16

General Discussion / Ascii Patrol goes ALPHA 1

« on: June 01, 2016, 07:13:21 pm »

Access is made public, from the homepage (middle menu button) - just in case somebody skipped it.

* I'd appreciate any feedback from you, yes that means you need to register to the forum. Otherwise my server would turn out to spammers' pub

* In case of any download / install / play problems, I will love to help.

* Please use this topic for anything related to the ALPHA-1.

17

Development Progress / So Alpha is delayed, but don't worry - not that much :)

« on: May 31, 2016, 01:50:07 pm »

Few things slowed me down, mostly providing hi-scores interface to all platforms.
Hi score data are accessible via http://ascii-patrol.com/rank.php?rank=1
It is updated and fetched by game using curl or browser by its own XHR requests.
Below is a screen shot.



Shot is made just after game over, so if player fits in hi-score table, it is centered and the new entry is highlighted.

Confirmed to work on all platforms.

18

Development Progress / Hi Scores with anti tampering validation

« on: May 26, 2016, 03:24:44 pm »

No graphics here, but topic I think is quite interesting.

Ascii Patrol records all player's key strokes during the game, later such recording is passed to the server with wget curl or in case of a browser it makes XHR request.

Then the server starts game application on its own and feeds it with key strokes recording from player. So it actualy repeats entire game-play, but of course without need to paint anything on screen or synchronize to the real time, so the process is pretty fast, about 0.5% 0.01% of real time game-play.

In that way it calculates player's score, which after positive validation, is inserted to hi-score data base.

My own experiments show that 1 hour of intensive game-play, relusts in about 100K bytes of recording data. It is almost nutting and allows to fully replay the game, so I'm going to use it also for making video gallery.

19

Development Progress / New Performance Screen

« on: May 19, 2016, 08:03:09 pm »

This one is going to replace scrolling list of killed enemies at the end of every level.
Grey values at right edge of progress bars are percents|seconds|lives to score multipliers.
Progress bars are animated (from blue to red) and score is counted up, currently 'T I M E' is progressing (yellow line).

'A R E A   C L E A R' (ratio killed/all):
From: 0%
To: 100%

'T I M E' (level game-play time):
From: theoretically shortest time possible, defined per level
To: mostly set to 2 minutes, defined per level

'S A V I N G S' (number of lives after level):
From: 0
To: lives before entering particular level

20

General Discussion / Interference fields

« on: May 16, 2016, 09:38:57 am »

Recently, while adding story line to the game I've added some noise effects to simulate a bad connection.
The main problem with it was that player in no way would be able to deduce what's going on, it could be even received as a bug.
So I've came up with field strength hexagonal iso-lines visualsation. Looks interestnig ...
Iso-lines algorithm is adaptation of 3d marching cubes to 2d hexagonal grid, in this case should it be called a marching triangles?

21

Development Progress / Improvments & Research (audio!)

« on: May 12, 2016, 09:59:44 am »

During making a campaign story I just couldn't resist making some additional research.

First of all good news for Linux TTY console players. Ascii Patrol will try to use raw keyboard input so even without running X11 there is a big chance to properly detect key presses and releases. Of course it can't be used while playing over ssh or even if game is started from another app like Midnight Commander (mc).

I've been scratching my head for a long time thinking about audio support in game. After intensive experiments I've came up with an idea of implementing sound using MIDI. Can sound pretty weird by now but in this way there are big chances to have sounds even when playing game remotely via ssh over laggy internet! MIDI also makes great support on all target platforms. Only real DOS systems like FreeDOS will require a real MIDI synthesizer hardware to be present, or at least some TSR MIDI emulation process will need to be started. DOS emulators (ie: DOSBox) will simply forward MIDI commands from MPU-401 ports to the host system. Windows has its General MIDI with Roland patches, Linux can use any software synthesizer attached to ALSA (ie: timidity). Web browsers need to support Web Audio, usually they simply forward MIDI commands to the host system. And now, the bad news: audio won't be implemented in first alpha release yet as this is too big part to be implemented quickly across all platforms.

Another new feature is going to be implemented, global hi-scores. Only gameplays results starting at the very first level will take part in it. After figuring out that freedos comes by default with WGET, decided I'll use it instead of CURL to send score data to server and get current hi scores to game. Of course web platform will not make use of wget, instead it will make requests directly.

PS, I made also a small fix for @Kyzrati suffering from GC lags in his browser

Well, that's all for today, getting back to work.

22

Development Progress / Background story line

« on: May 05, 2016, 04:42:39 pm »

10 campaign levels are awaiting alpha release already. But first, without spoiling too much, the background story-line is being implemented. That's where avatars take much importance. Final release will contain 25 levels so be prepared that ongoing alpha ends the story in pretty inconvenient moment 

23

General Discussion / in case you missed it, new homepage.

« on: April 26, 2016, 09:24:52 pm »

Yay! Still a lot things to do: gallery, videos, more in depth game articles.

Note: your browser may need a page refresh.
http://ascii-patrol.com

24

Development Progress / Improved campaign module

« on: April 25, 2016, 10:36:56 pm »

Now Play Campaign module includes a map.
Maps contain valuable info for beginner players so it introduces them with new kinds of dangers like land mines or missles.

25

Development Progress / Getting back on track, menu-system and other inter-screens

« on: April 20, 2016, 09:26:03 am »

Switching to event driven model didn't hurt so much as I was suspecting previously.
As it is confirmed now that game runs very well on many mobile devices it is the time
to get back to main development thread, the menu system and inter-screens.

Below we have a static mockup of ... not the most wanted to see screen

26

General Discussion / Making fun of google

« on: April 15, 2016, 08:20:52 pm »

Our Big bro, has stucked on captcha puzzle when trying to register to the forum hahaha!

Below I paste part of this server's apache log:

66.249.73.242 - - [15/Apr/2016:18:48:12 +0200]
"GET /forum/Themes/default/scripts/captcha.js HTTP/1.1" 200 1393
"http://ascii-patrol.com/forum/index.php?action=register"
"Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

27

Development Progress / Massive Refactoring (because of new target platform)

« on: April 15, 2016, 08:10:56 pm »

Bad news - regression.

happy call stack driven application logics cannot be handled by web platform, ehhh....
Ongoing refactoring requires me to switch to event driven approach.
Unfortunately such conversion is pretty heavy task and it does not deliver any fun.

... but ability to play game in browser is too tempting to leave it undone

28

Development Progress / Web platform, possible?

« on: April 14, 2016, 09:16:13 am »

I have done several experiments trying to port the game to browsers. Reasults are promising but still there are many quircks, especially on mobile platforms.

Rendering experiments, both should run well on major desktop browsers.
Test 1: canvas (2d) http://ascii-patrol.com/canvas.html
Test 2: canvas (web-gl) http://ascii-patrol.com/webgl.html

On mobile devices unfortunately:
Test1: makes too many graphics calls so framerates are rather low: 5-15fps
Test2: web-gl gives promising performance of 60fps, if only web-gl is avaliable on more devices

Porting game code to java script is another story. I gave a try to Emscripten.
Test3: http://ascii-patrol.com/test.html
It is using web-gl for rendering, desktop browsers should feel comfortable with it.
Unfortunately strange effects appear on my BB Q10 mobile.

29

General Discussion / Are we gamers or developers?

« on: April 11, 2016, 09:15:14 pm »

Feel free to add any other polls you like.

30

General Discussion / What is this Ascii Patrol all about?

« on: April 11, 2016, 09:07:03 pm »

Ascii Patrol is a one guy's project who imagined to bring "Moon Patrol" arcade game developed by IREM in 1982 to text consoles in form of ascii game.

"Moon Patrol" wiki page:
http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Patrol

Ascii Game, (more formally: Text based game) wiki page:
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_game

Some Ascii Patrol game tech specs:
- pure 7-bit ascii charset (aka oldschool ASCII Art)
- 2 modes: black-on-white & 16 color ansi palette
- resolution: anything between 80x25 - 160x50 (in characters)
- platforms: FreeDOS, Windows, Cygwin, Linux, js/html (web browsers)
- optional input handling via X11 (with ssh tunneling too)
- sound is at the moment out of the road map