Nerds Make Science Fun!

Before I get into a discussion about the three races that I’m planning, I’ll have to talk a bit about map design. If you frequent the Starcraft 1 scene, you’ll know that many maps, through cliffs, backdoor entrances, or short air distances, end up favoring one race over another, or lend themselves to a certain style of play. The Battle Royale map, with buildings you could destroy to reveal environmental obstacles that completely seal off your base, and the shortest air rush distance of any map, resulted in countless Zerg wins, and maybe one or two Terran wins in the entire time it was used. Destination, with an entrance to your natural expansion that is difficult to seal, make Zergling runbys hard to deal with. The cliffs behind that same area make Mutalisks and Carriers hard to deal with.

Air units won’t be quite as threatening as they were in Starcraft, where Mutalisks could singlehandedly win a game by killing all of your gatherers. This game will have no gatherers, so the main advantage air units will have is mobility.  Maps will have cliffs spread around the map, making the advantage come down to something more than unit speed.

Notice that, when you have no gatherers, map control becomes irrelevant, as you can just mass units and push out, without worrying about getting another source of minerals.

Instead of resources, I will introduce “production towers,” which are some sort of magicky-looking towers, spread across the map much like an expansion would be. You start with one sitting right next to your crawler, already aligned to you. For each tower aligned to you, you get a slight boost to production. How this boost will work is up in the air. It could be a flat reduction to build time, like -5 seconds production time to everything (anything taking less time to build than the towers would reduce just build instantly), or it could be fractional, or logarithmic (diminishing returns).

The towers start as neutrally-aligned. In order to convert one to you, you must bring your crawler, or units totaling 15 x (how many towers you have + 1) supply to the tower (within a certain capture radius), so if you’re going after your second tower, you need to bring 30 supply’s worth units with you. Regardless of how many towers you have, the crawler will completely fulfill the requirements. Then, you must have all those units sit there (they can fight) for 2*(number of previously owned towers) minutes, as a timer ticks down. This timer will not tick down any faster if you have many units near the tower. Your opponents also won’t be notified unless they actually have vision of the tower, in which case they can see the timer on the tower. If you have units near a tower while it’s building, but not enough to fulfill the requirements, the timer will freeze where it is. If you remove all units from the tower, the timer ticks backward at twice the rate it went up. Once the timer completes, the tower becomes erect and gets a set amount of HP. Note that, each of these quantities (2 minutes per tower, 15 supply, etc) is up for changing during testing.

As a side note, any timers you have running will show up at the top of your screen, in your color, and display its status. If you’ve scouted an opponent’s tower, his timer will appear just below where yours would appear, except running in the opposite direction (if your timer is a bar filling from left to right, your opponent’s appears as a bar filling from right to left), in his color. Clicking any of the timers will bring the screen to center on the tower.

You can contest your opponent’s towers, too. It is possible to have timers for two or more factions running at once. Say one player holds a tower until it is nearly done, but then leaves. An opponent can come in and start occupying that tower, starting his own timer. If something like this happens, you and your opponent’s timers both appear. If both you and your opponent have units in the vicinity of the tower, both of your timers stay frozen, regardless of who has more units. If you abandon a tower while both you and your opponent have timers running, your opponent will have his timer progress normally while yours will drain at 3-4x the rate instead of 2x, as if it were simply abandoned. Additionally, as long as you have any timer running on a tower, you will be granted full vision within the capture radius of the tower. If your opponent decides to station long-range units just outside of the capture radius, you’ll be in for a rude surprise.

Once a tower is erected, it becomes more vulnerable. You can abandon it completely without losing the benefits or worrying about a timer. However, it can be attacked. To capture the tower from your opponent, you must first destroy the tower by depleting its HP, then force out all opposing units to start your timer. You can also simply pull out and force your opponent to recapture it. The viability of such a tactic will depend on how much the tower was reducing build times.

Though winning the game officially requires that you destroy all your opponent’s units, removing the opponent’s towers can be enough to force him to give up.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ll be posting a little bit at a time about my ideas for an RTS.

Also mentioned in the previous post, an RTS with mobile bases would be difficult to balance. For me to explain why, I have to explain proxies.

Keep in mind that, unless otherwise noted, I’ll be discussing Starcraft: Brood War for most of my examples.
It’s an RTS with simple rules but incredible depth, and it’s the one I’m most familiar with. While games like Dawn of War have extra mechanics like cover, I plan to model my RTS after Starcraft, to a degree, because the simplicity of Starcraft’s rules has also led to that much more creativity. If you really feel unfamiliar with Starcraft, or want to find more information than the bare minimum I’m putting here, visit the Teamliquid Starcraft Wiki.

In Starcraft, you’re “expected” to place your tech buildings and your production buildings inside your base. That’s the safest place for them, and it consolidates all your stuff in one area so that whatever unit you’re using to build them won’t have to run too far out (unless you’re zerg, in which case your builder morphs into the building), and it lets you focus on one area of the map whenever you want to crank out another round of units.

The text below the page break is an enormous aside about proxies. If you want to read it really badly, click ‘more.’

Anyway, back to the main point. If you think a bunker rush is scary, imagine this. Your crawler is a colossal mobile unit with a passable attack. The current mechanic for it has it able to move, attack, and produce units at the same time. (This was not the mechanic used in C&C 4, though. There, your crawler would have to unfold into an immobile building with no attack while it pumped units.) So, you pick the faction with the units that are the fastest to produce. As you’ll see in my later posts about the available factions, this will be modeled heavily after the Starcraft Zerg. To avoid lawsuits, (Hah!) I’ll call this the Swarm. So you take your Swarm Crawler and march it toward the middle of the map, producing units all the way. As your units pop out, you send them to every part of the map to scout your opponent, who is likely teching to the next available unit (the poor sap, he’ll never see it coming!). By the time your hulking crawler makes its way to the enemy crawler, you’ll have a small but scary force of Swarm units, while your opponent has not made the best use of his production time. Your units outnumber your opponent’s, so your crawler’s HP will have a slight lead over that of your opponent’s crawler. Eventually, after a battle of attrition your crawler comes out on top. Your opponent’s only defense is to do exactly what you are doing, and that makes for a boring game.

I’ll admit, C&C 4 did a good job of preventing this sort of cheese. Since you have to turn your crawler into a building to create anything, this kind of rush is just out of the question. If your opponent tries to rush, you turn your own crawler back into its unit form to give your army the upper hand. However, this honestly feels a bit stiff to me. I want a crawler that can reinforce on-the-fly. If the crawler can move, but not attack, then you’ll run into problems when your units are produced piecemeal and lack the crawler’s support.

My favored solution is to have the crawler able to attack, but not move - or move really slowly - while it produces units, and be completely helpless when researching tech. This would force the attrition rush to be made with an inferior force, while the opponent would be able to flee if you insisted on parking your crawler nearby.

Rushing is still an option. If you gain an understanding of the timings of the game, such as when a certain unit is slated to appear, you can in theory create a large force and attack your opponent while he’s halfway through researching some powerful tech, forcing him to cancel his research to defend his crawler and delay his tech. Since time is the only resource in this game, it could be a major setback. The crawler’s function will have to be determined through extensive testing, but for now, this seems to be the option that can provide the most tactical possibilities.

(more…)

Lo, and did Blizzard get off their lazy rears after a decade of waiting and make Starcraft 2, and did they release it on July 27

So this would probably be a horrible time to discuss any other RTS. Which is why I’m doing exactly that.

The one I have in mind is Command and Conquer 4. I heard about it from a friend, who is a big fan of the C&C series but hated that game on sight. His biggest gripe with it was its MMO-like format. As you play online, you gain experience points, which you spend on an upgrade tree of sorts. He knew he hated it just for the MMO part. When I found out more recently that C&C 4 did away with resource gathering (Tiberium can now either be used as a bomb or redeemed for upgrade points), and that your main base, a mobile crawler, respawns if killed. From what I gleaned off the Wikipedia article, the win condition isn’t army annihilation, but keeping control of a number of control nodes.

While I agree with my friend that combining an MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) with an RTS (Real Time Strategy) isn’t a good idea, and I agree with other people that respawning in an RTS just feels wrong, I think the idea of a mobile headquarters has promise.

When compared to a traditional RTS, a mobile base would bring drastically different gameplay. I’ll be using Starcraft: Brood War as a basis for comparison. A mobile base would do away with resource gathering by necessity of map design; having resource deposits everywhere would clog the map. You’ll only have one base, so there would be no point in moving it to a new location until your current resources run out.

A mobile base RTS would bring more focus on scouting, map control, and army composition. In Starcraft, once you locate an opponent’s main base, you could generally keep tabs on them by hovering an observer (cloaked scouting unit) over his base or using a comsat (radar) scan every once in a while. Of course, there are some exceptions. You’ll have to keep tabs on where your opponent is expanding by periodically running a fast unit around the map. A Protoss or Terran player can hide a tech building in some corner of the map, hoping to catch the opponent by surprise. A Zerg can put a building at a less-defended expansion, where it serves a dual purpose of hiding the tech and possibly clogging an entrance into the base.

In contrast, against a mobile base, you can’t get complacent about your scouting. After you’ve seen the opponent’s base, he can pack up and travel across the map, and you’ll be left in the dark if you just go back to the same spot.

Balance will be difficult, but that’s something that playtesters or developers can work out.
I plan to make some sort of RTS like this as a summer project, or at least once I’m done with college apps. For now, I’ll be coming on to post more concrete ideas I’ve had that I’ll probably wind up implementing.

First update it forever. Isn’t that wonderful? I’m sure you’re all dancing with joy.

Anyways, here’s what we’ve got this time:

A wonderful powerpoint made by me detailing the work I’ve done this summer! Enjoy!

Slides for SIMR

William

“To the programmer he said, ‘I will make you incompetent during the worst possible moments. It will take you hours to find and repair trivial errors.’ ”
-Programmer’s Bible: The book of Assembly Code, 3:16

Oh, how true it is.

For a few hours today and the better part of last night, I’ve been working on a program to calculate a line of best fit. It was a code exercise that took much longer than it had any right to.

It’s not that the code itself was difficult. I use Visual Studio for my C# code, so I got the window and controls set up fast. The line of best fit can also be calculated analytically. Just find the formula for the least-squares error, take the partial derivatives of A and B, and solve the system of equations. My code worked perfectly fine for solving the problem and spitting out A (the slope) and B (the y-intercept).

The problems came up when I tried graphing stuff. First, I found out that the computer counts pixels from the top left, while I want the origin at the bottom left. But when I reflected the drawing vertically about the y-axis (the transformation was NEW Y = HEIGHT OF WINDOW - OLD Y), all the points disappeared. I had the help of my dad, and we spent about two hours staring at the code and getting nowhere.

Here’s the breakdown of what I did with that chunk of code today:

5 minutes: Figuring out that HEIGHT OF WINDOW should have been HEIGHT OF THE PANEL WHERE THE GRAPH IS ACTUALLY DRAWN, WHICH IS LIKE HALF THE SIZE OF THE ENORMOUS WINDOW ITSELF. Now there’s your problem!

5 minutes: Suddenly realizing the old code only showed a fifth of the data points and that now I’ve got 100 more to deal with.

20 minutes: Wondering why the edge of the graph kept getting cut off and changing the size of the points on the graph to see why. Turns out that the data just happens to have a lot of points congregated to the right.

10 minutes: Wrestling with syntax and about a dozen sets of parentheses to draw a y-axis.

10 minutes: Figuring out a way to expand the boundaries of the data set without having to worry about signs.

10 minutes: Wondering why my attempt to draw the least-squares regression line doesn’t show up on the window.

2 minutes: Adding 0,0 to the data set to force it to be included in the graph, then seeing the outlier skews the line way off.

3 minutes: Removing 0,0 and changing the graph range manually. Oh, looks like the outlier didn’t do much for the data anyway, and the line is off entirely.

15 minutes: Trying various fixes before noticing that it’d be best to remove the flip-by-y before making changes, since the flip complicates things.

5 minutes: Rewriting the line of code that draws the graph and remaking the arguments for the function from scratch. No dice.

20 minutes: Various remedies, all of which fail miserably, before sitting down to think and realizing that expanding the graphing range messes with the scale, so I need to add a few correction terms in to shift the line back.

5 minutes: Code-wrangling, which finally gives a line that works.

5 minutes: Drawing an X-axis.

Total time elapsed: 1 hour 45 minutes on a really short piece of code, plus the 2 hours from last night, plus the half an hour I used to write up this article.

Man, where’s the Ballmer peak when you need it?

-PKTT

Looks like someone out there has heard of this website.

In a school chapel meeting, I was awarded the Xerox award for innovation in science, which recognizes a student who uses innovative technology to reach students with information about science. I don’t have the letter close at hand, so the description is probably a little off.

Part of the description of innovative technology included blogs, so I suspect that one of our school’s teachers or administrators has been here. I suddenly think I should go back and edit profanity out of all our articles and replace them with substitutes such as loving caress.

-PKTT

Okay, man I’m late on the draw.

This has been around for a while, and the event ends in just a few days, but here it is.

http://www.wolfire.com/humble

The humble bundle. Some of the best independent games around, being offered for any (positive) price, from a cent to a thousand dollars. Pay whatever you want, and you’ll get the download link instantly.

Try it out. It’s the ultimate in instant gratification.

-PKTT

I ran into this website the other day. TryEngineering has some games that simulate the design process for a robotic arm, a parachute, and some other stuff. At least one of the games is a link to an external site.

http://www.tryengineering.org/play.php

Since I was working on the robot in the pits often, I didn’t get a chance to get too much of the souvenirs that other teams were handing out. Here’s a list of what I know of:

Nifty extending, collapsible pens from Google- I didn’t get one, since they’d run out by the time I got around to asking for one. Basically, hitting a button on the pen makes the two halves of its cover fold up like gull-wings and turn the thing into a pen-shape.

Rubik’s Cube Keychains from Google - I suck at Rubik’s cubes, so I didn’t get one. After Google started running low on pens, they made people solve these first before giving them pens. It worked.

Team Buttons: We all got a crapload of these. Teams with a bit of money to spare would have them made and passed out. Our team made do with finger traps from a local store. Some teams handed out stickers (both practical, like a battery disposal reminder, and just for show) or fridge magnets. I got a mousepad from one team, with their logo and number on it. It’s one of those hard-cover mousepads, so I’m holding off on using it.

Demonic Ducks: These are rubber ducks of various colors, and with horns, that one team was handing out for “adoption” to keep teams from all over in contact. I got an orange one. His name is Super Sayan(sic) and he is a ninja.

A rat finger puppet: The rat’s fur is kind of dirty-looking.

Various teams also gave certificates that said “Thanks for being on our alliance” or the like. Our team got a framed certificate from 1572 or something like that. The demonic duck team was handing out tiny models of the playing field with ducks hanging from the towers.