w00t! You guys covered my game :)

Psycrow · 05-08-2004, 12:14 PM

A game designer posting on the forums? Unheard of right? :P (Well, not when his company is equally unheard of ;))
Thanks for covering psyscapes.com's first game Tock on your site guys, along with the screenshots of course

The publicity is definately appreciated. Psyscapes.com is a brand new independent game company, and though I've been making games since 1999, they're all free games and this is my first attempt to fly solo.
Not to indulge in shameless self-promotion or anything, but for those of you who don't know, Tock is a free online card game which is played on the face of a clock and represents the battle between light and darkness in the human mind. It's played on the Palace visual chat software, which is also free. So although I won't be making any money from it directly, donations are accepted for covering the server costs, and there's a store with a semi-related music CD there too. Once enough money gets in, my hope is that I can start doing this for a living and make more games in the Psyscapes collection of games as well.
Wish me luck, and thanks for the coverage!

White Dragon · 05-08-2004, 12:21 PM

Well Good Luck Dude

Syanide · 05-09-2004, 12:16 PM

Good luck dude

Psycrow · 05-09-2004, 06:22 PM

Thanks!

Janus · 05-28-2004, 02:03 AM

I personally think Tock shouldn't be used in the same sentence as "chess" (I don't think "chess" should be insulted).

The Palace visual chat has a room limit size, a worse limit on windows servers, but somewhat better on linux/Mac servers. It takes 4 to 6 rooms of just SCRIPT LOADING, to run Tock (in English - It's a Memory Hog). Josh has this habbit of declaring the same variables over and over, which in Iptscrae, is redundant, and eats up your CPU. He's not even aware of how the Iptscrae command to loop a MIDI, can but looped infinitely, just by inserting a "ZERO", as the number of times it should loop (ex. 0 "filename" MIDILOOP). Palace 4.5.1 Linux/Unix/Mac servers also have a NOLOOSEPROPS flag that prevents props/pieces of avatars from being dropped in a room. Josh doesn't realize this, but, using CLEAN scripts in EVERY room verses a tiny binary flag that prevents loose props from being dropped in the first place, would save (especially dailup users) rather large amounths of bandwidth over a period of time (some ISPs charge for bandwidth used).

There are literally thousands of optimizations Josh here could've made to his scripting to make things better (99% of these optimizations are invisible to the common user, but really come in handy).

Josh, you can't program, you never will be able to program, NASA owns the rights to Iptscrae, and you're game is going to play worse than some of the tight ass games made for Atari.

Have fun everybody!
Janus

hiv · 05-28-2004, 03:21 PM

you're welcome and hmmm you have an enemy up there ^^^^ ;)

Janus · 05-29-2004, 12:40 AM

Yes, I guess you could call me one of the biggest Palace experts. I've written a couple builds (nothing public) in server plugins (Linux servers - gotta love GCC). I mastered Iptscrae in about 3 weeks (was my 10th programming language, now I'm up to about 20). I've done serveral bot like applications in Visual Basic (Heavy on the KERNEL32/WSOCK32 API), as well as C++, etc. I have a copy of the 1997/1999 (mixed) source code of Palace the client/server produced early in it's history, which of course Jim Bumgardener (www.jbum.com) wrote. I've studied that source code during certain moments of research/boredom.

I'd say, out of all this, scale of 1 to 10, Psy's game deserves a NEGATIVE 10,000. But that's just me

Nxs · 05-29-2004, 12:44 AM

Hard to argue with someone that seems to know their stuff!

Janus · 05-29-2004, 01:16 AM

What's dazzlingly hilarious to several of my (hardcore) programmer buddies, and to some of the novice ones (gotta give my homies their props too :P). If you ever get a chance (or got a chance rather), to read the INFO page about the official Psyscapes game (which was deleted), you would've noticed that the game itself, wasn't all that complex in theory or (theory of) design. This means that it wouldn't have taken any more than a week for even the newbest of novices to program. It was pretty simple, PERIOD!

All the maps were text hovering over an image. Chances are battle system in mind wasn't all that much better than an Atari system either. Sadly enough, I believe nobody took his Psyscapes game seriously, due to the fact it's taken 3 YEARS, for the game to mature thus far (and there still isn't a downloadable BETA :Oo

. Long story short => Psyscapes = cheap GUI slapped onto a MUD (Multi-User Domain or a text only RPG you use telnet/SSH to connect to). And I say it wouldn't have taken more than a week also to write, due to the fact it was an offline game and such (not all that dynamic).

Regardless why Tock and Psyscapes are the way they are, they aren't nearly as mighty as CHESS (the point of my posts :P).

Peace

batman_superfly · 05-29-2004, 01:26 AM

Why the hell do you care? If 99% of the optimizations are hidden to the players, so be it. You could have told him about the problems in a more kindly manner. And not all programmers are hardcore nerds (I'm assuming you are). I'm a CS major, and I probably spend more time playing my guitar than I do in front of a computer. I'm assuming (since it took him 3 years) that he's not nearly as big of a loser as you are. Maybe instead of trying to show off your programming knowledge, you should be more helpful.