Command Line DM Tools - The Shill

This just in. Command line DM tools, for you.
Play D&D? Think the command line is the best interface known to man? GUI's for Sissies?
Click here for download page

Need to roll dice? Need to roll lots of dice and then add them up.
Well you'll enjoy the handy dice rolling apps:

Literally faster than actually rolling 10d6 and much much faster than mentally combining them. Works for d4 to percentile. Can do anything less than 4 billion d6! Wow that's some fireball! With the dice rolling apps, 12d12 isn't such a problem any more.

-77 kobolds all fire crossbows at Grou? just type "./d20 77" and see how many go above 15! Then type "./d6 " and see how much damage he took! Previously that would have taken me 4 days to figure out, now it's easy to fling tons of ...stuff... at PC's and see if they live!

Need to keep track of any number of monsters hit points? Need this to unlimited and versatile?
Well today we bring you the HP tracker++ also known as "c".

Have as many enemies as your computer has hard drive space! This should be in the several trillion range.

Wow Soric got hit pretty hard, but it's not like you have to subtract 40 from 14 just cause Penny got a crit! Now you just gotta type "./c soric - 40". Now having Sam at the table isn't such a big problem anymore, cause with friends like him, who needs enemies!

Need to keep track of initiative? Need to keep track of lots of initiatives and know who's next?

Check the initiative tracker out!

How many times have you ever been at a game, or have been running a game where there is like a 5 minute pause between turns whilst the DM ponders who's next in the order. Ever started also keeping track of initiative because you're concerned the DM might just lose it.

NO MORE!

With this handy took all you have to type is something like this:
./init jer 12 liam 20 torg 13 kobold 10 and eleph 7
and it figures out who goes in what order. Then you press enter and it shows you who's next. Wowzers. Need to quite just enter in 'q'. Then you can press up, alter the initiatives and then go again! Uses Malloc! Memory Allocation Technology to ensure that the order is maintained regardless of battle size. I've actually been using this for some time and it's the only reason I drag my laptop to every single game I run.

Command Line DM Tools for D&D

Wow your a dork if you even found these - and also my kind of people.
I made a few of these. One tracks initiative, a few roll dice and the last tracks hit points. They're called init, d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20, d100 and c respectively. They'll work for any system that uses dice, initiatives or hit points.

You can download them all:

Source Code - cdmt.zip

They're all command line and I made them in Ubuntu, so they should be good to go for all Debian based Linux, Mac os X and damn near everything else.

You may have issues with the hp tracker if you're using windows. All you'll have to do is change some / to \ and \ to / if you're having problems. You probably shouldn't have any issues though with anything. It's all pretty basic stuff.

It's released under the Beer License.

Pogo Sheep!

New flash game. Woot! and stuff. You should play it:

Here:
http://web.uvic.ca/~liamk/ps2/

Or Here:

See it in action

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMO7z8Dtg98

I recorded me playing the alpha version and put it on you tube. Its kinda neat.

Drill Driving Damsel II: Drill Deeper

It's totally done. I added in a few more game play elements. It also has a start screen. Enjoy it here:

http://web.uvic.ca/~liamk/game/

Drill Driving Damsel

http://web.uvic.ca/~liamk/game/

It lives! AHAHAHA

Though not totally done, I'll it'll get updated as my teammates make it better. I personally did all the code and 85% of the art, I hope you enjoy it. I certainly do. Please comment on what you like and don't like.

Stay Tuned

-Liam

Stay Tuned

For the Drill Driving Damsel.

I started work on a simple flash game for csc 167 here at Uvic. The game will be done by the 23rd and I'm totally going to post it here.

For now, I shall give you a picture, I've had on my computer for awhile. It's the cover art.

Click to make it Bigger

In case you care, the Japanese text should say something along the lines of
Drill Dive Woman. I have no clue if it actually says that.

New Ubuntu Build

This one includes the test level for you to try. It also has the white box where portraits will appear in the future game. Its linked to on the side. It should also run in other Linux environments. I Just tested it at school and it functions.

Also if you go into the levels folder, you may edit l1 and try changing the game. Be warned you can't go beyond 50.

The Controls are:
w - moves you up
a - moves you left
s - moves you down
d - moves you right
q - spins you left/counterclockwise
e - spins you right/clockwise
r - speeds you up
f - slows you down
space - fires! (honestly the funnest button)

It's ALIVE

I just implemented my level loader and by virtue of its existence, a level editor as well. The level editor is your favorite text editor and the levels are written in plain text.

Anyway I made a very simple text level 1. Here's a picture of it in action. There is only one enemy in the game, so all there is is a whole lot of eyebots. I have them working really nicely now and I'm very happy with how they turned out.

All is not lost.

I started working on the project again. I tackled my largest hurdle yet today: Getting text on the screen. Check it out!

You can't see it very well in this picture, but the bottom row says: This is the Text Test

The bit of green text below the ship is actually a rudimentary health bar. or Structural Integrity Meter. SIM

The information on how to do this can be found here:
http://www.lighthouse3d.com/opengl/glut/index.php?bmpfont

They did an awesome job and I picked up what I had to do from their example in like 15 seconds. I can't believe this was holding back development so much. You learn a little everyday I guess.

The Clone Continues

Work on my starfox clone is coming along. I've been busy lately, so I haven't made tons of progress, but so far so good really. This one man computer science wrecking crew is getting the job done.

I have basically have a simple engine right now. It has all the framework for all sorts of ships, shots and collisions.

The next big thing I'm going to have to learn to do is make a HUD. Making text appear on screen is probably going to be difficult. If anyone knows of any good tutorials for that sort of thing, you should send them my way. Maybe people who've done 305 will know.

In the picture, you can see the enemy take a shot at me. Its in the top right corner, safe to say he's not very accurate and he could have timed things better, but what can you expect from a first time pilot. I call those guys iBots, because they sort of look eye-ish.

I also put up the current Ubuntu build. Its on its own sidebar now. In this one you can kill, and be shot at. You won't die, but I'll do that stuff later.

Anyway. Rock Rock On.

First Playable Build!

First mac build! Excited, probably not, but hey. I'll link to it regardless

http://web.uvic.ca/~liamk/f1/f1il10401.dmg

I know most people are running winblows, but if your using a mac, you can give it a shot. It's compatible with 10.4 and 10.5 intel and power pc. So if you've purchased a mac anytime within the last 5 years it'll probably run, and run well. Its runs super smooth on a new intel mac. Like better than my pc at home.

AAAAH it's so easy to make mac games/software that run on every god damn Macintosh computer ever. As oppose to windows where its going to be hard to get it going on xp, and it certainly won't run on vista or windows 7 without more work. What the hell is wrong with Microsoft!

Ok back on track. So far the game isn't much. You can fly around and shoot one guy out the air. He's a little glitchy, I haven't cared too much about polishing him off. That will come later.

Anyway here is your chance to try out the controls and tell me if you like them.
w - moves you up
a - moves you left
s - moves you down
d - moves you right
q - spins you left/counterclockwise
e - spins you right/clockwise
r - speeds you up
f - slows you down
space - fires! (honestly the funnest button)

All the collision detection lines are present right now. I actually think they're very cool

Cheers!

-Liam

I can detect collisions!

Its a big step. Its a huge step. Good collision detection is hard to do, I think this is ok collision detection, so I'm happy. Its fast, fairly easy to implement and works 100% of the time. It may not prevent clipping as of yet, but hopefully I'll get that working as well.

Its important to note this collision detection is entirely in house. I came up with it myself after reading something about spheres. Its been a linear algebra...fun time, so my one piece of advice to you is this: If you EVER want to make games, learn your linear algebra or get to know someone who does.

So far the initial 'level' which is known as the 'Eternal Spaceway' has one enemy, who can be killed. I think its awesome. Here you can see it in action with the collision detection spheres around everything. The qualities not the best, sorry. This isn't a professional game studio, I don't have time to make fake screen shots and pretend they're real.

Obviously the enemy ship isn't destroyed yet, but that just makes things nicer for you.

More stuff when its made

-Liam

Programming tip of the day: Look for ';' at the end of for loops, if statements and anything else that doesn't usually have a ';' . I've saved myself hours of debugging my checking for the ; first.

If you using python, well you can laugh happily until a list becomes a tuple on your ass.

Bringing Things Up to Speed 1

Day 1 wasn't much at all. I basically relearned GLUT: the GL Utility Toolset. Its awesome for most things. The first thing I wound up with was a rectangle with for colors. Its not very exciting.

Even less exciting is this rundown of glut functions I used:

glutInit(&argc, argv); was used to initiate glut. You can put in options, but I don't know what they'd be. Do you?

glutInitDisplayMode(GLUT_SINGLE GLUT_RGB); This was much cooler. It sets up the window to be single buffered and use Red Green and Blue Colors. The argument is actually a bitwise integer. So GLUT_SINGLE and GLUT_RGB are actually integer values with are subjected to a logical or. Cool stuff.

glutInitWindowPosition(100,100); sets the initial starting place
glutInitWindowSize(WIDTH, HEIGHT); sets its size

mainWindow = glutCreateWindow("main"); actually makes the window. It return an integer

glutDisplayFunc(display); sets the display callback

glutMainLoop(); starts the train wreck a rollin

You can see why most people don't make games. You have to start at the bottom before you can even think of where the top might be

Welcome to Fox-Like

This is a blog chronicling the creation of my rail based shooter which has a ship and takes place in space. I've termed the genre Fox-Like because the game will play a lot like the old Starfox games of the past. They're some of my favourite games of all time.

I'd be happy to have you follow me on the devolpment path. I'm making the game for ubuntu Linux, so it will be released for Linux and Mac OS X at the very least. I can probably do a windows port at a later time, but I'm not sure what that entails. I'm using openGL and Glut, so it should be very portable. Expect me to post all my early builds of the game for you to try out.

Thanks for reading.

My name is Liam Kiemele, and I'll be your developer for the next ever.