Sat, 24 Apr 2010

Launchpad Preparations and Database Jettison

Posted by fluxe at 10:13 PM in /

 

Recording in the bush this time with my new recorder, so you can hear the birds in stereo, this is a podcast about getting the deployment details worked out.

It was quite a bit of struggle to get it working correctly, but once the deployment does work with Java Web Start, it is pretty smooth. But the most refreshing thing about recent developments has been a big simplification on the server side. I actually said goodbye to Hibernate and Postgres, and with it all the configuration that those require. Many dependencies melted like snow.

I like the idea of making deployment of the game really easy, so maybe it will spread to hundreds of servers eventually, and they could be federated. Now, without the database, there's really only one thing you have to set up and that is an environment variable TETRAGOTCHI_HOME to point to a directory.

The players and their hashed passwords are stored in an XML file there, and a tree of subdirectories grows as the game progresses, where the world is persisted every minute. This will enable a time machine, since we will be able to return to a place and time to relive it. I suspect that it may take a while for people to fully appreciate what that means.

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Fri, 2 Apr 2010

It's all about the Length of Your Tail

Posted by fluxe at 12:19 PM in /

 

Another podcast episode, and this time about yet another switching of gears. I now have an even simpler approach to conflict resolution, or deciding who wins during an attack.

While trying to get chase-and-nibble working as I described in the last podcast I decided to see what it would look like if you saw the history of the tetragotchi movement in the form of a breadcrumb trail. The body's center of mass is recorded every hour so that as the body moves, it leaves behind a tail. It turns out this tail is a great way to measure fitness! You are as fit as how fast you have been able to run during the past 24 hours.

So now, when your radius touches that of your prey, the question becomes how long are your two tails, and the longest tail gets to consume the other. Here's a short video of the initial "death sequence", which has since become even a little better.

Since the above video I have added something else interesting to the death sequence, a solution to the question of where to have the prey re-born. I decided to have the prey travel down the tail of the predator to the end, and be reborn there. It's nice and out of the way of the predator. It's fun because as prey, you ride the tail like it's a monorail, until you're where your predator was 24 hours ago and then you are re-born in a new tensegrity egg.

Of course, after rebirth, you realize that you have inherited the body of your predator.

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