Games

I found a cool little PS2 game recently, Sonic Mega Collection Plus. It’s a collection of Sonic games from the Mega Drive/Genesis and Game Gear, including Sonic The Hedgehog (for each), Sonic 2, Sonic 3, Sonic & Knuckles, Sonic Spinball, Sonic Chaos, Sonic Blast, Sonic Drift, Sonic 3D and Dr. Robotonik’s Mean Bean Machine (for both).

For anyone who likes Sonic it is well worth getting. There are a few notes first though.

It does include Knuckles in Sonic 2 and Sonic 3 & Knuckles, but they must be unlocked. The Game Gear games are single player (emulating two Game Gears that could link up would have been fun). The unlockable non-Sonic games are interesting but not really worth going to the hassle to unlock.

It would have been nice to have the Master System versions of Sonic and Sonic 2, but you can’t have everything.

Unrelated to almost anything I’ve written, I just thought I’d suggest anyone remotely interested in god-games to buy Sims 2 now. It has managed the same thing as the Grand Theft Auto series. There is a reasonably structured game in there now to guide you in your actions, but the game is still wide open if you want to do something else entirely.

Most of this structure revolves around the new wants and desires your sims have. They’re tasks or events that reward or penalise you and are decided by your Sim’s aspiration. The funniest is the “romance” aspiration which has wants such as “Have 2 loves at once” or “Make out with 3 different Sims”…

That’s the name I’ve come up with for the game since it’s vaguley based on Cash Wars. Or at least will be. I’ve started adding descriptions to towns. There are a few issues still though, most notably the existence of multiple towns with the same name which I am eliminating (I’m only intending to have the largest 100 towns).

Cash City Wars

Something I’ve wanted to put into Galaxia for a long time is user scripting. i.e. allowing users to attach scripts to objects that are triggered by certain events. Ultimately this could lead to interesting computer players (but that’s a long way off).

Well I’ve been playing around with it a little and the easiest complex data to parse seems to be XML. So the scripting engine will be XML based. The following is how a script will (hopefully) look:

<onFleetEnterSector>
  <IsEnemy target="$fleet">
    <ExectureOrder order="attack" target="$fleet" />
  </IsEnemy>
</onFleetEnterSector>

Just in case you can’t tell what it does, when a fleet enters the same sector as your own it checks to see if is an enemy and if is, attacks it.

Firstly a bunch of variables the script can read are passed to it. After that all the processing works using callbacks. When each tag is encountered, it just calls some specified function with the attributes passed as arguments (probably as an associative array to easily handle a variable number). If it’s a conditional (like “IsEnemy”) the function must return true or false. If it’s an action (like “ExecuteOrder”) then it returns nothing. There is also another type - one that returns an arbitrary value (i.e. a function - but I’ve used the word function too much already).

I’ll put the code up once it’s tested a bit more.

Almost everything in Galaxia is an object. In hindsight this was a bad choice of name (from a programming standpoint I have objects of type Object), but I’m basically stuck with it. And I still can’t think of a better name.

The most interesting type of objects in the game will be vessels. The reason I chose vessel over ship is because not all vessels will actually be ships. Space stations for instance will be vessels that don’t have engines.

Vessels will have components and the components will add most of the functionality. I can’t tell you exactly what these will be or how they will work since this is the next big feature I need to implement. But basically, each component will allow a vessel to be given certain orders. For example engines allows a vessel to move somewhere, guns allow it to fire on other vessels.

The exact makeup of each vessel can be chosen when you build it. This also answers a question that has been causing me problems ever since the original Galaxia: “Why build multiple shipyards?” Well building some of the more exotic components will require some extra facility (Widget Factory for instance) therefore it would be better not to build one with every shipyard (you won’t have room anyway).