables, DLLs, screenshots and a git repository, is here:
http://bdavis.strangesoft.net/HumanCPU.zip
Also, here's the title screen.
Announcement thread: https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/615497
It's been fun!
