On the way home I realized that in Pong, you serve, and this would eliminate the hit the puck into your own goal repeatedly thing, which really isn't very much fun. I could have the puck tossed in from off stage, and have air-hockey type slots for the goals. I could even have it bounce a little. Also, even if I can't have spinning paddles, I can still have spin on the puck, as long as it doesn't curve. This would also work nicely visually, if I did a bi-color puck. It would also give me another variable in paddle intelligence; whether they understand spin or not. It would be nice if I could introduce paddle mistakes as well. I kind of have this now, using rounding errors, but if I was willing to stop the paddles being entirely deterministic, I could have them randomly misjudge sometimes. I didn't want to do this before, because being able to have them play the same game over and over made debugging easy, but now the collision engine is entirely purged of bugs, that isn't so important. If I'm going to do spin, I need to sit down and think about what happens when a spinning puck hits a moving point. The edges aren't so bad, since they always hit on the tangent, but points, ugh. Maybe it's not to bad. You'd look at the direction of relative motion, and the angle between that and the radius the point struck, and then you could get the ratio of the normal that goes into spin, and goes into a nice normal collision. In fact, this would mean that many collisions with points would be followed pretty much instantly by collisions with a side, but it can handle that. The effect of spin when it hit a surface would depend entirely on the stickyness of the surface, which would give me another paddle property, yay!
If I introduce serving, I could also have a shot-clock, where your opponent gets to serve if the puck doesn't cross the center line in x seconds. This is something the game would need, if it were a real game. Is there such a thing as tournament rules for air hockey? Why yes. Delay of game at referee's decision, bah. This could also fix the problem of stupid paddles who can't get the puck across the line. I should consider face-offs. The problem would be that currently the only random element in the game is the starting vector of the puck, so if I started the game with face offs, the same paddles would always play the same games. I don't like random numbers, though. I want this to be a dice-free game. Too many games nowadays are simply dice games with pretty graphics; not just RPG's, but also all the sports games. Part of the idea is to have it be a real game, where you can see everything that's happening, with proper physics. Having dice rolls in the souls of the paddles doesn't really make it a dice game, but I still don't like it.
Ooh, if I have a shot clock, I can have inelastic collisions and friction on the puck! I didn't do this originally, because the paddles were inanimate, so I just had stuff bounce around to test the collision model. After that, the pucks could get stuck in goal creases. It would mean a significant rejiggering of the paddles souls, but that's okay.
I don't mean to turn this into a programming journal. It just sort of happens. I do think about other things, occasionally. Like food, and ducks. Yesterday we went with a very small, cold birdwatching group and saw the frozen boston harbor. The open patches of water were a brilliant blue. It was all very pretty, but too cold to stand around looking for ducks for any length of time. We did eventually find where all the ducks were hiding, and saw well over a hundred scaup in a beautiful bay on Nahant, along with buffleheads, eiders (eider?), goldeneyes, and a distant raft of scoters. Also some Sanderlings which were hopping around one one leg in the lee of a wall on the beach, pecking at the sand. They'd switch legs every 20 seconds or so.
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(3)
06:54:39 PM,
Monday 26 January 2004
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I'm in a bind. I want people to play my game, but it isn't really a game yet, barely even a toy, and I don't want to scare people off by letting them play it before it's any fun. I want feedback, but I've also got a very clear idea of where I want to take it, so maybe I don't need it yet. But if I had users, it would be more pressure to work on it, which would be a good thing. Also, it isn't user friendly, and I feel I should make it user friendly before inflicting it upon the general population, but all the user-friendly tasks are a long way down the Master Plan. I should write down the Master Plan. Hmm.
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09:42:42 PM,
Sunday 25 January 2004
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One thing I'm going to need is a good source of paddle names. I was thinking of using the files Civilization uses to name cities. Any other suggestions?
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(2)
07:48:33 AM,
Sunday 25 January 2004
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What was an AI is now a Soul
What was a Paddle is now a Body
What was a Player is now a Paddle
What was the Game is now a Game and a GameDisplay
What was a MainForm is now a GameWindow
The Variables have moved
The paddles are defined by text files
nothing works
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(2)
06:40:21 PM,
Saturday 24 January 2004
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I've never quite been on board with the Mountain Goats, but John Peel played "Palmcorder Yajna" on Tuesday, and it made me very happy. And the headstones climbed up the hills. You can hear it there until the new show goes up on Tuesday. Probably other places too. Maybe even the radio.
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(1)
03:21:51 PM,
Saturday 24 January 2004
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I am re-orienting my objects.
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01:43:07 PM,
Saturday 24 January 2004
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I can feel my back tightening up and starting to twinge. I hate this project. I had the report finished in Excel last night, it took about an hour. I've spent most of today trying to get our software to do the same thing, for no earthly reason I can divine. All the number are there, they just need it to match the federal report. I was doing more good for the world when I was at McDonald's, or mailing rich people tackle for their boats. It isn't the fault of our software, exactly, it's a problem with the expectations and our software not matching. I blame the sales people. I think that after a certain number of people quit over a particular contract, the people who wrote the contract should be made to do the work.
(Checks to make sure his blog still isn't client googlable)
This is actually related to the reason I like Clark's idea of a Civilian Reserve. The only way you're going to get decent people working for the government is a sense of duty to society; and clearly, that isn't enough with full time things. Everytime I think about the military, and how important it is that it is capable, organization-wise, I think about the state employees I know and am filled with fear.
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04:24:44 PM,
Thursday 22 January 2004
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It took them a while, but the Martians found it, and now they're torturing the poor thing. Nasa rover breaks down on Mars What a miserable headline. I love the phrase "pseudo-noise". It's only pretending to be static. How about "Spirit Speaking in Tongues"? "Mars Breaks Spirit, Opportunity Waits"?
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(1)
01:08:14 PM,
Thursday 22 January 2004
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Anyone ever read any of Disraeli's novels? I'm curious, largely because I saw somewhere that he read all the Jane Austen novels annually. It also raises the question, are there any living novelists you'd vote for? Was George Bernard Shaw the last politically important fiction writer? My impression is that Orwell didn't gain his political clout until after he died, and I can't think of any others. Ayn Rand. It isn't that fiction writers have stopped being political, but rather that no one listens to them anymore.
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(16)
07:14:21 PM,
Wednesday 21 January 2004
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if (work * difficulty / energy > 1 - laziness)
{
Brake();
sThought += "Too Tired";
}
Laziness is a value between 1 and 0, where 0 is suicidally gung-ho, and 1 is functionally dead. Negative laziness is possible, but terrifying to contemplate.
If I ever teach them how to tell whether something's a likely goal or not, I'll add importance to this equation. Heck, I could have the score and the time remaining effect the importance.
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10:57:13 PM,
Tuesday 20 January 2004
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If I'm not mistaken, terrorism continuing beyond next year just got a big round of applause from Congress. I'm ashamed by the applause during the State of the Union.
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09:20:06 PM,
Tuesday 20 January 2004
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Things you never want to hear on a client conference call: "... and for those of you who don't understand what I just said, it was a joke." I mean, he went straight into it, straight from the joke. Without even pausing, allowing people to reflect on how bad the joke was first.
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03:42:50 PM,
Tuesday 20 January 2004
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site & script courtesy of Moss