Recent posts by faiuwle on Kongregate

Topic: General Gaming / MineCraft: Why so expensive?

Except, most games are first released full.

And even so, if things need to be fixed, they don’t charge for the patches, not even the companies that are most ravenous about charging high prices for downloadable content.

DLC for games usually IS an update,

Really? “Update” means a change in the game engine/bugfixes, in my experience. “Downloadable content” means additional stuff that isn’t necessary to run the game and should (ideally) be independent of the main engine – stuff like level maps, new objects, and so forth. It makes some sense to charge for the additional stuff, but not for updates to the core engine.

What’s the point of responding with your whole “That’s not the same..” if you didn’t talk about that in the first place?

My understanding is that when the Minecraft website says “free updates” it primarily means that you get free bugfixes and free transition to beta and/or full game features, not necessarily free cosmetic goodies.

As for Minecraft… I like casual sandbox games, because you can make your own goals. I’m just not really sure I see that many interesting goals that could be made for this game. If the point is to be a sandbox MMO, that’s something else.

Topic: General Gaming / MineCraft: Why so expensive?

“Downloadable content”? That’s not the same as “this game is in alpha/beta stage, and we are going to make you pay again for fixing things that are broken/adding features that are meant to be part of the main release”. Saying that you are getting these things for “free” is like saying that you get the steering wheel “free” when you buy a car.

Topic: General Gaming / MineCraft: Why so expensive?

Are there any game developers that charge for their updates? Now, that would be highway robbery.

Topic: General Gaming / MineCraft: Why so expensive?

You can do that in DF, too, except the whole visiting other people’s games/etc. The point is to build a fort for your dwarves to live in and fend off goblins in and make stuff in. And when your fort gets to be impenetrable, you can have them build giant monuments to your ego. Or throw themselves down a bottomless pit for your amusement. :P

Topic: General Gaming / MineCraft: Why so expensive?

See, but if you just want to build things, you can do that in DF, too.

Topic: General Gaming / MineCraft: Why so expensive?

Oh you have to defend yourself from zombies and such. LOL.

I don’t think it’s an issue that people are too poor to pay $10 – it’s just hard to justify it when there are games like Dwarf Fortress that are 100% free.

Topic: General Gaming / MineCraft: Why so expensive?

Ah, so you can make things more interesting than just stacks/structures made of different-colored blocks?

Topic: General Gaming / MineCraft: Why so expensive?

What is actually in Minecraft that is worth $10? I don’t have anything against paying for games, but the online version doesn’t really have a lot of interesting things to do, and there’s no demo of the non-free version, so it just looks like $10 for a virtual set of legos, from what I can tell.

Topic: Technical Support / Games not saving anymore?

I thought this was a bug with a particular game, but then I tried another game that I knew I had saved on the past, and save seems to be broken for everything. I recently (well, a few months ago) reinstalled my OSes, so something might have messed up there, but I don’t know how to fix it.

I am running Ubuntu 10.04, and Firefox. There is a ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/#SharedObjects/randomletters/ directory, but no folder there for kongregate.com (there are folders for other sites, though). I haven’t specifically allowed any of those sites to do anything kongregate isn’t allowed to do with Firefox. There is also a ~/.adobe/Flash_Player/AssetCache/randomletters directory, but I don’t know if that has to do with anything.

Topic: Kongregate / Profile background

Isn’t it? I can’t convert anyone, and it doesn’t say “trained as a L4D2 survivor” in my profile anymore.

Topic: Kongregate / Profile background

Ah, ok. I guess it would have made more sense if they got reset on the day it actually ended.

Topic: Kongregate / Profile background

So, I see that the Left4Dead thing is over now, so why is my profile background still Left4Dead-themed, and my avatar still has the white border? I thought all of that would get reset automatically. I tried to reset my profile by editing it and then saving it without adding a background image, but it didn’t work. Is it stuck like that now?

Topic: Game Programming / Null object references(New problem, AS3)

Possibly adding “new” in front of “MovieClip (root)” would fix it? I’m also not sure where this enemyholder array is coming from (unless the standard MovieClip class has an “enemyholder” array in it already?). Also, you don’t need to use “this” in front of everything, unless you’ve got function parameters with conflicting names, or something.

About color codes = 0xFF0000 is just a number, written in hex instead of binary. It wouldn’t make sense to pass it as a string.

Topic: Game Programming / Bitmap Flickering Problem

No, that’s not a bitmap. I’m using the bitmap class and drawing it on the map with graphics.beginBitmapFill (…)/graphics.endFill ().

Topic: Game Programming / Bitmap Flickering Problem

No. The “map” is a square with a black border with a number of objects on it. Since many of the objects represent stacks of object,s and I don’t want to create huge numbers of sprites and stack them on top of each other, I find the top element of the pile and draw it in the appropriate place. All the tiles on the map have their own piles, so it goes through and checks for piles that need to be drawn. Since the bitmaps are drawn directly on the map, this has to be done whenever graphics.clear () is called. I imagine that even if they were sprites, they would still have to get redrawn at that time by some internal sprite-managing system that causes child sprites to show up in the right places after a graphics.clear ().

Topic: Game Programming / Bitmap Flickering Problem

Some of the objects can be dynamically resized to any size (using arrow keys) as long as it’s not bigger than the whole map. The resizing is done while the object is being dragged.

Topic: Game Programming / Bitmap Flickering Problem

Actually, what it looks like is that the text oscillates between smooth and blocky – I don’t think it actually disappears. It shows up as blocky when it’s not flickering. I’m not sure what the blockiness is due to, but I figured I’d work it out as and when it became a problem with real graphics.

For the record: the images are not bitmaps pasted onto a sprite that’s a child of the map, but images that are stored in an internal array and then drawn directly onto an appropriate part of the map when necessary. I don’t know if that makes a difference in how often they have to be redrawn, and the alternative is having 492373 sprites/bitmaps stacked on top of each other with only the top one actually being visible. I figured it would be better to keep track of the stack of bitmaps internally and just display the top one.

Topic: Game Programming / AS editor

Since someone mentioned emacs, we also need to mention gvim. Yes, there’s a Windows version and everything.

Topic: Game Programming / Bitmap Flickering Problem

What is double buffering? In any case, none of the non-bitmap graphics have any problems with being redrawn often, which fits with my experience of other languages, and I didn’t realize it would be different for the bitmaps.

As for what I am doing – I’m just drawing rectangles around tiles, not creating a bitmap on the surface of the map. (In any case, the objects that are placed by the player aren’t represented by bitmaps yet, and they don’t flicker.) If the size of the object is increased before it is placed (the only way to do that, really) the rectangle has to be enlarged to match the bigger area. If it’s only bitmaps that are the problem though, that should be fine.

Topic: Game Programming / Bitmap Flickering Problem

You mean, have one sprite per object, and then move the sprite around with the object? That might work, though that sprite would have to be redrawn if the object got resized.

I’m still not sure why the way I did it causes the bitmaps to flicker, though.

Topic: Game Programming / Bitmap Flickering Problem

So, I have a map area where the player can drag objects and click to place them. Since all of the objects snap to tiles, I wanted to draw a rectangle on the map to show where the object that’s being dragged is going to snap to. So, I have an event listener listening for mouse movement that draws the rectangle. If I don’t add graphics.clear (), and then redraw the map whenever that function is called, the previously drawn rectangles are never erased, and the mouse leaves a trail of rectangles across the map. If I do add that line, then every time that function is called, every bitmap on the map (which get redrawn with the rest of the map) flickers. These aren’t complex bitmaps – they’re basically placeholders that consist entirely of transparent .pngs with text on them. How do I prevent them from flickering, or, alternatively, how do I get the rectangles to erase themselves without having to redraw the whole map?

Topic: Game Programming / "program arguments"

Well, if it were in C/++ or Java, you could give it command line arguments, which you just as as parameters for main (an array of character arrays followed by an int pointer). I don’t know if you can do that with AS, but you can definitely take in the file name (and whatever else you want to tell it) as input from the user. Or you can have a text config file that’s edited by hand and read at runtime.

Topic: Game Programming / Theoretical Game Design Challenge

Actually, I don’t think you even need any kind of metaphysical time-travel, etc., to suitably deceive the player, as long as you’re clever about how you introduce the world to them. Check out the Scavenger trilogy by K.J. Parker – a guy brings about the end of the world by pursuing his desire to settle down and be a happy, blameless farmer (or something). It’s truly epic.

Topic: Serious Discussion / Obamas

Translation of the OP:
“WAHHHHH MY SIDE LOST THE ELECTION AND I’M STILL BUTTHURT!”

Seriously – we had to look at Bush’s ugly mug for eight years, and hear about his near-death experience with a dang pretzel – you can deal. I mean, how dare famous people be on television, that’s just so unnatural.

Topic: Game Programming / How to get rid of all the hackers

How, exactly? By getting a higher score than you? I can understand if you mean in multiplayer games, but most of the games here aren’t multiplayer.