Quality Free Games Blog

One problem with free games is that there is so many of them, and the good ones get lost in the quagmire of the dross (I count my games in the latter mainly I'm afraid). People rave about the latest commercial games, and magazines only review games that you have to pay for. I find this really frustrating and annoying. Why do people ignore all the stuff that's free?

What was needed was somewhere where they are reviewed and rated, and I've finally come across it - the Freegamer blog. Now people have got no excuse for not playing quality free games like Tremulous.

My New Game - HoloRacer

I've finally got round to writing a new game. I thought I'd go for something simple that I could hopefully finish before I got bored with it. It's a simple 3D racing game called HoloRacer. It's designed to be as simple and as fast as possible, and it does get pretty fast (assuming you have a good graphics card). It's still in it's mid stages, and is fully playable and good for 5 mins. I'm just trying to think of features'n'things to add to it now. Let me know what you think.

Getting the big picture of source code

The way I see it, you should be able to look at program code, and pretty much work out what's going on straight away. And I mean "the big picture", like how all the files and classes work together, and which classes are used by which other classes. Unfortunately, that never happens, cos there is no standard or good way at the moment to see "the big picture". Maybe UML comes close, but no cigar. Is there a good Java class analyser out there?

When you look at code, you're doing just that - looking at 20-30 lines of one file of a program that could come be comprised over any number of files (including source, data, xml etc..). Who knows where this particular file fits in? Is it the Main file? Or is it the code to some abstract "missile" object that gets shot by the player, and is sub-classed for specific weapons? Until we sort this out, programming is always going to be hard.

Before you can take an open-source project and mould it into your own vision, you need to know the whole project, and that takes too long. Okay, you can fix the odd bug here and there, and change the names, but until you know it from top to bottom, you're only going to introduce bugs.

Programming shouldn't take a lifetime

I have a dream, that one day I will be able to write a game (after having the idea) in less than a day. Nay, in hours! Maybe I'm too impatient, but if I suddently think "yeah, a network RTS this feature x, y AND z would be great", I don't want to waste a week of my life writing it. I want it in a day! And why not? I'm not talking about using the latest "3D Gamemaker Pro" or whatever, I'm talking about having the power to write something quickly, but also get down to the nitty-gritty of the code if need be.

I'm still trying to think how this could be acheived; some kind of "code objects" that can be dropped into a framework. Re-usable classes would be a good idea. I suppose that game objects are too specific to be able to be written generically. You could have a generic "missile" object. Could that be used in an RTS and a 2D shoot'em up? Not without changing the code I fear.

Game Idea

I've had this idea for a game for a long time, ever since I read a synopsys of Timelords (IIRC) by Julian Gollop, which is an old game on the Spectrum. Anyway, this idea is a bit vague, so bear with me. Actually, thinking about it, it's more of an "aspect" that can be "fitted" to any other game that involves time travel. Basically, the player travels in time, and when the affect something, then just like real-life (presumably) they affect it in the future.

To give you a more concrete example, imagine Command and Conquor with time travel. If your units could go back in time and destroy the research centre, then in the future the enemy wouldn't have all the highly advanced technological weapons to fight you with!

Anyway, I'm still trying to think of a good way to actually implement this idea in a game. I'll let you know when I manage it.

Some more thoughts about my Grand Theft Auto MUD

Most of my customers seem to be from America (I'm naively assuming, since they speak english and connect in the middle of the night (I'm in the UK, BTW)). Unless they are nocturnal brits? It does mean that I rarely get the chance to interact with them though.

I'm still struggling to come up with more good ideas for the game (that are easy to implement if I'm being honest). Quite a lot of people walk around and think "is that it"? I think that's partly their fault for not actually talking to anyone, which is the main way to find missions.

People always want to kill kill kill! I'd probably perfer this mud if it was more of an adventure, but I suppose it's understandable given it's based on Grand Theft Auto. However, people join the game, type in 'KILL [the name of the NPC they first meet]' and then usually succeed, but then get killed by the cops. There's far more to it than just fighting!

The Browser as the Platform

I just read something on Slashdot today that got me thinking...

If you wonder why you're not using Netscape and maybe not using Java, and why you've probably got Windows underneath your Mozilla, it's because it became obvious to lots of people that Netscape+Java was a sufficiently powerful and easily ported environment that the operating system underneath could become nearly irrelevant - so Microsoft had to go build a non-standards-compliant browser and wonky Java implementation and start working on .NET to kill off the threat. It wasn't that conquering the market for free browsers was a big moneymaker - it was self-defense to make sure that free browsers didn't conquer the OS market, allowing Windows+Intel to be replaced by Linux/BSD/QNX/MacOS/OS9/SunOS/etc.

It almost makes me angry, not only to think of all the man-hours that are wasted trying to get web pages to work correctly on all the browsers (due to IE's complete disregard for standards) but also what could have been. Imagine being able to write a program that worked on *any* computer (PC, Linux, Mac), and didn't have to be installed - just load and go! That's what we could have had, but Microsoft soon put a stop to it.

MUD Reviews

No, no-one's reviewed my MUD* yet on any of the mud sites, but looking at the other reviews, I can't see the point....

Call me cynical, but I would hazard a guess that 99% of player reviews are by the owners, and it is just an exercise to try and get more players. Some of their praise is so over-the-top that if they were genuinely a player, you would think the mud was giving away free cash or something. Here's an example to prove my point. And another! I spotted one a while back, and the email address of the "reviewer" was of the same name as the mud he was reviewing - talk about a giveaway!

*GTA-MUD, my mud based on Grand Theft Auto.

Someone Completed my First Mission

...only a day after I created it! Basically, they had to kill a mafia don and take his corpse to the police station as proof to collect the reward (they're very open-minded ;-) ). He is flanked by two bodyguards with Uzi's, so it should have been pretty hard.

Unfortunately, one of the cops had wandered into the Mafia house as well, and decided to also shoot the mafia don as soon as he retaliated to the bullets coming from the player. So basically the player had a free "henchman" helping him out, which made the job considerably easier. Still, I'm very proud that they even discovered the mission and knew how to complete it.

[This posting refers to GTA-MUD, my mud based on Grand TheftAuto.

Mud Update

This MUD game is brilliant fun. I don't mean in a "my programming's brilliant", or my game design, but I just really enjoy doing it. I normally get about 3/4 people connected every day, and if I'm in front of my server at the timke, I log on and pretend to be a very-intelligent NPC, to make the game worthwhile.

The thing that is so great, IMHO, is that I can actually see and appreciate people using my game. I've got a few projects on Sourceforge (I may have mentioned them before ;-) ) and they get a lot of downloads, but I get absolutely no feedback what-so-ever. I discovered only a few weeks back that I get the most out of programming when I know other people are using it.

Anyway, things are trundling along nicely. I'm slowly increasing the number of locations and items (though I want to keep the number of locations small so that players can meet each other easily). I'm really concentrating on making the game world as realistic as possible.

Several People Connected!

Today was a milestone! I woke up and had a look at my MUD server, and 36 people had connected! Several of them were still playing when I logged on. I had a nice chat with someone who told me that it'd been recommended by one of his mates. I only registered my mud with The Mud Connector and Top Mud Sites yesterday!

It did give me a bit of food for thought though, as it did show some flaws in the system:-

• Once an NPC has been killed, they stay killed (and there's only about 5 in the game.
• There's not enough guns.
• There's not a lot to do apart from fighting.

I'm quickly rectifying these problems now.

[This post refers to GTA-MUD, my mud based on Grand Theft Auto.]

Someone Connected!

My first forray into hosting an on-line game has officially happened, and it, er, didn't go too well. Due to a small bug in my MUD server, it got stuck in a loop waiting for something to be received, even when something had been recieved.

(Basically, it was looping round while the bytesAvailable() function returned zero. Unfortunately, if the user had already typed in their commands, they would sit there waiting for the program to respond. Which it never would.)

Oh well, it's just the start. Needless to say I've corrected the problem and it's all now up and running. Telnet to onlinegameplanner.no-ip.org on port 4000 if you like Grand Theft Auto!

I've spent the remaining time adding content. I think another problem with MUD's is that the content isn't reactive. I want to make everything in this game reactive, from the NPC's reacting to other characters actions, to locations being affected by the time of day. This is no small job, as it means everything must be able to react to everything else. Call the exponential police...

MUDdy Waters

Ahem. If you tried my MUD prior to this morning, you probably failed to connect. I had it running on Windows, and it works fine when I conncet locally, but if I try remotely, Windows goes into "freeze for 5 seconds every 10 seconds" mode. Literally. Even the mouse won't move. Even after I've closed the MUD and stopped all Java programs.

However, needless to say it works fine under Linux. Now I just need to spend some time on content. There's only a few locations, and some very unintelligent NPC's. But all that's going to change. I want to make this as realistic as possible. It's going to take some work, but it will be slow but sure work.

My Programming Adventure Continues...

I've decided on the first version of my multi-player internet game that I'm going to host on my PC (now that I've got a static DNS). I decided on a MUD, since I'd already started writing one based on the GTA universe.

After a bit of polishing up, it now works, though is very limited in location and content. Anyway, if you've got nothing else to do, give it go! It's called GTA-MUD. The GTA stands for "Great Text Adventure", for legal reasons obviously. Let me know what you think!

Sourceforge Software Map Not Being Updated?

Has anyone else noticed that the Sourceforge software map has not been updated for a while? I've got a couple of projects that their own statistics page says have a rank of <1000, but the software map still shows them in the 9,000's, where they were weeks ago. Their rank on this page hasn't changed for ages.

Sourceforge is free so I can't really complain, but it's a bit frustrating that hardly anyone will be seeing my projects. Although I guess some must, to have got them to their high rankings. Oh well.

If you're not busy, check out Laser Squad 3D and Realtime Chaos.

My Programming Adventure

I've decided that I'm on an adventure to try and find the most entertaining and fulfilling form of gaming/programming I can. (What I mean when I combine the two is a form of gaming of which I could program a version myself). Playing against other people is where it's at - I think it's a hundred times more entertaining playing against someone else rather than the computer.

I started off badly, writing multi-player network games when I've only got a single PC (and thus couldn't actually player them properly). The only network I have access to (at work) isn't very condusive to games.

I then wanted to try an MMORPG, but I actually find these boring. I tried Crossfire the other day (a 2D MMORPG). It is pretty good, and lots of time has obviously been spent creating it, but after wandering around for a few minutes I was bored. Unfortunately, my PC is too low-spec to be able to run a 3d MMORPG, but I imagine these would be the same.

The next thing I discoverd was a simple multi-player 2D arcade game across the internet called Search and Dread, and I think this is my calling. It only takes a low-spec PC, it's quick and fun to play, and you can easily play against other players, and actually ineteract with other players straight away. No wandering about chatting to NPC's for the first hour.

So this is what I'm working on next - multi-player arcade games across the internet. I just have to think of a game that's not already been invented!

Lack of Inspiration

I'm lacking inspiration to do some programming. It's something that comes around every once in a while, and I'm sure most hobby programmers get it sometimes, but I can't think of anything I want to write. And even if I did, can I be bothered to spend another hour of my life hunting down another bug?

This gets me round to the question of programming in general. I don't want this to sound like I'm saying I can't hack it, but shouldn't programming be a lot easier? I've been thinking about this on-and-off for a few years with no answer, but maybe we should go about it in a completely different way. The human brain works best with visuals, so why do we write programs using words? How about something like what Tom Cruise uses in Minority Report? This is obviously heading into 4GL territory, but there's so much that can be improved in that area. Computers should be at our command a lot easier than they are. Someone off the street should be able to walk up to a computer and get it to do whatever they want.

Anyway, I digress. The main point of this was about my lack of inspiration. I enjoy writing games, more than I enjoy playing them. So after I've finished a game, I don't really play it, so it feels like it was a waste of time. I stick it on the internet of course, but the lack of response if deafening. (I've often commented to people that there should be more comments from other programmers, on, say, Sourceforge, so at least you know someone else has seen it). I much prefer multi-player games, but that means having a network and someone else who wants to play that particular game, which is easier said than done.

So I don't know what to do next.

Make, Compile, Clean, What???

I do think that some free-software makers like to make life as hard as possible for the end user, and unfortunately Linux software often comes in this category. When you download something specifically for Linux, it's normally just the source (which is fine if that's all you're expecting) but sometimes when you just want to use the software, you have to wade through reams of README text, and follow instructions that involve going to the command line and typing in 'compile' commands that take minutes to run, and often fail if you haven't got the correct version of gcc installed.

The software arena is a crowded place, and software like this isn't doing itself any favours. No wonder Windows is prevalent - despite all it's shortcomings, it's pretty easy to get any downloaded program up-and-running with just a few clicks of the mouse. Linux software isn't going to attract new users by making it complex and hard to install new software. People just don't have the time or inclination. And why should they?

Viruses Plague British Businesses

(According to the BBC). Well there's an easy solution - haven't they heard of Linux? What are they waiting for?

Calculating Line of Sight - Help Needed!

At the moment, Emergent Mercenary uses the following algorythm to work out of one unit can see another (i.e. are there any walls in the way):-

(Note - the map of the game is a simple 40x40 array, and each cell can be a wall or floor. Unit positions are stored as floating point numbers, so they can be anywhere, not just in the centre of a map square)

1) Work out a line from one unit to another
2) Move along the line, and at every interval, check whether the point is part of a wall or a map. If its a wall, the unit cannot see the target.

This does work well in general, but if two units are close together but round the corner from each other, it can sometimes return true when in fact there is a corner in the way. I could try increasing the interval, but this obviously increases the time it takes the algorythm to run. Does anyone know a better method?

Any help much appreciated.