Re: Antarcticonq

Re: Antarcticonq

[Eric W. Brown]

> Oh lord, the Mountains of Madness...  I can't think of
> any way to model Lovecraft in XConq, but if I do,
> beware.  Nyarlathotep won't work until manual...

I don't know; portions of Antarctica's history according to Lovecraft.  
I could easily see both the shoggoth uprising against the Elder Things 
in Kadath and the possibly near future -- if we're to believe news 
items like the one found here:

	http://www.ufoarea.com/aas_kadath_antarctica.html

conflict between humans and shoggoths after the ruins of Kadath are 
opened.

:)

The biggest challenge with these scenarios is that (in modern times, 
anyway) Kadath is mostly below the surface, and there is some argument 
to extending it for multiple hexes; if this approach is taken it would 
be reasonable to have units on the surface and units in the caves 
beneath not be able to interact with one another or even be aware of 
one another.

Didn't Matthew Skala mention that the ultimate goal of his Antarctica 
work was to create a Lovecraft based module?

Re: Antarcticonq

[mskala]

On Tue, 5 Oct 2004, Eric W. Brown wrote:
> Didn't Matthew Skala mention that the ultimate goal of his Antarctica 
> work was to create a Lovecraft based module?

Yes, though I had in mind more to just mix some Lovecraftian ideas into an
exploration-and-conquest game rather than to actually simulate the events
described in the literature in precise detail.  For instance, I have a
list of ideas for advances kicking around that includes "The Delapore
menu" - which would increase your food production.  Never mind that _The
Rats in the Walls_ didn't originally have anything to do with Antarctica.

I'm going to have to think hard about playability and scale, though; the
rough draft module I have (which doesn't have any Lovecraftian stuff in it
yet) suffers a lot from my being unclear on the appropriate time scale.  
The thing is that activities like building bases and (especially) roads
take a long time, weeks to months, but other things like the flight of
airplanes take place on a much shorter time scale.  It seems like I have
to abstract out one or the other.  I also had some issues with background
economy.  I tried to make it so that you could build a network of caches
and have them automatically refill from bases, and so that bases in
low-productivity areas could be supplied by bases in high-productivity
areas by way of a chain of caches in between, but that doesn't seem to
actually work.  I need a better understanding of why the existing code
does what it does, before I'll know whether that's a bug in my design or
in the system itself.

Playing Wreckreation recently, I noticed that my units seemed to alternate
between getting 10 action points and getting only 2, and it's only in the
last couple days that I finally figured out that that's due to day and
night.  I wonder if I might do be able to abuse day/night to deal with
different time scales - have a bunch of "fast turns" for things like
airplanes, and then the occasional "slow turn" for things like base and
road building.  I think it's possible to make some units move only by day
and others only by night, but I haven't looked into that yet - I got the
idea just now while typing this message.
-- 
Matthew Skala
mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca                    Embrace and defend.
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/

Re: New Proposed Xconq Web Site Online

[Jim Kingdon]

> Unless there is multi-platform, lightweight rendering API that can
> take a list of Pango glyphs (which I am led to believe is what comes
> out of the far end of the Pango pipeline) and actually draw them on
> the display, I am not sure how much use it would be to us.

It is possible that http://sdlpango.sourceforge.net/ is such a thing.
Although that page seemed to describe lots of issues, without quite
saying just what SDL_Pango does.

> Possibly. But, I have previously mentioned the possibility of writing 
> labels in runic alphabets (both historical and fictitious):

It is the kind of thing which wouldn't be off the shelf.  But using
Unicode's private character numbers and writing yourself a font which
the usual UTF-8 tools can process might be just as easy as doing
everything from scratch.

Of course the real point of using something like Pango would be if we
want to deal with arabic, thai, bidirectional, and the other
complicated cases.  If you just want to put up characters next to each
other, something much simpler like the following (or even home grown
solutions like what we have now) are much more plausible:

http://www.linux-games.com/sfont/
http://www.geocities.com/andre_leiradella/#sdl_bdf

Antarcticonq

[Elijah Meeks]

Finally played the standard game on Skala's map and,
wow, I never thought a bunch of mountains and tundra
could look so good.  It's amazing what accurate
terrain data can do to make even a game with (only) 13
units so much fun.

Tremble, America, for now Morocco controls all the
Strategic Ice Reserves!!!




		
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Re: Antarcticonq

[Eric McDonald]

Elijah Meeks wrote:
> Finally played the standard game on Skala's map and,
> wow, I never thought a bunch of mountains and tundra
> could look so good.  It's amazing what accurate
> terrain data can do to make even a game with (only) 13
> units so much fun.

It does look quite good. Though it didn't have quite the same features 
as the other map of Antarctica that I saw recently:
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20040926&mode=classic

> Tremble, America, for now Morocco controls all the
> Strategic Ice Reserves!!!

If your Moors, Berbers, or whatever so much as touch the IceCube 
neutrino detector, I will shoot your entire caravan of snow camels. Capiche?

Eric

Re: Antarcticonq

[Elijah Meeks]

> It does look quite good. Though it didn't have quite
> the same features 
> as the other map of Antarctica that I saw recently:
>
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20040926&mode=classic

Oh lord, the Mountains of Madness...  I can't think of
any way to model Lovecraft in XConq, but if I do,
beware.  Nyarlathotep won't work until manual
change-type is fixed, unless you want him/it to be a
human-only controlled character.  Hmmm, maybe you play
Nyarlathotep as he seduces and destroys various parts
of humanity...

Well, one thing's appealing, it does lend itself to
the number of units I like to put in my games:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu_Mythos

> If your Moors, Berbers, or whatever so much as touch
> the IceCube 
> neutrino detector, I will shoot your entire caravan
> of snow camels. Capiche?

You'll find our snow camels to be far more resiliant
than their warm weather counterparts...  Besides,
we're phasing them out in favor of Tauntauns.




		
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