cat /proc/claus

While finishing the paper for the ECF conference (or to put it in a more honest way, while procrastinating playing DTD in Kongregate when I should have been finishing the paper for the ECF conference), I had this idea: What if I wrote a GA that evolved a labyrinth for DTD?

After that, the flood of ideas came through (and the paper was quickly forgotten for an hour or two). I drew a quick scheme for the genome representation and for the rough simplified game to be used as the fitness function, and then I realized that this would be no fun at all if I didn’t program a small graphical front end for the program.

While thinking about this, I dreaded trying to delve into Java’s swing to program what should be a very simple cartoonish interface for a non-interactive game. I thought for a second about finally taking the time to learn the curses library, then it hit me. If I’m to learn something new, I might just as well finally get that goal of learning python off the self!

So here I am, reading a bunch of python tutorials, and some pygame examples for the Gui. Luckly, I found a half-made DTD clone in pygame which is running, so I can probably use that when I finally get to the “getting things on screen” stage, but right now I’m still struggling to write a basic GA loop in the language. More specifically, how to use the fancy tuples to implement crossover functions. Gah, things are too different, but at least I’m off to a start already. Tomorrow and Monday are Japanese Holidays, so with some luck I get a large chuck of the project started by then and can write some more precise details… but for tonight - reading, reading reading.

Tonight I got to DM my second live session of Swords and Wizardry. It was a continuation of last week’s game. We’re currently running the dungeon in the Quick Start guide, and now that the party has cleared half the rooms and returned to town, I started filling the cleared room with new, bizarre monsters.

In the first session, the team invaded this ancient temple and started exploring, with Timmy, a young torchbearer, and Ed, a mercenary. They found Cristina, an Elvira-like evil cleric, and with clever use of a “Sleep” spell, put her to sleep, and turned her into a sexual-slave-trap-detector-monster-bait. After exploring a bunch of easy rooms, they ambushed a group of goblins and made short work of them, returning when facing the goblin mage.

In the current session, they were recovering from the encounter with the goblin mage when they met the new PC, who was accompained by a full entourage of 5 hirelings. They started investigating again when a goblin ambush took out half the hirelings (and poor Timmy!). Having get rid of the goblins, the group had some fun at a talking statue room, and almost got killed by a pack of giant rats. Only two PCs survived the onslaught, and one of them was unconscious (Yay! my first PC-kill!)

They returned to town, to re-stock on hirelings and PCs (this time a full 8 hireling mini-army, including Barack Obama :-P), and returned to the dungeon. It was different now, though - all rooms were deathly cold, and strange translucent zombies were everywhere, claiming for “revenge” — the zombies would meld in certain places, and managed to remove and eat the brains of one of the hirelings - who later turned back into a frog zombie! Aaaie!

We finished around here… This was a “replacement” game (the main GM for our regular game was missing), so I’m not sure when I’ll get to play it again, but we had laughs and laughs during the whole thing, so I hope it is soon

So I’m really enjoying this old school thing. The lightweight approach to PC death (the characters suck anyway, and it is so fast to make another one!) allows me to play more fast and loose with the rules, and have the monsters try interesting things, like ambushes and rush tactics on the players. I also invent a lot of stuff on the spot, knowing that if I make anything too broken, it is really easy to erase it later.

On the other hand, I still have to get the hang on how to deal with time and weight in order to better make sure that the party’s resources are taxed. Their lamps are almost running forever now, and they are lugging a LARGE ammount of treasure now without a problem. Also, the large amount of hirelings made things a bit… “strange”, but nothing that can’t be fixed by having the city block them from sending any more of its young men to their deaths

I’ll put some links later, I’m dead sleepy now.

It should have been obvious, and I should have known it before, but I didn’t know, and never observed before that microwave operation interferes with my my computer’s wireless networking. XKCD even mentioned it recently. After reading it on XKCD, I started to notice that whenever I use the microwave to heat up some coffee for myself, my internet radio gets cut.

That said… I’m pretty sure I often used the microwave while using the computer before, and I have never noticed this phenomenon before reading the XKCD strip. Hmmm, I wonder if they did something to all wifi boards of the world? That would be quite a prank to pull off!

The work on the paper for the special issue of IS continues. My “crunch” started on Monday, the deadline is Saturday, today is Tuesday and I’m afraid I haven’t advanced much yet I have decided I’m not going to the lab anymore this week, except to do whatever is absolutely necessary - I just can concentrate better at home, when it comes to slaving away writing an article - I can listen to music, food is cheaper to come by, and if I have to stay up until late, I can just sleep in my own bed and wake up in a much better shape the next day. Of course, I can’t keep this up forever, If I stay too long locked away in my home I start getting depressed for not seeing anyone else, but I think I can easily pull it off for one week.

Well, for 5 more days

Today I lost a very long slice of my time to this game, called Dwarf Fortress.

Dwarf Fortress is a curious game. It is a simulation of a small outpost of these long bearded, beer loving, short tempered, underground miniatures. The Dwarves are largely autonomous, although you can select for each dwarf each jobs you will allow him to perform (up to a point). Then you set tasks for the dwarves, like digging tunnels, mining, crafting things they will need for their fortress, like food, beds, armor, tools. The goal is to build a thriving outpost among rampaging goblins, thieving kobolds and cannibal, tree-hugging elves.

One thing that is impressive about the game is how much stuff is connected. Before you start the game, it generates a history of the world up to the point where you begin playing. Your starting dwarves are settlers from another dwarven civilization, intent to stake out a piece of territory in a new mountain. This past civilization may have entered a war with a band of goblins or humans (all procedurally generated), and your dwarves will remember this war, and make painting of it in the halls of their fortress. Maybe some of the goblins will have shields with images from this war, as seen from THEIR side.

Then eventually the war will come to YOUR front, and the dwarves will automatically give legendary names to those soldiers of your fortress who were able to fell many enemies, and write HIS stories in the paintings of the halls. Or maybe the hall painter REALLY likes cheese, and will fill your meeting halls with portraits of himself eating cheese, who knows?

Or maybe you have a couple of dwarves who have similar interests. They may marry, and move in together, completely out of your control, have kids, and those kids will be pretty upset if you don’t provide a proper burial place for their parents when they pass away, and even rebel and become berserk about it.

Like any good sandbox simulation game, there is no goal. Make a industry powerhouse, able to generate millions of dwarfbucks in value. Or make a grand fortress that will convince the king to move the capital of the dwarven kingdom. Or make a martial fortress where every single dwarf is a champion of some sort. You can also control the game as much or as little as you want to.

And that is why it is so dangerous. There are so many options, so much freedom, and so much varied consequences for your actions in-game, that it can very very easily consume hours of your time at once. And all this was build by two guys in their spare time (although it seems that the DF developer is now working full time on his game, living off the donations of the game fans - I’m certainly going to drop my two cents in the hat once my dry spell ends).

There, now you know what I do on one fourth of my spare time (and 80% of my procrastinating time).

This weekend, I ran the 12th session of my 4e campaign here in Japan. This campaign is based in my Vlachia world, which is the scenario where I have DM’ed all my D&D campaigns (AD&D, 3.0, 3.5, 4e) since teenagerhood. The 4 players are all Brazilian students in japan like me. We play once or twice every month since august last year, and this has been a great way for me to kill whatever I may have of homesickness.

Anyway, I thought about sharing my views on some resources I have been using in this campain.

Firstly, and specially, I’ll talk about the Obsidian Portal website. They host RPG campaigns, by offering a wiki/blog mix format that works really well to store NPC information/Session information and to make it available for the whole group. I have been slowly transfering the info from my paper notebooks into that site (slower than I wanted). It is cool also to browse other people’s campaigns to hunt for ideas. There are free and paid memberships, but other than the free membership being allowed only one map online, it is completely usable.

Also, I have recently bought the Player’s Handbook 2 for the 4e system. I was really curious about some of its classes, like the bard and the sorcerer, and I wanted to make it available to my players. My opinion of the book is this: the new classes, items and options are a great addition to my game, but the book could be much, much better organized. For instance, something that sorely lacks is a good page where all the classes are described and compared together. Crossreference is also weak - the entire subsection describing the shaman goes by without explaining many details of its spirit companion - the class defining feature. All in all, it is worth to buy the book, but it does feel shoddily made.