December 29, 2008 • No Comments
Just a tool I whipped up today to help me plan out dungeons for my 4e campaign. It’s designed to be used as your players progress through - you click on a room when they enter it and a description, list of items and list of monsters will appear at the bottom.
Adding new rooms is accomplished by clicking the “Room” button in the top-left of the window. The “Save” and “Load” buttons should be self-explanatory.
You can position and resize rooms, and there’s snap-to-grid functionality so it all looks neat.
The files are stored in human-readable XML, so you can tinker with them externally if you have to.
I’m sure it has a few quirks… I spent about half and hour debugging, but it feels robust enough.
Update #1: I’ve uploaded a new version which fixes a bug with the load code, adds a “New” button, autosave functionality, a bigger grid, size info (in feet and squares) and a few other tweaks.
Update #2: New version, 1.2. Fixed a bug with the autosave code and made a few miscellaneous tweaks. Also has a fancy icon.
Download CrawlNotes v1.2
Make suggestions or bug reports at the CrawlNotes forum.
Posted in Dungeons and Dragons
Tags: crawlnotes, d&d, vb .net
December 11, 2008 • 8 Comments
One would not expect an online trade rag for the IEEE to contain decipherable gems of content for the average Joe. Indeed, even the above-average Joe might struggle to convince himself it deserves an RSS subscription, especially with front page features like “Your quick-and-dirty guide to the fourth fundamental circuit element”.
But this article on artificial intelligence in games is a terrific read. The title “Bots Get Smart” is a little misleading - sure, it starts off talking about computer-controlled opponents in first-person shooters, but manages to segue into AI storytelling. The latter topic is what I will focus on.
I could spend a paragraph or two breaking it down, but the article does a good job of that already. Cue a mammoth cut-and-paste:
PaSSAGE uses the same game engine as Neverwinter Nights, a fantasy adventure set in medieval times, produced by BioWare of Edmonton. With PaSSAGE, scriptwriters determine only the most general arc to the story and provide a library of possible encounters the player’s character may have. The computer studies the player as he or she progresses and cues in the kinds of experiences that are most desired. For instance, if you like fighting, the game will provide ample opportunities for combat. If you prefer to amass riches, the game will conjure up ways for you to be rewarded for your actions. The software is able to make the sequence of events globally consistent by maintaining a history of the virtual world’s changing state and modifying the player’s future encounters appropriately. The game will therefore always appear to make sense, even though it unfolds quite differently for different people—or even for the same person as his moods and tastes change.
Neverwinter Nights appears a popular choice of tech among academics, be they teaching the fine points of journalism or building an MMO so realistic one cannot make armour without assembling the 50-odd components required for its construction. I’m guessing it’s because the Aurora toolset is so powerful and NWN can run smoothly on most PCs.
Continue reading ‘Is an AI-controlled narrative really beneficial to players?’
Posted in Game design
Tags: ai, mmo, neverwinter nights
December 8, 2008 • No Comments
I definitely recognised the art style in the 4th Edition books when I first picked them up, but it was only recently I figured out where I’d seen it before - the Legend of the Five Rings CCG. I can’t believe it took me as long as it did to realise the common link was William O’Connor.
For comparison, here’s a piece from L5R, and one from 4e. I’ve heard a few people express their dislike of the 4e art, but I believe it suits the new ruleset.
I used to play a lot of L5R until, well, World of Warcraft killed it.
Posted in Dungeons and Dragons
Tags: art, d&d, l5r
November 26, 2008 • 2 Comments
Recently I got back in contact with my old D&D gaming group in Sydney. They’re eager to play 4e, and I have some experience with the system thanks to a good friend of mine whose creativity and DMing skills far exceed my own (probably).
Anyway, seeing as flying up to play on a regular basis would prove expensive and clunky, I’ve been researching ways to play D&D over the ‘net. With the right applications and a bit of know-how, it can be done.
The first task was to select the programs I’d need. For the most part, I had a solid catalogue written in my head. The only part I was stuck on was video chat software, but that looks like it’s been resolved.
Here’s what I’ve settled on.
Continue reading ‘4th Edition D&D over the Internet’
Posted in Dungeons and Dragons
Tags: d&d
November 21, 2008 • 3 Comments
Over the last couple of hours, I’ve been transferring Playwrite from Wordpress.com to my server at DreamHost. Everything went pretty smoothly, as you can see!
RIP playwrite.wordpress.com.
Posted in General
Tags: playwrite
November 20, 2008 • No Comments
See the hand? Yeah, it’s not quite back yet, but it is getting there.
Got fed up with the free hosting I had, but I couldn’t really complain considering, well, I wasn’t paying anything. So, I purchased hosting with DreamHost. MySQL, PHP and unlimited bandwidth and space for life, thanks to the special birthday deal.
Sweet.
I’ll get it up and running in the next week or so, once my damn domain name host allows me to update the name servers. Don’t worry, I made a backup of the Zafehouse score database, so that will return unharmed as well.
And a quick bit on Deadshed: I’m thinking I might release a beta late December to get some feedback on its progress. Not 100% sure yet, but I’m warming to the idea.
Update: It’s alive!
Posted in General
Tags: Zafehouse
November 13, 2008 • No Comments
Easiest way to explain it. If you don’t get the reference, then Conslide probably isn’t for you.
If you do, well, download the program and give it a try! Pressing Ctrl+~ will cause a Command Prompt window to slide down from the top of the screen. To hide it, just press Ctrl+~ again.
It’s basically a text box that sends commands to a hidden instance of CMD.exe, monitors it for output, and sends anything it spits out back to the text box. The usual DOS commands work - copy, del, mkdir, rmdir and so on - but not everything is supported. It won’t run programs, but it will happily process stuff like ping and netstats.
Definitely needs a lot of work, and is more a proof of concept than anything else. If you’re interested in seeing the source, drop me an email or comment and I’ll fire it your way.
Note that it needs the .NET 2.0 Framework.
Download Conslide (Wikiupload)
Posted in Tools and utilities
Tags: conslide, quake, vb .net, windows
November 12, 2008 • 1 Comment
I’ve been deprived of my PC for over a month now. I didn’t think the lack of a decent machine would affect me much, but it has. My temporary home in Melbourne gave me access to a box with enough grunt to run Fallout 3. I happily clocked about ten hours on the game before I moved to a more permanent location.
Now, all I have is my laptop, a paltry device equipped with a 1.8GHz C2D and X3100 IGP. A beastly piece of hardware it is not.
Despite falling short of the minimum requirements by at least a billion fathoms, I decided to give Fallout 3 a go on my laptop. It refused to get past the intro movie. I wasn’t expecting much, but I would have thought the game proper wasn’t a big ask.
Apparently, it was. And I wasn’t alone. A bit of research uncovered Oldblivion, a hack to get Bethesda’s Oblivion running on older hardware at a decent click. If you weren’t aware, Oblivion and Fallout 3 use Bethesda’s version of the Gamebryo engine. Logic suggested to me that if a solution could be found for Oblivion, then Fallout 3 had an outside chance.
Continue reading ‘Do you have to be smart to be a PC gamer?’
Posted in Opinion
Tags: fallout 3, pc
November 11, 2008 • 3 Comments
Argh. Zafehouse has been out of commission for at least two weeks now, so I can’t put it down to a simple outage with my free web host. Looks like I’ll have to cough up some cash for, you know, a decent provider.
Any recommendations for Oz-based services are very welcome - particularly ones with MySQL and PHP support!
Posted in General
Tags: Zafehouse
October 31, 2008 • 2 Comments
Having Zafehouse picked up by Rock, Paper, Shotgun was 12 kinds of awesome.
For a while, I thought 12 was the limit. Then, a couple of players smashed this number into oblivion, drowned the dozen of awesome in a torrent of fantastic, and showed me Zafehouse’s true potential.
Over at a forum called Sekrit, user FinalSin not only ran a diary game using Zafehouse, he went to the trouble of inserting the nicks of other forum goers into the random name generator via the source code. I won’t spoil it for you, but sufficed to say it’s an entertaining read.
On a similar plane of radical is the blog Poisoned Sponge, where the author used the events of a Zafehouse game to write a fictional journal. It’s a three-parter and definitely worth your eyeball time.
It’s a fantastic feeling knowing people are doing things with your game you never considered, transforming it from machine code into an experience. The event system in Deadshed was inspired by two things: a conversation with buddy David Kidd, and these guys.
So yes, the sequel is for you.
Posted in Zafehouse
Tags: Deadshed, Zafehouse
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