Geocties now has an hourly limit of 4.2MB. Say if a release is 700KB that a maximum of 6 per hour, excluding browsing. Which is generally not bad overall. But what when a release comes up there is usualy a much higher numbe of people visiting than usual, and hence higher browsing and downloading in a shorter period of time. Then the 4.2MB might be a pain.

Could just wait and see, but it’s probably time to go to change host anyway, shouldn’t keep using “kostatus” in the address for the game.

Tripod is the best alternative I see, but while Geocities works out to be bout 3GB bandwidth p/m (though with the evil hourly limit), Tripod is 1GB p/m (but without the evil limit).

I propose we change the name. Several reasons.

1. The “woods” theme hasn’t been used very much, and I don’t think it will be anytime soon, if ever.
2. “Woods of Torbin” is a bit too long of a name for people to type into an address bar. Having http://www.geocities.com/woodsoftorbin/ is a bit silly, so the acronym wot is used, but this acronym is too common. Googling for it would give you millions of result and no sign of our game anywhere near the top. Even googling for “WoT game” would give you something else - The Wheel of Time.
3. Using “WoT” in the URL is too ambiguous (not to mention them being taken most of the time), using “kostatus” as I do now is a bit silly.
4. Adding “RL” for Roguelike at the end of the name would not make sense in this issue. WoTRL? YUK!

So as much I have gotten used to and attached the name Woods of Torbin and WoT, I think we will need a change.

I haven’t thought up a definite replacement yet, it’s hard. But here are a few proposals (I am not too warmed up to either one actually):

• Torbin
• TorbinRL
• Kostellas (Kostatus+Atholas=Kostellas, a bit ridiculous though… And sort of like naming a city “Stalingrad” after yourself)
• Something in a foreign language typed up in English. I like Papaki’s name.

By Kostatus

I have started working on Sound, as Kostatus has gracefully taken over the work of melee code. In the process of doing so, I simplified the Node class originally used by A* and derived an AStarNode subclass from it. This makes the Node class useful as a base for building other more creature senses, should they become necessary.

I have revisited my originally flawed implementation of A* and made some changes to it to reduce memory footprint. The original design was a lazy quick hack. Now I am happy to say that the memory usage has been reduced by a factor of 2/3. The reason why I favor memory footprint over speed is because the in-dev WoT as it is (with my configuration) requires 35MB to run, including all the overhead of the Java VM. I don’t want to add any extra fat to that. Normal creature movement uses ~3% of my (1.4 GHz) CPU cycle. So that should be as good as it can get. Besides, the memory saving will become even more significant when the pathfinding algorithms (A*, Dijkstra) are used on bigger maps; so the little loss on CPU cycles is not too bad.

The basic framework for sound has been implemented. I’m a bit too tired to test it out now, so I will probably do it tomorrow or later in the week.

by Atholas

A roguelike trailer: http://fin.broodwar.com/dbd-alpha.avi

By Kostatus

Some draft goals that we need to complete before the next release:

1. Melee and Ranged fighting fully implemented.
2. Save games and persistent levels.
3. Fully implemented inventory handling system.
4. A town map, and maybe even a world map.
5. Support for “simple graphics” which includes the ASCII tiles.
6. Food and hunger (at least for the PC)
7. Character selection (”birth”)
8. Some way to win the game.
9. At least a demo-level body part damage system.
10. At least a demo-level shop system (shop assistant goes to back of store-room)

More to be added later!

By Kostatus

I wasn’t so happy with the original AI movement that the nomial creature does; it was implemented quickly to check for the correctness of our A* implementation. So, I started adding in features that make the AI movement more “realistic”. Having implemented all that, I wasn’t too happy with the way A* break ties — it doesn’t do it at all. I have experitmented with different method of tie-breaking and other people’s idea, and eventually the tie-breaking problem is partially solved, but I am left with some odd cases where the tie-breaking method doesn’t work. In the end, I have to tweak the A* algorithm even more to deal with these cases. Contrasting the current pathfinding algorithm with the one in the old C++ WoT 0.0.2 gamma 1 release (we also had a 0.0.3, but that was an internal release), the current A* implementation is definitely much more mature and also more fun to play around with.

As far as pathfinding goes, there is very little left to do. Most of the AI basic movement features I have wanted are implemented, and the ones that I have in mind are gonig to get implemented soon. Thanks to Kostatus and our new co-developer, there isn’t so much tension in rolling out releases. So, I am left with a lot of time to pursue new ideas and polish the existing ones.

AI movement is affected by a lot of factors, and (shrotest-)pathfinding is only one of them. So just movement AI alone, there is much left to do. I am going to start implementing AI features that Kostatus and I wish to see in the mid-Feb release (I will temporarily codename it Rockie), in particular the next feature I will implement is sound-driven movement. We don’t have enough infrastructure as yet to implement the other AI I have planned, so I will leave them out for now. I will most likely have to reassign some of the basic attack codes to Kostatus ot implement myself a bit later.

by Atholas

Latest Java docs are now available for browsing at http://wot.00pro.com/docs/.

By Kostatus

Before I post anything further, I fixed the bug mentioned in the last post. I for some reason started writing some pretty crazy debugging messages. Here is one:

DEBUG: Summer rain. Summer pain. Summer rains when Summer faints.
When Summer ends and life gets tough, drink some vodka, take some puff.

This was inspired by the previous one:

How I love thee when thee crash, oh summer love

One of the WoT developer is a Russian, hence the reference to vodka :-p Just to poke some fun at him.

by Atholas

The A* as it stands is rather bug-free and is working pretty well on all the tests I have done on it. I ended up using a TreeMap, and 2 HashMap for A* for the fastest operation. The testing revealed some pitfalls in the creature generation code, so it was quality time spent. I have notified Kostatus about this bug, and might fix it myself. This turned out to be a pretty small bug, so no big deal there.

When I am confident enough to commit the code, I will start on working on Melee. Kostatus has been working on status display, items and some other stuff. I might redirect the Melee part to Kostatus and work on some new features for the creatures (which I won’t make any further announcement about — a surprise for those who will play the release due to debut soon), depending on how fast Kostatus can get some basic item working.

I am a little unhappy about our new developer not making any commits yet. I hope that it is only laziness rather than crisis that is dragging him behind… but since Kostatus and I have picked up the speed on development (so much that the documentation for my part of the code constantly get outdated), this shouldn’t cause any trouble for the mid-Feb release. I must go update the documentation soon.

Watch this space.

By Atholas

• All the features of the (unreleased) 0.0.3
• Random World Map
• Random town maps
• Basic conversations with NPCs
• Sound-driven AI for some creatures
• Highscores

By Kostatus