Blogs

Follow up to Shadow of Mordor the sequel basically extends the good bits from the first one (the nemesis system, the ranger abilities, riding various animals over orcs) and adds extra levels of depth ... and also loot boxes.

The game plays as an extended version of the original shadow of mordor which I was quite a good game the innovative nemesis system adding a layer of depth to the game that made it a lot of fun to play. In Shadow of war they've taken that a step further and added some new modifications.

There's a whole bunch of things in the latest update. In particular they have fixed the rovers. Worth another Sunday night look?

After a wank weekend, I did have mucho chuckles last night; thanks all. Glad I stayed for the finale, felt good to round off the evening with an overall success. It occurred to me after we finished that there's a deep irony to the pastiest member of our mini-clan being "Bronze" over and over. Like a Twiglet Adonis. The heists have been really good fun; it's great to have four of us!

Grand Theft Refuse

I like watching two highly qualified tech workers taking out the bins. Get used to it, automation is coming!

I seem to have a cache of photos saved up! Here they are in some sort of time order. Had a great time last night, worked hard and made some tidy cash!

Rollins

EMW owns a weed farm on the edge of Grapeseed (Blaine County). One of the NPC characters who "works" there is a chap we've named Henry Rollins, because, well, he looks like Henry Rollins. You can sometimes find him working bust mostly he stands about smoking the profits. This snap is of the most we've had together in a single session, Left to Right: Henry Rollins, me, EMW, Big R, Fish, Dwain.

Lack-Of is great for long forms and discussions but I want a place to bung links. Right now I have 4 chat windows open. I'd like to rationalise, what do you like to use? Perhaps we could set up a group one?

I quite like Slack - for a number of reasons. Google Hangouts is OK ish.

After my previous attempt at getting bad guys to move around, I hit YouTube hard in my lunch breaks and discovered that lots of people repurpose the inbuilt animator finite state machine for doing most AI.

SMELLY

This is a code smell. Every domain object and class should do one job and do it well. Repurposing suggests that you're bending a system for something that it wasn't intended for (single responsibility principle). However, I thought it was best to just get over myself, give it a go and then come back again later.

The next step in Cloudship is adding bad guys that will follow eventually hunt and kill the player. I know that I'm going to create a finite state machine eventually where the enemy will sit at various states and move from one to the next given certain times. The machine will be made up of rules like this ([name] rule):

I'm charging toward the more difficult things first and creating a procedurally generated weather map was definitely a big task. I wanted to use a Perlin noise map rather than circle packing algorithms because I wanted there to be dead spaces where you can stop, recoup and not drift off. I might stick in a global wind to gently push you.

Preamble

I'm holidaying at home this week; spending lots of time with Kate and Naomi (Felix is in Folkestone with his Grandparents). There are snatches of downtime (like now) where Naomi is off to sleep, it's a bit early for lunch and Kate is pinned down. There's not enough time to get out to a field to fly the quads but there is enough time to bimble on the computer.

Ever since I saw the first trailers of lone echo I was facinated by it's unique locomotion techinique great graphics and interesting human and an AI robot in space story. Made by "Ready at Dawn" who made some of the best PSP games like Daxter and the god of war psp games (also The Order 1886 which looked amazing but was very very boring to play) Lone Echo and it's multiplayer component Echo Arena looked like they were going to be the first big professional vr game.