This Week’s Program: Nov 14 - Nov 18

I hope everyone got a chance to look at this week’s Supermoon, the biggest in 60+ years. It was really something. We won’t see a moon like this for another eighteen years. I found this quote on a blog while reading about the Supermoon:

The term “Supermoon” was originally coined by an astrologer, but the general public and the media, unable to distinguish fact from fantasy and seeking any escape possible from the futility, meaninglessness, and ultimate tragedy of their existence, became infatuated with the superness and hyperbole of the name, even though perigee full moons occur fairly frequently.

“Escaping from the futility, meaninglessnes, and ultimate tragedy of existence,” you say? Well let me tell you about the progress I’m making on my computer game…

9424f6c83cd339e736464cec888ad540380b3838

A weapon has a maximum range. With destructuring in Elm, it’s pretty simple to get at that maximum. Weapons in Necromunda have both a short and a long range, which I represent as a pair of Pairs with the Ranged type. To get the maximum, I destructure like so:

Ranged (_, _) (_, max)

And now max is the maximum range of a weapon. With the shoot action, I use the Tabletop.viewMeasuringTape function to draw a line from the shooter to the maximum range.

c156b6c1ea822b450bb244b940a2baf59f1ee069

Elm 0.18 was released this week. With it comes a new debugging mode for importing and exporting a sequence of events in a program, which is really cool. But some syntax was removed and libraries reorganized and it meant I had to do a fair bit of work. Luckily the Elm folks made an easy to follow migration guide. I’m okay with these changes, but I have to admit I liked the backtick syntax that let you use functions as infix operators. I had that with Tabletop.by and frequent use of Random.andThen.

e45beeaebbe18916281919f1a5e2564919832ac6

Most of this week was spent re-learning basic geometry. Here I find a new point given another point, and angle, and a length. I know that polar coordinates are a thing, but I’m not very comfortable with using that just yet.

ebfe0a105f350beaba27ef0e78a59f294f2e9ee3

Here’s my first stab at drawing an arc of sight for a weapon. From the Necromunda rule book:

The fighter is always assumed to face in the direction faced by the model itself, and is able to see within a 90 degree arc to his front.

Get out of here with that gendered language, Necromunda rulebook. One of Necromunda’s Hive City Houses is the House of Escher, which is all female. You’ll be able to play a House Escher gang in hive-city assuming I ever finish this game…

Anyway, using my poor geometry, I draw this arc. Using the previous comit to find a new point at the maximum range of the weapon, and then find new points out from either side at 45 degrees. I think this is right.

This isn’t really an arc though. It’s a triangle.

5dd204366fc8f608583f483724602f1b7adf8247

I revise my viewArc function to use an SVG path element. This lets me draw an actual arc. I’m also learning more about polar coordinates and so I might revise this further down the line.

ffa7cc09fef2d1b067e6f96612dd9f8d59a1a4ea

Now I need to make sure that you can only target and shoot at models within the arc of sight and within the range of the weapon. I punt on the “within arc of sight” part of that, and create a function:

withinShootingRange : List Model -> Model -> Weapon -> List Model

This function signature says that given a list of model, a single model, and a weapon, return a list of models. This function will take the list of all the models, the shooter, and the weapon used, and will filter down the list to only include the models within the maximum range of the weapon.

This week, this blog post appeared: Not Your Problem. It’s about the real problems in game development outside of the high-tech fancy problems. “Expert problems are not your problems,” it says. I liked this blog post quite a bit, especially as I’m dealing with such non-expert problems as how to draw a simple arc.

I have to admit, I’m getting a little bit burnt on this project. I now feel comfortable in the Elm programming language, which was one its explicit goals. I know what I like about it and the challenges in building software for it. I’ve learned a whole lot about SVG. I’ve learned a small slice of game development. I find that I’m not solving the problem of making the game, but also that of building a game engine in a very young language and toolset, which is fine, but has diminishing returns on my attention. The completionist in me wants to see hive-city through to some conclusion, but I also feel tugged in other directions. I know what I want to do after hive-city and I’m anxious to start on that. I know that I am really fascinated with gamedev stuff but I want to try a more powerful and mature set of tools, like Unity. I’m going to continue to pour energy and work into hive-city, but I think this project might not come with me into 2017. Would love to know what you think. Has reading about this project been interesting to you?

I am also somewhat resolved that I want to participate in this year’s Ludum Dare, which is coming up fast.

This week, I also want to wish a very Happy Birthday to my wonderful and amazing wife Vera, who is my most devoted reader and my closest collaborator. Thank you for your encouragement, your friendship, and your love.

🌕 Mark