It’s All A Game
I mentioned a few posts back that I had been hacking on a ‘game’ that Mike and I had been discussing. After writing some code, the conversation deviated into three dimensions for a while. After a few days of no activity because of that distraction, I regained some momentum this morning and threw this together:
The terrain is randomly generated, but the city is placed by the user. There are a few hacks because I did this while Brenley was playing this morning. I will clean it up later. For now it’s just pretty.
UPDATE: After crawling the Intertron looking for terrain generation tips I finally found something that will do for now. I randomly generate a length and width, then randomly raise or lower the terrain in that strip by 1. Repeating this about a thousand times yields an oddly useful map. There are a few lonely water spots that I try to normalize out, but the method for that doesn’t work very well. Not worth posting a screenshot of.
Comments (8 comments)
So what’s up with Telemetry?
Jackson / December 3rd, 2005, 3:12 pm / #
games are more fun than graphs.
pulse / December 4th, 2005, 4:59 pm / #
Yeah, but graphs are more profitable. ;)
Jackson / December 4th, 2005, 10:07 pm / #
says who?
pulse / December 5th, 2005, 9:38 am / #
Sure, there is some real money to be made in games, but that money is made by big teams. There aren’t many game startup companies around without big money already behind them.
Graphs on the other hand can be developed by a small team and still end up in a big payoff.
Sure there might be more money in games than analytics (maybe), but the profit margin for a small team creating a web app is going to be larger.
Oh, and there was this part in your article: “The analysts at PWC also think that the PC game market will continue to shrink. In fact, PC game sales are projected to decline from $771 million in 2004 to $655 million in 2009.”
I do hope you guys succeed with the game stuff, and it is probably more fun, but if Telemetry is not going to be used then give me the code. ;)
Jackson / December 5th, 2005, 5:24 pm / #
Some things aren’t about money. I’m lucky enough to get paid well for what I do during the day. Recall the NetNewsWire guy and his horrid stories of spending more time supporting than developing after Ranchero’s recent acquisition.
My mercurialness and general sloth unfortunately precipitate situations where I rebel against my own desire to burn hours on something like Telemetry and force me to point my efforts at purely Academic Endeavours.
Besides, if I spend all my time developing web apps I’ll rips my own eyeballs out with a spoon. Boring.
gphat / December 5th, 2005, 5:30 pm / #
Telemetry is not a fitting backscratcher when I have no itch. That’s also a major factor.
gphat / December 5th, 2005, 5:31 pm / #
So, then, does that mean you want to give me tho code?
Jackson / December 5th, 2005, 9:26 pm / #
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