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Messages - Kyzrati

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2526
So you want to exclude them completely from loading at all, yeah? That shouldn't be too hard to add, sure. While directories can be collapsed, it doesn't extend to collapsing their subdirectories, so I can see how that would be annoying in your situation.

I'll get you a quick update for this soon!

2527
Announcements / Progress Update: August 29th, 2016
« on: August 28, 2016, 09:08:01 PM »
Good news and bad times, but the latter are behind us, so here's an overdue update!

First of all, over on the blog I posted a new article describing The Alpha Release Cycle, where you can read in great detail about the entire development process behind putting together and releasing a new major alpha build.


Part of it talks about the advantages of a one-month cycle, though I can say now that Alpha 11 is going to be one of those somewhat longer cycles :P

That's where said "bad times" came into play... My ancient dev laptop was on its last legs, so I had no choice but to get a new one, and the transition has gone quite poorly as Windows 10 is a terrible buggy mess on this thing. I'd really like to go back to 7, but after many days of problem solving and fixing broken things, I can finally do work without too many serious disruptions, so in the interest of continued progress I'll have to stick with what I've got for now!

In a few weeks I'll also be taking some time out to participate in the Roguelike Celebration in San Francisco, so that will contribute to a lengthened dev cycle. Only a few days left to get tickets to that, by the way, but all talks will be recorded so you'll be able to watch them either way. More recently than what you'll see on the site there, I decided to change my talk, since the original was a very serious topic aimed more at developers than a general roguelike audience, and is probably more suited for my blog, anyway, which tends towards that type of content. Instead by popular demand I'll be talking about my background and how I went from being a hobbyist to a full-time roguelike developer. It'll be a lot lighter, fun, and more personal, plus towards the end it can still include some relevant elements from the original talk.

In good news, despite the non-dev factors resulting in a longer wait for Alpha 11, I can already say that it will be the largest Cogmind update ever. I am partially making up for lost time by finally unlocking lots of late-game content which was built into the game even prior to Alpha 1, but only now does it make sense for it to be accessible. Special items and other fun stuff :D (also deadly stuff :D).

Most of what I've been working on lately is secret (as usual...), but here's a new little feature I can show you:


Taking EM damage now also does a bit of ASCII-static animation along your HUD borders. (Of course I also blow up the Power Conduits for good measure--hard to resist!)

In another fun milestone, Cogmind has now reached over 100k lines of code (C++, excluding comments, scripts, and data).

2528
Competitions / Re: Weekly Seed #54 [Alpha 10] [Seed: Raiding Party]
« on: August 28, 2016, 08:23:51 PM »
Having trouble repeating your amazing first run, eh? It's still way up there on the leaderboards :P

Garrisons are especially dangerous early on when you have a relatively low-integrity and unprotected core. If I so much as see the corner of one, or even hear it dispatch something, I turn around and look for another way around xD

Good idea to attach the HTML log, too. Kinda fun to skim those to get an idea of what happened. We can see what that oh-so-nasty trap did to you, heh.

2529
Competitions / Re: Weekly Seed #53 [Alpha 10] [Seed: Crowd Control]
« on: August 28, 2016, 08:19:00 PM »
This was an impressive win, taking advantage of the new fast-win bonus points without necessarily being incredibly fast about it :P

Couldn't get rid of the tutorial on this one. Hope that doesn't affect anything.
The tutorial messages don't impact anything, no. They're completely separate from the "tutorial map" you get three times with a fresh copy assuming no /user/ data migration, and the messages will have reappeared for you here (in either case) because I added a couple new messages for Alpha 10, which automatically resets the tutorial messages for everyone.

You can deactivate it in the options to never show the messages.

2530
Everything REXPaint / Re: Own extended font
« on: August 25, 2016, 10:23:08 AM »
This particular version is going to be quite a wait, but ah well, I can only spare so much time for a free project these days xD. I know a good number of users look forward to that feature in particular, so I'm eager to implement it, though my insistence on doing things as efficiently as possible means I don't want to hack it together--gotta get it done nicely and right the first time!

And hey gumix, not doing any cool ASCII art lately? :)

2531
Everything REXPaint / Re: Own extended font
« on: August 25, 2016, 08:59:03 AM »
Hey there!

It's not currently possible, no, but support for larger (unlimited) numbers of characters is planned for a future release. It will definitely happen at some point, but I can't say when for sure. (It should be during or shortly after the dynamic UI overhaul, and that's a rather large project!)

2532
Support / Re: Any luck with Wine on OSX? [SOLUTIONS INSIDE]
« on: August 24, 2016, 08:04:15 PM »
Yep, a wrapper is definitely planned! The main reason it hasn't happened already is it's not something I can easily do myself, so will probably rely on outside help...

2533
Ideas / Re: Storage Unit Rebalancing
« on: August 24, 2016, 09:30:36 AM »
Always consider what the other robots might have to share :). And if you really want to salvage something in particular, be careful what you shoot at them with, or even better, use salvage targeting processors. Wailing away at something with big cannons and explosives won't leave much behind!

2534
Ideas / Re: Storage Unit Rebalancing
« on: August 23, 2016, 06:49:47 PM »
It's pretty easy to repair common parts at low-level repair stations now (they were completely overhauled in Alpha 8), nothing like it used to be that would've been mentioned in this thread. Still, it's not a panacea--you'll have to selectively repair only parts that are really important to you due to the limit on how much you can get out of it (especially without hackware).

And while you are unlikely to find storage units lying around in higher floors, it's very easy to find Haulers, and you can just take the largest storage unit in the game directly from them! Or before you find them, take medium-sized storage from Recyclers, which are everywhere, or small storage from the Workers. The idea of harvesting parts from hostiles known to carry them can be crucial for survival in tighter spots.

Also, it's not just -10. Currently the lowest three floors of the game each have a guaranteed dedicated area with tons of storage parts to choose from (the "storage cache"). It's only when you reach the mid/late-game where you'll be more likely to rely on stealing or building them.

Also, as a combat bot I always carry spare storage in my inventory itself.

2535
Whoa, whoops, I typed out a reply to this a couple days ago but don't see it here :/ (Must've been too busy switching around to different tasks and closed the window before hitting send :(. These past few days have been extremely crazy...)

This gist of it was I'll ask around for you because I don't have much personal experience with Wine or Linux. I wonder if other Windows programs run under your Wine setup have the same problem? (You aren't using it for anything else at the moment so I guess you might not know without trying some program.) To my knowledge there are multiple different "Wine engines," so maybe you just need another one which is more compatible? (As mentioned by some other Linux users in this thread, I believe. Yours is the first case I've seen in which it isn't running under Wine.)

And regarding your update, if you could attach the run.log file when that happens, I could tell you more about the cause. Since that doesn't happen normally, however, it too will be something related to your Wine setup, possibly that Cogmind is being blocked from doing something it wants to do in its local directory structure. Make sure that Cogmind is run with full admin permissions, without which it won't be able to operate normally.

Again, sorry for the late reply! I thought my post in this thread had already gone out...

2536
General Discussion / Re: Is This Game Right For Me?
« on: August 21, 2016, 08:19:58 PM »
It appears ukelele's mind is already made up, though to respond to this:
It sounds like it's more tactics driven in cogmind, use what happens when it happens most effectively (optimize within the randomness).
That is generally the easiest way to survive, though with experience players have been able to force other unique strategies purely for fun and/or the challenge.

And the challenge naturally scales depending on precisely this:
I like to win, but I like to see how greedy I can be also (winning all points or do outrageous things etc)! That's fun for me.
Due to the whole "world is alive and responsive" aspect, it presents a flexible system in which you'll learn to navigate and bend it to your will, but you'll frequently encounter other ways in which you can take on extra challenges that seem right at the edge of your capabilities, similar to other roguelikes in how it's possible to challenge yourself by optionally visiting a known dangerous area, or choosing to take on a particularly dangerous foe, though in this case acting across more layers of the game.

That's a convoluted way of saying that I think based on what you've said, you'll probably enjoy it :P

2537
Support / Re: Cogmind on a 4K monitor
« on: August 21, 2016, 12:48:16 AM »
Yeah it's a pretty messed up scenario. I presumably found the "easiest" way to do it was to activate an explicit setting in Visual Studio that takes care of ignoring that piece of the OS for you, but it obviously didn't work. And the other runtime methods I couldn't determine how it was possible to use them in combination with my engine.

In any case, regarding the cfg deletion method maybe the exe-specific setting doesn't kick in until some moment after the program has already started? No idea :/

Seeing as it works fine when you set values manually, I'll look for another way to try to detect and set values that rather than based on what the OS says during startup, although given the current situation it would still require manually changing the OS exe setting. I could also include a separate cfg file which 4K players can copy over if needed.

Thanks for the info!

(Note: If I can come up with a temporary semi-solution I may pass it along to see if it works for you.)

2538
Support / Re: Cogmind on a 4K monitor
« on: August 20, 2016, 10:25:01 PM »
Thank you very much. My question in this case would be: If you've already made the proper setting in windows via the .exe properties and delete your cfg file then try to restart, does it set the values properly and give you the size 36 font? (If not, you can just restore your manual cfg file after trying.)

I'm curious if that's even advice I should give (because it's easy), or if for now I should provide a separate manual cfg file for those with 4K monitors.

The ideal final solution would be to have the game detect and proactively ignore Windows DPI scaling, but everything I've tried so far seems to fail (I think, anyway--it would be much easier to test here...). The especially annoying thing is that Microsoft can't even get all of their own programs to scale properly, so how do they expect us to do it :P. It's been like this for years...

2539
Support / Re: Cogmind on a 4K monitor
« on: August 20, 2016, 09:27:19 PM »
Ah, number of rows I was referring to is entire window, not the map. The minimum map size is 50x50. The reason it decided to give you 80 on first startup was because before that point the DPI setting hadn't been manually changed, and that will cause it to be confused at the actual size of the window being created according to Windows. In this situation, I believe the best approach is to just delete the whole cfg file and restart after changing that setting, in which it should be detected and set correctly. But you've already manually set it yourself so it's the same effect.

And no you're not making it less playable at all! Cogmind was explicitly designed to work with a 50x50 map, so you're set up just fine now. I was just referring to what was an occasional call early on in development for a viewable map area even smaller than 50x50, so that even larger fonts could be used. Playing with a map larger than 50x50, on the other hand, works just fine.

2540
Support / Re: Cogmind on a 4K monitor
« on: August 20, 2016, 08:35:13 PM »
The issue there is it's impossible to have fewer rows than 60, which is how the engine arrives at your ideal / largest possible font size (2160 / 60 = 36). (Width is not an issue because Cogmind is designed for a minimum 4:3 aspect ratio, and almost everyone uses 16:9 these days, so width is derived from the limiting factor--height.)

I wrote a lot about this on the blog earlier this year.

I agree that flexibility is nice, which is why I'm big on adding optional features, but this particular one has too large of an impact on the game design and architecture as a whole, so it's unfortunately not going to happen :(

2541
Support / Re: Cogmind on a 4K monitor
« on: August 20, 2016, 08:06:07 PM »
Ahhh, I just typed out a bunch of stuff and didn't see you edited your post xD

Glad you figured it out!

As I figured it was the high DPI setting mentioned higher up in this thread.

(That's one of the few things I haven't been able to get Cogmind to do automatically since I have no way to test it here, so it has to be a manual settings change. If only I had access to a monitor setup like this I could see what's happening and figure out what to do about it... (So far I've taken several actions as advised by MS, but reportedly none of them have actually worked.))

2542
General Discussion / Re: Alpha 10 Discussions [SPOILER VERSION]
« on: August 20, 2016, 04:34:12 AM »
Hehe, gotcha ;)

I'll look into it for Alpha 11.

2543
General Discussion / Re: Alpha 10 Discussions [SPOILER VERSION]
« on: August 19, 2016, 07:48:46 PM »
Datajacks already work that way, because they are melee weapons. You can just bump the target to hack, as you do in standard melee (no need to force-melee).

The problem with the handful of other semi-applicable special weapons (really just Mining Lasers, Welding Torches, etc.) is that, as a category, you can fire them at targets that aren't adjacent to you, so they still have to follow the projectile rules. What I could possibly do instead is change that one weapon to belong to the same "special melee" category that Datajacks do, basically making them like Mining Claws and they would then follow all melee rules, including 1) adjacent attacks only and 2) bump to attack (or in the case of walls--force attack to attack).

In fact, Mining Lasers would probably belong to this category if the special melee type existed when they were developed, but that came later :P

2544
General Discussion / Re: Alpha 10 Discussions [SPOILER VERSION]
« on: August 19, 2016, 06:42:48 PM »
Hey Enno--glad you noticed the cave ambience. Added that several releases ago and no one really brought it up :P

Regarding special weapons, none of them require that you be adjacent to your target, plus they can be used in volleys rather than solo like the melee requirement, so they should follow the volley rules for consistency.

As you're playing pure keyboard, if targeting a robot a simply f+f will repeat attack, and if you're attacking environmental objects it's just f+cursor shift, so it shouldn't be too big a deal unless you are perhaps digging through a thick wall and being chased by a hostile in view at the same time and therefore have to move the targeting reticule away from a previous target? (I can only guess why you are making this request since you didn't specify!)

2545
Support / Re: Alpha version and steam release?
« on: August 19, 2016, 01:36:10 AM »
I'll always release the exact same thing to both places. All releases already go through extensive testing and are mostly bug free, and in the event that any serious problem is found, a hotfix/patch goes out immediately. So there's no reason for the two channels to be any different, unless for some reason Steam makes it difficult to update quickly (which I don't know because I've never used Steam before). Here on the site I can do updates in a flash :)

2546
Support / Re: Alpha version and steam release?
« on: August 17, 2016, 10:18:52 PM »
Yep, the latest and greatest Cogmind will always be available from this site and your regular download link! You don't have to use Steam, nor worry about DRM.

2547
Strategies / Re: Basic Question and Answer thread
« on: August 17, 2016, 08:07:22 PM »
Rule of thumb would be cannons can do it, guns can't. Also pretty much all melee weapons can smash/slice through walls, too.

Though remember that in terms of cannons, if you have a weak cannon on a floor closer to the surface, it won't necessarily be able to take it down since walls up higher are also tougher.

Also, EM is always an exception because it does little outright damage--so no EM cannons (or even AOE EM, really) are good at taking out walls.

2548
Quite recently through further out of game reading I learned (finally!) that branch and main path exist use a different glyph. I play in ASCII, and branch and regular exits don't generally appear on screen at the same time, so I had never noticed that they aren't the same symbol. So I can now cast aside my signal interpreter dependence in the early game. However, even knowing that they are different, I cant seem to reliably remember which is which. I have to toggle over to tile view to check what kind of exist I've found. In my most recent game I forgot to do this (thinking I had the glyphs figured out) and ended up in the Caves by mistake. I was well geared up and supplied, so this actually turned out pretty well, and I found some interesting new lore, but it

This may represent purely my own idiosyncratic experience, but I feel like a more explicit UI callout would be helpful here, perhaps for example the tool tip could read "Main: ?" or "Branch: ?".
You don't need to remember which is which, because they are only shown as a different glyph if you've already identified where the exit leads! In which case it will already have a popup :) (and shows the name of the destination in the scan window)

This part of the design is very intentional, because as Cogmind you don't know where these places lead, and unless you put effort into determining (or for whatever reason are unable to determine) where they might take you, you'll have to deal with the consequences. (Hacking branch access locations at a terminal is a relatively common and easy way, too.) But like mindreader says, all branches are valuable in their own way.

I'm sure the world map goes unnoticed by new players for a while, and while there is a tutorial message telling you to open it, most players seem to ignore those (but as stated elsewhere, I don't want to use modal messages that force players to pay attention to a tutorial...).

If Cogmind were "gamier" in its theme, I like the idea of making it part of the level transition, but as is I prefer to stick to going to the next area as quickly as possible without pause for anything else in between.

Showing the map automatically would be a nice reinforcement/teaching tool for newer players (something I'm sure would be absolutely required in a AAA game), though once someone has learned about the map, opening it whenever is pretty easy and allows them to control the flow of the game. And Cogmind is all about player control, in order to keep the sense of immersion intact.

As a much more minor suggestion, something like a game to game persistent version of the worldmap that would populate with discovered branches as you explore the complex would be helpful to me. It would fill a role as a spoiler-free crutch for meta-game knowledge of which branches connect where, how deep they go before they connect back to the main complex. As the community grows this kind of information will probably be available via Wikis and guides, but those sort of resources tend to hard to use as references without encountering accidental spoilers.
That's a neat idea, though such a feature would unfortunately be quite involved to develop because branches don't always appear at the same depth, or connect in the exact same ways. Plus there is lots of overlap in terms of their pathways (if compared over multiple runs), which would lead to a somewhat confusing interface if done visually (less so in terms of a text-based format, but that's not very cool :P). It's not impossible, but I can see that feature taking several days by itself.

Thanks for the feedback.

2549
General Discussion / Re: Behemoth cannot shoot through door?
« on: August 16, 2016, 07:43:19 PM »
This is a known way to take advantage of Behemoths at the moment, in certain situations. I was going to do something about it in Alpha 10, but ran out of time, so it might be in the next release instead! Thanks for the specific screenshot.

They'll be even scarier when you can't get them in a situation like that ;)

2550
Support / Re: Any luck with Wine on OSX? [SOLUTIONS INSIDE]
« on: August 16, 2016, 12:58:38 AM »
Ah, well, hehe, this being the OSX thread we had made that assumption xD. Wine may very well behave differently depending on the architecture.

There is a Linux thread here where others have been talking about their approaches--haven't heard of anyone with this issue before, though. So far it's mostly a bunch of players reporting in that their particular setup works.

I'd suggest checking out the posts in that thread (there are some details), and if you're still having trouble try asking over there. Having not used Wine before, it's possible you're encountering a settings issue on that end.

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