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Oops, I did it again!

No posts until Tuesday of next week. I know I didn’t get to making any of this posts I said I would, but such is life. However, I will say this: If your looking for a fun, free shooter, try Combat Arms (which is a f2p modern shooter which is quite annoying but fun at the same time), or Wolfenstein Enemy Territory (Even though it has an “M” tag, its about as violent as the mickey mouse clubhouse show is).  I like Day of Defeat better then both those games, but those ones are free, unlike DoD. But yeah, I just wanted to point those out before I sign out for the week. And to anyone who actually reads this thing: Thanks a lot. You make my life feel like it worth something.

Updates Oh My!

Well. In case you didn’t notice, I have been gone for a while. During the past week, a lot of things have happened. So much in fact, that I’m going to split them into separate posts during the next few days to keep me busy till I leave. So, what have I been up to? A preview of things to come: I installed ubuntu 8 over my vista install, and so far I am addicted to the command line and other linux tools. I went to a band camp, where I spent a week playing my French horn and learned beginning guitar. I discussed podcast ideas with one of my friends, as well as some musical ideas. My internet is failing and I can hardly use it, and I tried Drift City, a racing mmo, and I plan to share my impressions here. So, there you have it, I have been a busy guy. Hope you enjoy something in there!

Wesnoth Board Game Prototype

Please note that I did this on a spur of the moment, and lots of it I wrote poorly or hard to understand. If you see anything that needs adding, removed, corrected, or anything else, alert me. I do realize there is already a Wesnoth board game prototype, but this requires less setup time and is (I think) easier to under-stand. However, I could be wrong. Please try to bear with me.

The game would be played on any number of 8 ½ x 11 pieces of paper. Each paper would depict a different land mass, each one surrounded by ocean. This would introduce a certain modularity to the game. So if you have a small game of one or two people, then you would only use one or two maps. If you had three people, you might use three maps, etc. Each map would be divided into small boxes, each one representing a space in a real game if Wesnoth. The maps would have to simple and have clearly defined tiles, such as woods, plains, mountains, etc. Each map would be preferably black and white, and easy to acquire and print out for a game. Each player would have a different colored pencil to make markings with if possible. From here on out, I’m going to go through the rules in the order they might happen in a real game of Wesnoth.

Setup -Each player would begin by designating 3 to 6 spaces on the map as his castle tiles (The tiles MUST be connected). This gives the game a certain amount of modularity in its play experiences. After the starting tiles are defined, one tile connected to the rest would be designated as his keep tile. This is where that player’s leader starts (see the section below for units).  Players then decide on the amount of gold they want to have. This should be written down on a piece of paper on the side.

Recruiting – At any time during a players turn, if his leader unit is on his keep tile, he may recruit a unit on castle tile. To recruit, the player simply chooses a unit to bring to the battlefield, subtracts the cost of the unit from his gold total, and then places the unit on an empty castle tile. The recruited unit is considered activated for that turn, and cannot move nor attack. A player can have a negative amount of gold at any time.

Villages – I tried to make the mechanic for villages as simple as possible. Each map may contain one or more villages (predefined). Simply, the last player to have touched a certain village owns it. At the beginning of each turn, the players count the number of villages they own and add the number to their gold total.  Also, any units on villages at the beginning of each turn recover 4 health if they need it. They may not go over the limit.

Units – For each faction, there would be 6 different units. Each one would be given a number. For example, a player playing the dwarf faction would have the guardsmen be 1, and the thunderer be 2, the spearman be 3, etc. These numbers would be predefined of course, so the player wouldn’t have to make them up. To represent the units, any marker may be used that has a number on it, the easiest being a six-sided die. There is also a seventh unit, which is the player’s leader. The leader unit starts in play on the keep tile, and is any one of the 6 choices of units the player has (See below for details on the leader).

Units in detail – I do not wish to make up any unit specs today, but I can give guidelines as to what makes up a unit. In fact, I’m going to provide a small sample of a unit with both ranged and melee attacks.

Dark Adept -7/14/7

Dark Missile (R3) – +5, +4

Staff (M4) – +2 ,+0

Defense – +1

Let’s dissect this unit one line at a time. The numbers next to the name of the unit follow this scheme: Cost/Health/Movement. Cost is the amount of gold it takes to recruit this unit. Health is the number of hit points the unit has. And movement in the about of spaces (including diagonal) the unit may move per turn. The letter in () next to the name of the attack is what type of attack it is. The number next to the type of attack is the amount of attacks that attack has.  The (R3) stands for ranged and 3 attacks, while the (M4) stand for melee and four attacks. The next two numbers are the units’ attack and damage rolls (See the section on attacking below). Same thing for next line. The Defense Line is the operation you perform on your defense rolls, including the terrain advantages. I know there is a lot missing from the actual game, but I couldn’t think of any other graceful way to do the unit attacks. If you have any other idea, please let me know.

Attacking – You attack by first choosing what unit and what attack you are using. If the opposing unit has the same type of attack you are attacking with, then he can counter. If he does not, then you can make a risk-free attack. After you have chosen the attack you are using, both players roll a D6. If the attacking players attack roll (plus modifiers) is higher than the defenders roll (plus modifiers), then the attack hits. If the attack hits, the attacker then rolls another D6 (plus modifiers) and subtracts the total amount from the defenders hit-points. If he has no hit-points left, the unit is removed from play. Otherwise, the defender now has a chance to attack (if applicable). This continues until one unit is dead or both units have used all their attacks.

Leader in Detail – The leader is exactly the same as any other unit, but is represented as a “7″ on the map and added power. The leader unit gets +1 to all his rolls, no matter what he is rolling for. Otherwise, he acts just like any other unit.

Terrain – Terrain has no advantage while attacking, and only helps when defending. Simply put, you just add the terrain modifier to your defense roll to total your defense. The terrains are:

Grass – +0

Hill – +1

Water – -1

Swamp – -2

Castle Tile – +2

Keep Tile – +3

Villages – +2

Note: If I missed anything, please tell me and feel free to suggest states for anything.

Game End – The game ends when one of the players leader units get’s killed.

Did I miss anything? Think the game sucks? Have a suggestion? I would love to hear from you about anything related to this. I hope that it wasn’t a complete waste of time on my part, but oh well, Wesnoth is a game I love. Enjoy!

Sometimes the US sucks…a lot

Let me describe the situation here, just in case your living under a rock. We want to fight terrorists in Iraq and other Middle-East countries to gain their freedom. The terrorists are fighting back, not only in the middle east, but at home to (see 9-11). The US government raises taxes so that they can “fight terrorism” in the US and support our troops in Iraq. We claim the terrorists are losing.  We start a massive terrorist hunt in our own country. This. My god, where is this country going?

Stuff

As you can see, I have changed the theme of the blog to a cool, nice summery theme. What was wrong with the old one you say? I was tired of the dark, stone cold look. This new theme is nice. Nicer then your blog I’m sure. However, this post isn’t going to be all about the theme. Using StubleUpon, I found Improv Everywhere. Basically, the cause scenes that you would never think of and confuse the hell out of everyone around them. It’s pretty sweet. Also, if you have a source engine game, I would like to plug the single-player mod Riot Act. In involves a jail break style of game, expect you get to control antlions for a while and other neat things like that. And once again, please take the time to visit Gray Sun Productions, and contribute if you can.

1 Compile Completed Successfully

My experience with the source engine SDK has been trying to say the least. When I first tried to compile something with it, it failed in every possible way. Then, when I had just figured out what might be going wrong, I continually got an error “Error in spawning cl.exe.” I gave up for a week or two, then decided to come back and fix the cl.exe problem. Turns out that visual C++ express just deleted a path and needed it to be added again. After fixing this issue, I finally got Half-Life 2 Deathmatch to compile. I quickly made a simple test map, and added it to the mod. Success! However, I need to know some C++ in order to really make anything interesting. So I dug out one of my old C books and starting writing simple programs, modifying the C to become C++. So yeah, just a bit of an update.

printf(“Enjoy!”);

A test picture

Not sure if I’ve mentioned it before, but I do own Daz3d’s Carrara. And while I find that it suits all my 3d needs, sometimes its fun to play with professional software that I could never afford. Anyway, I picked up the Vue 6 Personal Learning Edition (Which, as far as I’m concerned, is used by Disney to render large landscapes.). So after a little playing around, I managed to produce this: (Note, the watermark is a thing that the PLE does; I didn’t chose to add that)

If you care enough to comment on it, feel free. Otherwise, just enjoy the art!