For background I have been working on an RPG based off Ray Wenderlich's tutorials. (Example)http://www.raywenderlich.com/1163/how-to-make-a-tile-based-game-with-cocos2d.
Now I am trying to build a scripted event/Cut scene system so that for instance when a player enters a building, the different characters can have a discussion of the current events, before continuing the adventure. My only problem is I can't really visualize how one would implement this.
I would guess some sort of one time use trigger, maybe kept in a large switch statement on a singleton somewhere ? Which maybe draws all the temp characters ? Then the event then deactivates itself.
I am just looking for a blueprint of how one would do this. Although programming examples are welcome as well.
It depends a lot on how much time you want to commit to the system and how versatile you want the final system to be. A powerful cut-scene system can be flexible enough to be used in almost every interaction in a typical 2d RPG.
If you want to go all out I would suggest a heavily data drive approach. Keep as much data in files and use the filesystem to your advantage. If you say 'all the dialog scenes are in this folder' then when adding a new scene it just needs to be dropped in the folder rather than creating the scene then touching some master switch statement somewhere. Just keep in mind with a large system you want to make adding a new cutscene as simple as possible, not 400 different places to touch.
I would also stay away from switch statements for tracking progress in a cutscene. It adds a lot of code overhead per scene. Idly a cutscene would be a simple as an array of data and a position. Your cutscene manager, the singleton, can parse through the array, decode the data into commands and fire them off.
Sorry if thats a big vague but a lot of these decisions depend on how your engine is structured and what you want out of the system. Keep in mind that the more general the system is, the more uses you may find for it going forward but it will take longer to get up in running to begin with.
you can just check for the tile you are on while you are moving, and when you are on a specific tile you can start a cutscene, also you can add a tag via TiledEditor (this is the recommended editor for using with CCTMXTiledMap) to your map to specify where the cutscene should begin just like he pointed the character start point in that tutorial. the you check for the triger specified (either a specific tile or what the point taged in map) in every gamecycle. and then it's almost very easy you just freeze controls and play a prerecorded camera and object movements till the cutscene finishes. the restore the game to normal mode and turn off checking for the triger.
Related
I'm trying to improve the structure of my development, and stripping back to the very beginning while learning Swift. This is not language dependent though (the edit is not appropriate).
Something has been troubling me for sometime, and I hope someone can take the time to help me.
I'm making a simple game where questions are stored in a binary tree, so am creating a class for the binary tree (BinaryTree.swift).
My ViewController will take care of interactions with the interface (buttons etc.)
I need to also create the business logic for the game (which question should be returned, keeping score etc.). The logic for this type of game is trivial, but I need to understand principles before I scale up to larger projects.
Problem
Is it reasonable to create a class in a separate file solely for the game logic (GameLogic.swift), as I'm concerned that it is not a reasonable way to structure this app.
In all honesty, it is up to the developer to choose how they structure their data. The MVC, or Model View Controller model is still alive and well but I choose not to use it. Without a who lot of information on what exactly would go into GameLogic.swift, I would say go ahead and try it. Maybe another developer with more experience than me can give you another idea!
I need a 3D engine for a very specific task in Artificial Intelligence, and I'd like some input.
The first part is the trivial one - basically, all I need is a FPS engine (3rd person would be good, too), such that it allows me to navigate a room and interact with objects (if you have Java and Windows, I'm looking for something similar to the Give Challenge, but a little more up-to-date). Physics would be nice, but is not a must.
Now, the non-trivial part would be: I need to impose a virtual grid over this room, such that at any moment I can say "the player is located at B5 - now he moved to B6", and so on. I need to redirect this information to another system (namely, one which will give the player instructions about what to do) and, at the same time, send messages to the player, so I must be able to have a single point through which the game logic passes through; also, I'd love not having to write my own collision detection and such.
So far, I've tried:
the Source SDK: it seems a little overkill (since I'm not really planning to shoot anyone, at least half the code base is useless to the task), and since I'm not really a Windows developer, I'm spending too much time with the "easy" stuff (such as getting VS up and running). Plus, cross-platform would be really nice.
Blender game engine: while this worked decently, the interaction model seems a little weird, and some easy stuff (such as making sure the camera stays inside the scene or showing the mouse on screen) gets too weird too soon.
Crystalspace 3D: I've tried their demos, but it looks a little old-fashioned, and since that was one of the problems of previous engines (it's easier to get volunteers when your game looks nice) I'd like to try something else.
Now, maybe I'm asking a little too much for a single software, but I'd love some input. Can anyone suggest me an alternative? Or should I give one of the previous ones a second chance?
Try the UDK. All of the things you request are present, and it's free for personal/noncommercial projects. Here are some highlights:
Modern looking. The UDK features an intuitive-ish visual material design system, post-processing effects, Scaleform Gfx UIs from Autodesk, and more.
A visual scripting interface called Kismet that can control gameplay elements, the camera, and more.
UnrealScript, a scripting language similar in syntax to C, C++, Java, that gives you the ability to extend existing functionality or create your own.
Comprehensive documentation available on UDN.
Lots of community support outside of Epic, in places such as Polycount, Eat3d, 3dbuzz, and more.
Basically, "and more".
If what you're looking for is a professional, free (as in beer) engine that will allow you to focus primarily or solely on your differentiating gameplay features, Epic has set the bar high.
I'd like to know about the things that make Morphic special.
Morphic is much more than NSView or any other graphics class that simply allow the re-implementation of a limited set of features. Morphic is an extremely malleable UI construction kit. Some design ideas behind Morphic makes this intention clear:
A comprehensive hierarchy of 2D coordinate systems is included. They are not restricted to Cartesian or linear. Useful nonlinear coordinate systems include polar, logarithmic,hyperbolic and geographic (map like) projections.
Separation of the handling of coordinate systems from the morphs themselves. A morph should only need to select its preferred coordinate system, instead of needing to convert every point it draws to World coordinates by itself. Its #drawOn: method and the location of its sub-morphs are expressed in its own coordinate system.
Complete independency of Display properties such as size or resolution. There is no concept of pixel. The GUI is thought at a higher level. All the GUI is independent of pixel resolution. All the rendering is anti aliased.
Separating the coordinate system eases the moving, zooming and rotation of morphs.
All coordinates are Float numbers. This is good for allowing completely arbitrary scales without significant rounding errors.
The Morph hierarchy is not a hierarchy of shapes. Morphs don't have a concept of a border or color. There is no general concept of submorph aligning. A particular morph may implement these in any way that makes sense for itself.
Morphic event handling is flexible and allows you to send events to arbitrary objects. That object need not subclass Morph.
Warning: Smalltalk's live dynamic environment is a red pill. Static, frozen languages will never be the same for you ;-)
In a nutshell: Morphic is a virtual world where you can directly explore live objects (just like the real world). Did you ever look at a UI and...
wonder "wow, that's really cool! How did they do that?"
kvetch "I wish they had done X instead!"
While these thoughts would lead to pain and frustration in any other environment, not so in Morphic.
If you want to blow your mind, become a god in a Morphic world:
Launch a Pharo image, and click on the background (which is actually the "World") to bring up the world menu:
Bring up the "halos" on one of the menu options (shift-alt-click on my Mac):
Drag the "Pick Up" halo (top-middle) and drop it somewhere in the world:
Enjoy your menu item which is now available wherever you want it:
Seriously, click it and watch the Browser open!!
Ever have an option you always use that a vendor has buried three-menu-levels deep? Could this be useful?! This is a glimpse of the power of a live direct GUI environment like Morphic.
If you're intrigued, read John Maloney & Randall Smith's paper Directness and Liveness in the Morphic User Interface Construction Environment
The title do not map your question, so I answer your question and not the title.
I have read about Morphic the last two days and conclude with what I think makes morphic special.
Morphic is perfect for live coding. That is a direct mapping such that when code is changed the output on the screen change. And/or if morphs on screen is changed (draged) the values in the code is changed. That is cool in art performance!
But Morphic aims for higher abstractions than that. The properties of the morphs is abstracted away from the code. Do the SoC to a file or fetch a server-side database.
I suppose WebStorage and JavaScript file is a good option to store the liveness state of the Morph properties changed interactively. You see - programming is done through each Morph. Then the code need only to handle events from click and drag.
The aim for research has even abstracted the code away. Coding can be done through the Morph to define what happen with click or drag. Morphs can be puzzle pieces as in Scratch.
A program has to be backed up into a file somewhere. I don't consider to do coding on a cloud as safe. So a JS-file is the only alternative (if not setting up a server is an option), because datafiles is not allowed locally, not even in same folder as the web app. The Same Origin policy means same server - not same folder.
When the app starts the Javascript file (or Web Storage in first place) will set up the world of morphs. User interacts with that world. The new state can be stored in WebStorage and bacuped by a download.
You can use Lively Kernel as the language in the file or store the morph data in an object or whatever you find simplest to generate as a file to download.
So what is special with this? I am not repeat the accepted answer, but this is my conclusion:
Everything you see on the Morphic screen is a morph.
The tree of morphs is called a world.
The coordinate, dimension and properties of each morph is abstracted away from the code into the tree.
The research aims for abstract away the code too.
You may know a lot of programs, e.g some password cracking programs, we can stop them while they're running, and when we run the program again (with or without entering a same input), they will be able to continue from where they have left. I wonder what kind of technique those programs are using?
[Edit] I am writing a program mainly based on recursion functions. Within my knowledge, I think it is incredibly difficult to save such states in my program. Is there any technique, somehow, saves the stack contents, function calls, and data involved in my program, and then when it is restarted, it can run as if it hasn't been stopped? This is just some concepts I got in my mind, so please forgive me if it doesn't make sense...
It's going to be different for every program. For something as simple as, say, a brute force password cracker all that would really need to be saved was the last password tried. For other apps you may need to store several data points, but that's really all there is too it: saving and loading the minimum amount of information needed to reconstruct where you were.
Another common technique is to save an image of the entire program state. If you've ever played with a game console emulator with the ability to save state, this is how they do it. A similar technique exists in Python with pickling. If the environment is stable enough (ie: no varying pointers) you simply copy the entire apps memory state into a binary file. When you want to resume, you copy it back into memory and begin running again. This gives you near perfect state recovery, but whether or not it's at all possible is highly environment/language dependent. (For example: most C++ apps couldn't do this without help from the OS or if they were built VERY carefully with this in mind.)
Use Persistence.
Persistence is a mechanism through which the life of an object is beyond programs execution lifetime.
Store the state of the objects involved in the process on the local hard drive using serialization.
Implement Persistent Objects with Java Serialization
To achieve this, you need to continually save state (i.e. where you are in your calculation). This way, if you interrupt the probram, when it restarts, it will know it is in the middle of calculation, and where it was in that calculation.
You also probably want to have your main calculation in a separate thread from your user interface - this way you can respond to "close / interrupt" requests from your user interface and handle them appropriately by stopping / pausing the thread.
For linux, there is a project named CRIU, which supports process-level save and resume. It is quite like hibernation and resuming of the OS, but the granularity is broken down to processes. It also supports container technologies, specifically Docker. Refer to http://criu.org/ for more information.
One of our next projects is supposed to be a MS Windows based game (written in C#, with a winform GUI and an integrated DirectX display-control) for a customer who wants to give away prizes to the best players. This project is meant to run for a couple of years, with championships, ladders, tournaments, player vs. player-action and so on.
One of the main concerns here is cheating, as a player would benefit dramatically if he was able to - for instance - let a custom made bot play the game for him (more in terms of strategy-decisions than in terms of playing many hours).
So my question is: what technical possibilites do we have to detect bot activity? We can of course track the number of hours played, analyze strategies to detect anomalies and so on, but as far as this question is concerned, I would be more interested in knowing details like
how to detect if another application makes periodical screenshots?
how to detect if another application scans our process memory?
what are good ways to determine whether user input (mouse movement, keyboard input) is human-generated and not automated?
is it possible to detect if another application requests informations about controls in our application (position of controls etc)?
what other ways exist in which a cheater could gather informations about the current game state, feed those to a bot and send the determined actions back to the client?
Your feedback is highly appreciated!
I wrote d2botnet, a .net diablo 2 automation engine a while back, and something you can add to your list of things to watch out for are malformed /invalid/forged packets. I assume this game will communicate over TCP. Packet sniffing and forging are usually the first way games (online anyways) are automated. I know blizzard would detect malformed packets, somehting i tried to stay away from doing in d2botnet.
So make sure you detect invalid packets. Encrypt them. Hash them. do somethign to make sure they are valid. If you think about it, if someone can know exactly what every packet means that is sent back and forth they dont even need to run the client software, which then makes any process based detection a moot point. So you can also add in some sort of packet based challenge response that your cleint must know how to respond to.
Just an idea what if the 'cheater' runs your software in a virtual machine (like vmware) and makes screenshots of that window? I doubt you can defend against that.
You obviously can't defend against the 'analog gap', e.g. the cheater's system makes external screenshots with a high quality camera - I guess it's only a theoretical issue.
Maybe you should investigate chess sites. There is a lot of money in chess, they don't like bots either - maybe they have come up with a solution already.
The best protection against automation is to not have tasks that require grinding.
That being said, the best way to detect automation is to actively engage the user and require periodic CAPTCHA-like tests (except without the image and so forth). I'd recommend utilizing a database of several thousand simple one-off questions that get posed to the user every so often.
However, based on your question, I'd say your best bet is to not implement the anti-automation features in C#. You stand very little chance of detecting well-written hacks/bots from within managed code, especially when all the hacker has to do is simply go into ring0 to avoid detection via any standard method. I'd recommend a Warden-like approach (download-able module that you can update whenever you feel like) combined with a Kernel-Mode Driver that hooks all of the windows API functions and watches them for "inappropriate" calls. Note, however, that you're going to run into a lot of false positives, so you need to not base your banning system on your automated data. Always have a human look over it before banning.
A common method of listening to keyboard and mouse input in an application is setting a windows hook using SetWindowsHookEx.
Vendors usually try to protect their software during installation so that hacker won't automate and crack/find a serial for their application.
Google the term: "Key Loggers"...
Here's an article that describes the problem and methods to prevent it.
I have no deeper understanding on how PunkBuster and such softwar works, but this is the way I'd go:
Iintercept calls to the API functions that handle the memory stuff like ReadProcessMemory, WriteProcessMemory and so on.
You'd detect if your process is involved in the call, log it, and trampoline the call back to the original function.
This should work for the screenshot taking too, but you might want to intercept the BitBlt function.
Here's a basic tutorial concerning the function interception:
Intercepting System API Calls
You should look into what goes into Punkbuster, Valve Anti-Cheat, and some other anti-cheat stuff for some pointers.
Edit: What I mean is, look into how they do it; how they detect that stuff.
I don't know the technical details, but Intenet Chess Club's BlitzIn program seems to have integrated program switching detection. That's of course for detecting people running a chess engine on the side and not directly applicable to your case, but you may be able to extrapolate the apporach to something like if process X takes more than Z% CPU time the next Y cycles, it's probably a bot running.
That in addition to a "you must not run anything else while playing the game to be eligible for prizes" as part of the contest rules might work.
Also, a draconian "we might decide in any time for any reason that you have been using a bot and disqualify you" rule also helps with the heuristic approach above (used in prized ICC chess tournaments).
All these questions are easily solved by the rule 1 above:
* how to detect if another application makes periodical screenshots?
* how to detect if another application scans our process memory?
* what are good ways to determine whether user input (mouse movement, keyboard input) is human-generated and not automated?
* is it possible to detect if another application requests informations about controls in our application (position of controls etc)?
I think a good way to make harder the problem to the crackers is to have the only authoritative copies of the game state in your servers, only sending to and receiving updates from the clients, that way you can embed in the communication protocol itself client validation (that it hasn't been cracked and thus the detection rules are still in place). That, and actively monitoring for new weird behavior found might get you close to where you want to be.