Mind Forever Burning

The dependency wasn't created intentionally, but I'm running Lion, so CW is probably correct.

Was this ever resolved? I can offer more help if needed; feel free to PM me.

Whose arc is Drowning in Blood?

But only after you checked; until then it had both succeeded and failed. That tearing sound you heard as you inspected the drive contents was the sound of a parallel universe forking from ours, in which the upgrade succeeded.

Unfortunately for us, that was the universe where the extra hour you got to work on CoX led you to an epiphany that caused you to pick up the phone to T.J. Kim pointing out the fatal legal flaw in the sunset plan which could only be avoided by releasing the source code to a third party.

Why do you care about alignment? Won't this cause some weird aliasing effects? It seems much simpler (and IME more expected) to have each tick be the same length.

Edit: Maybe this is what people mean when they say "Arcanatime". Still seems strange though.

Also, further thought, maybe this is because powers durations are in seconds instead of ticks, in which case not adding the extra millisecond will cause aliasing. You could fix that with rounding... probably... but then that probably just gives you this result anyway...

Interesting stuff.

There's a strong parallel here with 3D geometry calculations in the rendering part of a game loop. On each game tick, the naive implementation calculates all the absolute positions of objects' rasterizations based on the matrix transforms for not just the objects themselves but all intermediate objects in the scene-graph that can have them. For example, if a car object is actually composed of wheels that can turn and a frame that hosts those wheels, then rasterizing the wheels involves knowing the current transform for the car, as well as the transform of the wheels themselves (think of the results of an explosion that hurl a moving car past the viewer).

There are common tricks that can be applied to save the matrix math involved in recomputing the leaf-node object transformations, if you believe that there are parts of the scene graph that remain unchanged between game ticks. Such tricks could be played here too: you could consider the attribmod formulas to be a graph that must be traversed on each tick, dirty the nodes that change between ticks, and use cached values for everything else. In the (probably extremely unlikely) event that nothing at all changed between ticks, this would allow the whole computation to be skipped.

However, I would avoid trying to get that complicated on the first pass. If the attribmod abstraction is written correctly, this kind of optimization can be applied later without too much pain. And you'd want to actually profile the full system before deciding to design this: there may be parts of the full engine that swamp what you're doing here, or you may find in real world cases that not enough can be cached between ticks to justify the increased complexity. (There's some quote about premature optimization being the root of all evil...)

BTW, I talked to a few other folks today at work about this, and the reaction was pretty universally "That's completely insane and I hope they do it".

I would say quite the contrary. Regardless of how many issues there are with your particular implementation, I find it telling that you cared enough to spend a weekend actually writing code. And you clearly know enough about the game engine to at least follow Arcanaville's and Codewalker's corrections, which is a deeper understanding than I have, frankly.

Ouch.

We agree on that point. I would just add that competition is fierce in large part because people are willing to write games for very low pay, just because they think it's fun. Game companies tend to weaponize that as an instrument of corporate profitability. That's true whether it's mobile, desktop, or console gaming.

That very factor may make this project feasible, though. There are lots of people who seem to be willing to put in limited amounts of time basically for nothing.

I'm not one of them, unfortunately. Tempting as it is, my corpse is still being steamrolled by my other indie game project.

EDIT: I'm actually writing the online multiplayer component right now. These discussions have definitely influenced (and thankfully, for the most part, confirmed) my thinking about how to structure it. No idea how well it will be received, though, and funding the server is definitely a concern.

Yes, that's what I meant. I've only played once, and that was the 2nd time I'd played a D&D variant since high school (which, without getting into specifics, was a *long* time ago) - so I'm no expert. But I was impressed by the organizational effort put into fighting imbalances due to GM laxity.

Have you looked at Pathfinder? They aim to solve a lot of the issues you bring up here. It's a hugely ambitious project, though, and the lengths to which the organization has had to go does bear consideration in this discussion.

I would be careful using mobile gaming as an example of industry profitability. I have written a mobile game, and I also have friends who have done it. For the most part, we have not made back the money for the time put in. There are games that are more successful, of course, but a lot of the profit for the industry goes to Apple.

Which is why I think a successful model for a game involves being the Apple figure, i.e. being the broker between creatives and their audience. Amazon is doing pretty well at clobbering the print industry with the same strategy (Kindle Direct Publishing).