Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Gratuitous Tank Battles, and designing units

Posted on July 13, 2011

One of my gripes with standard Tower Defense games  is the lack of control over upgrades of towers. The decision the player has is basically ‘upgrade a tower, or build a new one’. I think that’s a little limited. gamers these days are happy to look at a choice of ten guns in an FPS, and choose the one whose weight / accuracy / rate of fire / ammo suits their playing style. I think we should at least give the player those sorts of choices when they pick their turrets in GTB.

A problem that Gratuitous Space Battles had, was the huge range of different weapons, and no hints as to what one is best for any particular situation. All the stats were there, but comparing them in the initial (1.0) release of the game was tricky. later patches fixed this, but it was still a bit overwhelming. Add in the extra DLC weapons and there are even more.

One of the ways I’m fixing this in Gratuitous Tank Battles is by sharing weapons across classes. Another is augmentations.

In GSB you had cruiser guns, frigate guns and fighter guns. GTB has large, medium and small units (mech/tank/turret) plus infantry. The difference is, a lot of the guns are interchangeable this time. So a fast gatling laser, for example, might be mountable on a medium or heavy tank, mech or turret. There are suddenly a LOT less overall choices to keep track of.

The second feature is augmentations. These are like little mini-bonuses to a component. One of them is a range-booster augmentation. This could be applied to ANY weapon. So you can combine it with missiles to get long range missiles, or with a ballistic weapon to get a long range cannon. Again, this means a lot less choices to suddenly spam you with, but still a lot of interesting combinations.

Some units have 2 augmentation slots, some 1, many have none.

I think this system works very well, it solves a lot of the design issues I had with GSB, and I wish I’d thought of it before. It’s similar to the ‘perks’ in Call of Duty, which is pretty much what made me consider it.

Hopefully this moves GTB towards the holy grail of strategy games which is ‘quick to learn, lifetime to master’. GSB was more ‘lifetime to learn’.

See… I do listen to gamers opinions :D Tell me what you think. Is this a good move? If not, why not? :D

Gratuitous inverter and cat pictures

Posted on July 11, 2011

Just biding time till I talk about GTB. I bought a new camera, so went snapping. here are pictures of what a solar panel inverter, and a cat of mine (called jack) look like, in that order:

Handy optimising tip

Posted on July 9, 2011

If you have a profiler like aqtime that can be remotely enabled and disabled try this.

  1. Have a flag that is ‘bprofileframe’ and set it to false by default
  2. Bind a keystroke to a function that toggles the flag on
  3. In your render loop, before rendering, if the flag is true, enable debugging
  4. At the end of the render loop, if the flag is true, set false, and disable debugging.

Voila! you have a keystroke that will capture a single frames profiling data and ONLY that frame, making for really easy profiling on very specific situations. Works a treat. Now I just need to work out how to make it all faster :D

Solar install complete

Posted on July 8, 2011

So the solar guys have finished and gone today. I now am the proud owner of my own little ground-mounted photovoltaic power plant. Check out the remote monitoring gadget for proof it actually works:

 

That gadget is the bluetooth-enabled sunny beam monitor that wireleslly connects to the inverter and lets you monitor output. Cunningly, it has built in solar panels itself, for power :D It also has a usb cable for you to power it, or to dump the historical data to a PC as a csv file.

Here is my ‘what I learned so far’:

Ground mount panels are BIG. They don’t look big on a roof, but stick 10 panels (roughly 2KW) on frames in your garden/driveway and you will be surprised how big they are. This isn’t something you want to do in a small suburban garden. We are lucky in that the drive for our house is unusually big and empty, looking more like a car park than a normal driveway, so we still have lots of room left. They need a lot of space between rows of panels too.

Planning permission for solar with a listed building is HELL. Either pay a company to do get the permission for you, to save yourself the hassle, or start the process a year in advance and prepare for stress. This varies by local council, and if your house isn’t listed, and they go on the roof, AFAIK you dodge needing this permission entirely. Lucky you :D

There will be a lot of extra hardware installed by your electricity meter/fusebox. You get a new (tiny) generation meter (middle top of picture), plus a new fusebox gadget (bottom of picture, with big phat AC cable coming into it from the inverter), and another little black box thing (under the generation meter, stuffed with big cables). Don’t assume it will all fit in a tiny space in a cupboard somewhere. We ran out of room and needed the fusebox gadget attached below. I’ll probably get it boxed in one day to look less industrial.

Prices are dropping big-time. My roughly £10k install was £11k just 9 months ago. If you got a quote for PV a year or two ago, get a new one. The panels are getting much cheaper.

Get panels with bypass-diodes. They are more expensive, but worth it. Mine are Schuco. With Bypass Diodes, shading on 1 panel means 1 panel generates zero. Without them, shading on one panel would mean all ten generate zero. This is a BIG deal. Don’t get them without bypass diodes unless you have a south facing roof in the sahara and no trees for miles. Not all panels are the same.

It’s very very cool to have lots of electrical stuff running and your electricity meter not moving. Especially on the day we hear there is another 16% rise in electricity prices. bwahahahaha. I’ll be contacting my electricity company soon to get a new meter fitted which can handle being supplied to. Sadly mine wasn’t one which spun backwards :(

You get a dedicated generation-meter which you have to manually read and report in order to be paid the feed-in-tariff (43p / unit). Entirely seperate to that is an agreement with the electric co that you get credited as exporting 50% of what you produce (extra 3p per unit). This is great,because I will use everything I produce and export bugger-all, so it’s free money :D. This happens because the electric co can’t be assed to install proper export meters.

Lots of boring generation stats to blog over the next few weeks, I’m sure :D. Already earned £1.50 yay!

Now back to programming stuff that explodes.