Possibility and Probability » Wasteland

Petit DosBox Setup

Nick Loadholtes — Sat, 04 Mar 2006 00:34:03 +0000

I had the Petit DosBox from OS X up and running a while ago, but today when I went to run it I kept getting an error about libSDL not being found.

Last year I had an “incident” that basically required me to re-run the 10.4 installation. I think when I did that it must have wiped out the symbolic link I had made to get Petit to run. If you are finding yourself in this situation, here’s what I did to get it up and running (Mac Mini running OS X10.4.5):

WARNING: Only attempt this if you are confident of your computer skills *and* you have backups of your important data. This is a fairly safe thing I’m describing, but you are doing it at your own risk. I’m merely pointing out what I did and how it worked for me. Your mileage may vary. Proceed at your own risk.

Open up a terminal window.
Type in cd /usr/local/lib and press return.
Type in ls and press return. Odds are there is nothing there.
If you don’t see anything that says SDL, type this in: sudo su and press return
Enter your system password. (Basically you are going to run as root for this next command)
Your prompt should now say “root”. Type in (or cut-n-paste) this line: ln -s /sw/lib/libSDL-1.2.0.dylib libSDL-1.2.0.dylib and press return.
Type in ls and press return. You should now see libSDL-1.2.0.dylib. At this point try running any Petit dos program. If it works, yaa! If not, you might be missing the SDL installation. I’m not sure if it comes with the Mac by default or ifI had installed it manually.

If you have success or failure with these instructions, please leave a message in the comments. I’ll try to help out if I can (but no guarantees).

A refactoring success story

Nick Loadholtes — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 00:25:07 +0000

Today I decided to do something about a project that has been nagging me. I started write a game last year (or was it 2004? It was started a while ago at any rate…), but then I just stopped working on it for a variety of reasons.

One of the biggest reason was that my design, while it sounded good in theory, wasn’t working out too well in practice. My idea was to make a Wasteland style RPG type of game that used a state machine to control the game. The idea worked pretty well in the beginning. I found a project that was similar to what I wanted to do, then adapted the code and put a state engine in there to drive everything.

It worked well enough until I wanted to add in more features like events, changing maps, etc. Then the code revealed how convoluted it was. A lot if it is my fault, I’m still not in the “Python frame of mind” for everything I do, and that has made things more difficult. I checked around on the internet to see if anyone else was tackling a project like this and lo-and-behold there was. This site has a great little tutorial that pretty much covers everything I wanted to do, but done without an (explicit) state machine.

Instead it uses a different pattern, the mediator. The mediator looks a lot like the observer pattern, at this point I’m not sure what the major difference between them is. At any rate, I had some time today so I set out to refactor my little game and see if I could drop in the mediator/observer pattern in the place of the state machine.

Much to my surprise and delight, it was fairly easy to do. After about 3 hours or so of work I’m now almost at the same point (functionality-wise) that the original code was. At first glance it looks like I’ve streamlined my code base a lot and can eliminate a lot of extra code that was introduced to the system. The only downside I can see so far is it looks like the mediator/observer based code is inefficient in that every game object gets called every game tick. At this point I’ve got a pretty small number of objects, but the moment I get NPC’s and inventory items working I’m going to have to do something because that will introduce a ton of objects to the game world. Truthfully I don’t think it will be too terribly hard, but it is something to think about (the web page mentions this problem and has a few suggestions).

The biggest and nicest advantage of this refactoring has to be the separation that has been gained. Before I was using global objects to try and keep everything in touch with everything else. Now each game object is its own little island, knowing about only those objects it needs to know about. This is really exciting for me, before I was dreading adding new things to the game world because of the work that was involved in attaching them to everything.

Well, back to the salt mines, let me see if I can make some more progress!

A cool DOS utility for OS X

Nick Loadholtes — Sat, 02 Jul 2005 19:30:00 +0000

I’ve been reading the Darwine mailing list lately, they’ve been doing a lot of work there trying to get Wine to work under OS X. This got me wondering if other emulators like FreeDOS were up and running on OS X. To my joy and wonderment they are.
The Petit Dosbox program just rocks. After installing it (and I also had to grab the SDL libraries because those aren’t included with OS X) I was able to boot up my favorite game of all time Wasteland. That just rocks to no end. The gui for Petit is great and it allows me to just go tot he games, instead of having to stroll down memory lane and visit the DOS prompt.
I know I really should get back to business and finish the game I keep talking about writing/finishing, but right now I feel like heading back into the desert…
Tags:games, OS X, Wasteland

Learning from past mistakes

Nick Loadholtes — Mon, 02 Aug 2004 07:01:56 +0000

I’ve always thought it would be cool to write my own RPG like Wasteland. I really liked that game. Over the years I’ve had two “almost there” attempts at doing this. Once was in C/C++, and the other was in Java.

Both times I insisted on implementing everything from scratch. Well I kinda had to with the C/C++ version, I was pretty green and didn’t think to look on the internet for examples. But I feel I learned a lot by figuring out stuff on my own.

Both the C and Java version were dropped because I would hit a wall that I didn’t know how to get around. I always felt bad about that, it was like I quit just because it got to be a little bit difficult. That and I was cutting my teeth on design and architecture issues, and that’s always painful.

I decided this time around, I was going to do things differently. Java seems to be such a bear to work with for games, and C/C++ just doesn’t appeal to me right now. Python, it seemed, was a good choice. I found some code where someone had done something pretty close to what I was wanting to do. So I downloaded the code, and played Wasteland a bit and found the quick differences between the two.

I’ve started modifying the code of NotHack to try and make it more like Wasteland. And so far, I’m amazed at what I’ve been able to do. In one weekend I feel I’ve done more productive work than I ever have on the other two (in the same time frame). And the funny thing, is it isn’t because of python (I’m still learning the language as I go), but rather because I’m taking someone else’s framework and modifying it to do what I want. That’s really a mind blower for me, I’ve never really thought like that before.

So the lesson I’ve learned here is to work smarter not harder. If someone’s already invented the wheel, I’m going to work hard to resist the urge to create fire, mine ore, smelt down the metal, cut down some lumber, and bring all the pieces together in the hope that it will make a wheel. That much effort just isn’t worth it when all I need is to slap a new coat of paint on the already-invented wheel…

Damnation Alley

Nick Loadholtes — Mon, 26 Jul 2004 18:58:34 +0000

When it comes to video games (specifically PC games) I’m a big fan of Wasteland and the Fallout series of games. I really dig the post-apocalyptic theme of these games. For me they are much more fun than the typical RPG fare of magic and dragons and such.

How ever, there seems to be a shortage of these types of games, and for that matter movies and books. But a few months ago I saw a movie called Damnation Alley. Its from 1977 and stars Jan Michael-Vincent (from AirWolf) and George Peppard (from the A-Team). Its a little on the campy side, but I really enjoyed it. It was like Wasteland was made into a movie. I’m going to have to go do some research and see if the game was inspired by the movie.

The movie was based off of a Roger Zelanzy book of the same name. I just started reading the book yesterday so I’m only 10 pages into so far. From what I’ve read in the reviews, its supposed to be pretty good. I’m hoping that it will inspire me to write the post-apocalyptic RPG that I know I can write.

And speaking of which, I’m looking at the Nothack source code by Roger ‘Denor’ Ostrander as an inspiration for a top down 2d RPG. Written in Python, I think it is a very good starting point. I’m slowly learning to take other people’s code and use it for a starting point as opposed to writing everything from scratch. Python never ceses to amaze me, the code seems pretty easy to grasp. I tried writing something like this in Java a while back and it just seemed to spiral out of control. But then again I do remember I was trying to architect something big with it, so that’s probably why the java code looks so ugh today.

Finishing what ya start

Nick Loadholtes — Wed, 26 May 2004 01:56:15 +0000

The other day I had a great idea for a video game. Not your typical, “hey wouldn’t this be cool?!?” type of idea, but a mind-blowing, so-funny-it-should-be-illegal, type of idea. I was inspired to try and bring this vision to life, so I pulled out some notebooks and began trying to rough out my characters and plot lines. “This game is gonna rock…” I thought to myself.

Then a strange sense of deja-vu hit me. I’d done this before. But if I had done this before, where was my epic video game? Then it hit me, its sitting on my computer rotting inside of my CVS repository.

About 2 years ago I decided to I needed to write a RPG engine. Well, more precisely, I decided I needed to work on my Java skills a bit and that making a 2D, top-down RPG would be a fun way to do that. So I set about working on the engine. No script, no ideas for a story, just Wasteland as an inspiration of what I wanted to end up with.

So I began coding. And designing. And recoding. And testing. And more coding. When I finally stopped, I had the basics of what I wanted. Watching the program run, you could guess it was a video game. I had/have grand expectations for the backend scripting system, but I have never gotten around to implementing it fully. And that is the is the problem, I have not finished what I have started. Yet here I am wanting to start writing a new game.

Looking over the vast expanses of the net I see that this seems to happen to a lot of people. Good idea, a great start, loose some steam, make a few changes, loose more steam, dead stop. I flipped through a game design book (one of the Game Guru books, I don’t have the title in front of me) and I saw a nugget of advice: “Finish what you start. Start small, something easy like a puzzle or a tetris game. Finish it compeletly then move on to the next project and repeat. Soon you’ll be writing networked 3D shoot’em ups that look spectacular.”

Looking back at the number of half-finished projects I have on my computer, I think this is a really great idea. So I’ve decided that I will do this. My first target is a prototype of a NxN sliding puzzle that I started for a homework assignment (see this entry for details). Its a nice little program so far, but it needs to be finished then polished. Thankfully python is easy to read so I can get back to this pretty quickly. Hopefully I will be able to crank this out soon, and that will give me the motivation to go back and finish my little RPG engine. If everything falls into place, I could then use that engine to implement my killer idea. Easy as 1-2-3, right? I guess time will tell.