Every now and then… and I mean rarely every now and then… something nice happens as a result of a structured design. I just accidentally discovered an originally unintended effect using Launchers to target Creeper on the other side of a Micro Rift. Here’s the technical skinny:
Launchers want to fire at the densest Creeper within a radius. Their algorithm is to look at all Creeper within a surrounding radius to find the densest Creeper to which there is a path. To do this they scan through all surrounding cells and build up a sorted list of densest to least dense Creeper occupied cells. Then, this list is evaluated to see if there is a path to the target cell. This is necessary because the projectile fired by the launcher is powered/guided and it has to travel to the target cell via a route that is completely powered. I’ve talked about all of this in a previous blog post…
If there is a wall of terrain between the launcher and some nice fat pile of Creeper, the projectile won’t fire (the wall is in the way). But what if there is a MicroRift on both sides of that wall? Well it turns out that the projectile will take the shortcut and nuke the Creeper after all.
Some might say “of course”.. and they’d be right. This does make sense. Of course I never really thought about this when I was coding everything up. It just worked out this way. Btw, for the vast majority of folks who have never done any development… the ratio of bugs to serendipitous events is about 1000 to 1 on a good day.
Here’s a little image of a Launcher fired projectile on it’s way through a MicroRift to deal some punishment. I’ve added the yellow arrows to show the path it is taking.
do i have first comment? why yes i do. this is a first for me.
So, there’s really not much to comment bout this is there? i mean it doesnt pose any questions, does it?
but i bet it brightened your day.
one thing though, the moarter/launcher munition graphic looks a bit bland to me.
soz
sounds like a great find, but missles be able to go through any 2 rifts to hit creeper by a far-away rift? or only if the two rifts are close togeather like in your example
The projectile still won’t fire outside of the Launcher’s radius.. So this can’t be used to target creeper anywhere. It’s just useful in certain situations… situations that might make interesting scenarios in custom maps for instance.
so if you had some creeper sepperated from the blaster by a wall and a micro rift next to the blaster but the other micro rift is outside the blasters range but connected to the creeper through a tunnel, would the bullet go through the micro rift and all the way through the tunnel to the creeper?
The projectile fired by the Launcher can’t exceed a maximum distance from the Launcher (regardless of MicroRifts). At least this is my intent.
This was actually mentioned on the forum, but i think the problem with it was that could dig a parael room, lots of launchers, then a microrift for it to fire at the parael creeper 😉
You could do this…. of course something has to defend that MicroRift on the side with the Creeper. And if you are defending the MicroRift, then you can also probably move your launcher’s through as well. The MicroRift trick is most useful when there is a rock wall that separates two chambers… and you want to allow one or more Launchers to hit Creeper on both sides of that wall( without having to constantly shuffle the Launchers back and forth).
“Its not a bug, its a feature!” 🙂
so i see that the graphic for the missle is the same as it is for cw1. since you describe it as a missle, not a bomb (like in cw1, it can’t turn or guide itself in anything other then a strait line) will you cange it sometime?
I likely will make it a little missile icon along with a smoke trail. That’s just fluff (but cool fluff), so it’s low priority at this point. But, I do intend to change it before the release.
Do you plan on keeping this in the game?
As fun and useful as it might be it seems a bit like a scapegoat to me… =X
I probably will keep it. It’s usefulness is marginal and likely only something useful to experts and only then under certain special map situations.
lol cool side effect, dont you just love it when random stuff happens that you didnt expect 😛
Can anything else shoot through rifts?
Only things that “move” go through rifts. So beam and field weapons don’t go through rifts.
The wonders of game designing! That is why we have beta testers. Nice accident though!
4th.
For the (CW1)Blasters, are they shooting the area right next to the wall they are trying to shoot at or where the rift is leading to?
Those blasters are just parked there. THey aren’t shooting at anything at the moment the shot was taken. Their barrels are just pointed in the last position they were in when they did shoot at something.
you have probobly been asked this question alot but i was wondering when cw2 will come out? december? january? february? just a rough estimate will be good
I’m in the final stages at this point. This means I am preparing to start most of the story missions creation and most of the game mechanics are complete. I’m also integrating music, sound effects, and art…. and doing the menu screens, etc. My original plan was before the end of this year. But, I expanded the scope of the game by adding fields. That took about an extra 6 weeks. So I would guess that maybe January would be the release… but it could be February. I’m going as possible, though, so if I can do it sooner I certainly will. The game is going to rock… I can already tell you that from the play testing that I’ve been doing. I can easily ‘waste’ 2 hours a night playing my test mission over and over and trying new strats.
thanks for responding to my question, and not to contradict you but any time spent playing cw 1 or 2(when it comes out) is NEVER wasted time
will the blaster and repulser work for this too?
im just imagining a repulser flying through 100 rifts and shoving some creeper far far away. and what about good creeper and bad creeper?
A few questions
1.is there only going to be two types, one for you and on for the enemy or some more? (kind of like that toxic AIR from adobe)
how many weapons will there be?
P.S.
sorry, random button typed, anyways, cant you dig a hole in the side for fighting up? If you dig a pit, the creeper will fall in and you can use a mortar to finish it off. Or better yet, if you can move packets in creeper, dig a hole in side the creeper, like an exit so it will fall somewhere else.
Oh yeah, if you dig to the bottom, will there be undiggable terrain or everything will just fall in like a pit and die.
Yep, this is one of the basic strategies that you learn early. You always (almost) want to get into a position where you are above the Creeper. One way to do this is to dig an ‘expansion well’ and let the creeper flow into it.
The bottom of the map does not drain away creeper, it’s like an solid wall one cell off the bottom of the visible map.
Something as inspiration for you:
Something like an multiplayer-version of creeper world (2) would be awesome. Maybe so, that there are 2 odin-citys/ship, which have to defeat the creeper together or destroy the other player.
There is a very big topic about this on the forum:
http://knucklecracker.com/forums/index.php?topic=4697.0
I think it would add too much more work and probably woulnt work out, because cw1 was designed as a downloadable game and it will almost deffinitly be for cw2
im guessin the thing above the rightangle is a scroll or a type of artifact
Yeah, that’s a scroll (or message artifact). Upon recovery, you get some message.
possibly stupid question:
what are those clear squares with the life meters? or structures moving to or from there, or are they something else?
Those are shield units. They stop the flow of creeper (both good and evil). But, when touched by evil their health decays. They allow the passage of packets and units, though… including weapon fire! This means they play a part in an very effective tactical move that most layers will learn…
quick question
what are those gems for on the right side?
Gems have associated points. When you collect them your score goes up. This means that your score is based on completion time and on the number of some artifacts that you collect (like gems). I may also make gems give you some instant energy or ore… so that they aren’t just point based.
I’m confused by the idea of multiple rifts. If something enters one of, say, 5 existing rifts, since they are all a single point, what determines where it will exit? What keeps it from exiting in an unintended place or becoming multiplied by 4 and exiting from all of them?
This is the primary reason that only movable units can travel through rifts. Movable things (like units or missiles) have a starting location and a location that they want to move to. They perform a path finding calculation to determine the shortest path they should take. MicroRifts form shortcuts on the map that the path finding algorithm considers. So, a movable unit will enter one rift and exit some other specific Rift in order to make it’s travel path shorter. This is a deterministic calculation and solves the problem you mention.
He thinks of everything…
I have several things to say which i would have said earlier but i just found this and am not sure if you still check the comments on your previous posts.
1. what if, instead of being destroyed when creeper touches them, rifts teleport the creeper to another location? This would make it so that there would be a downside to making them in the first place effectively balancing them and also making them something the player will want to defend.
2. Will there be a trial version of this available like the “Creeper World Training Sim” that made me realize cw1 existed?
3. will it ever be possible to create decay-able land in the middle of play? So you could, for instance, put something in the way of the creeper that would slow it down for a short period of time but is extremely expensive and maybe requires ore instead of energy to produce
Moving creeper through rifts has been talked about on the forums a good bit… but I’m not sure it fits into the game. For starters, the creeper would have to either come out of some other ‘random’ rift, or some fraction would come out of all other rifts. There are lots of problems with this…
There will definitely be a free ‘flash’ version of the game, just like with CW1. There will also be another free flash version of CW1 with some custom maps. All just a matter of me getting the time to do them. But they are invaluable in helping spread awareness for the game.
for cw1 there will be another free flash game?
(just to clarify)
never mind that third question, i just saw the post that mentions shields.
will there be the equivalent of spore attacks?
They are called phantoms, and they are in the game currently. I still have to balance them, but they are like spores in CW1.
slightly off topic but have you decided weather you will be able to see the feilds on custom maps?
I’m back and forth on this. Right now, it’s a control in the game (and something you have to spend 1 research point on).
Are you going to put your sense of humor in the story part cause you didn’t last time and i was disipointed
If you beat the last level in story mode without thor, you get a slightly more humerous ending
Sense of humor, eh? Maybe a dash of humor here and there will make it into CW2. CW is supposed to be pretty apocalyptic, so I can’t go overboard… but I can slip a few things in here and there.
Have you ever thought of entering your games at an indie game competition? That way they’d get alot more attention.
Perhaps…. this is something I will likely do for CW2.
I can’t wait for Creeper world 2 to come out it will be so cool!
In the picture the mortar missile is taking a curved path- didn’t you say that they had to take a straight line to their target?
The projectiles can snake their way around to their target… but they can never exceed the firing radius of the Launcher.
thats what morters in cw1 do. btw, there called launchers, not morters
in cw2, i mean…
(sorry for the extra post)
are you still gonna make some of those levels where you grab the totem from cw1, or at least make it one of the options?
Right now I have these mission types:
Domination
Acquisition
Green Zone
Domination means you have to destroy all ‘evil’ things.
Acquisition means you have to collect all artifacts (and you can ignore as much creeper as you can get away with).
Green Zone means you have to get X amount of friendly creeper into the “green zone”.
What you would be talking about would be “Escape” missions where you have to reach and activate totems like in CW1. I could add these type of missions to the game, but they are so similar to Domination missions that I’m not sure they add much beyond those missions.
Escape is more like acquisition I think. But instead of totems you’ve got to collect artifacts.
And I think acquisition is closer to escape than domination, cause if you’ve destroyed all creeper why would you escape. Acquisition/escape will be rather used for puzzle maps.
You should definatly add survival
http://armorgames.com/play/7446/kolm
check that games intro sound. stolen from cp1 ?
They just licensed the same music I used for the title screens in CW… obviously they have good tastes 🙂
Some survival-typed genre would be really cool, too. Just by adding or increasing the force of creep emitters over time 🙂
I like survival style 🙂
Are you planning to give any modding support
aka, the ability for users to make thier own not only maps but weapons artifacts, terrain ecedera?
The map editor itself is a giant step for simple “modding”. It lets you tweak game play to some degree.
More modding support may be added to the game after the initial release, though.
How much will the game cost?
whats the difference between building an ore rig and just digging out the ore?
I’ve not decided on pricing yet, but it won’t be expensive… in line with CW1 most likely.
In the final game, the only way to get ore is by building an ore rig. You can’t actually dig up ore… that was in an early prototype of the game.
how much will the game cost?
will the map editor be free?
what is the difference between building an ore rig and just digging out the ore cell.
will the Repulsor have indefinite strength in pushing creeper away?
does good creeper wear down shields?
will the player be able to toggle the types of packets generated by the assault ship like in Creeper World 0572?
can stationary structures be “anchored” on indestructible terrain blocks?
-Pricing hasn’t been finalized, but it won’t be expensive.
-The map editor will be included with the game for free. It doesn’t cost extra.
-You can only get ore via an ore rig… not by digging
-The repulsor is not infinitely strong… nor is it infinitely long.
-Good creeper does not wear down shields
-I don’t allow packet toggles currently, but I may consider adding this before the release.
-You can not build on top of the “boulders” in the game.
will there be a demo or “training sim” like there is of CW 1
Absolutely…. There will be both a demo and a “mini” web based flash version of the game.
The demo will be available when the game is released. The mini flash version may show up some time after the release.
Anything new? Can’t await news! 🙂
Are you planning to make a pre-order selling, where pre-orderes can kind of betatest for you? Would be great! 🙂
I’ve been locked up working hard for the last few weeks. I’ve finished most of the administrative aspects of the game (menu system, and all of those things). I’m starting the final mission creation… so I can see the end in sight.
I’ve not decided for sure about pre-orders. I think that I might just do the full release, and then expand the game over the months after the release… with higher sales being an incentive to make more additions to the game.
I can’t wait for this to come out! =D
In the screenshot, their was a small hill in the corner you could dig into(i think?). It would be cool if on story missions, each surface terrain had different small hills/mountains with it’s own signature art. That would give each lvl. it’s own personality. =)
There will be some custom graphics support in the first release of the game…. and I may extend the support the the months after the release.
oh my god, virgilv replied to me. Im so happy!
I still want to know if there can be an option to turn off custom colors/graphics!!
how close to the end do you think you are now? (now that you have finished the admin stuff and menus)
in the artifact post, i saw something called a “maker” what does this do exactly?