Jay McGavren’s Journal

Hit a couple walls with Zyps… My fix to make creatures stop turning wildly after resuming an action caused them not to act at all unless they were acting on every object in the environment. Messy.

So I perused the literature again and found that a couple decent, accessible books on game AI have been written since I last looked. Added one to my Safari bookshelf, and from skimming it, I appear to be re-inventing the wheel in a couple respects. No big deal… as far as I know Zyps is still the most easily extendable AI architecture out there, and one of the few suitable for hobbyists.

And the book solved my problem, I think. Behaviors and Actions will need a little re-architecture, but it appears sweeping changes won’t be needed.

Thus far, LJXP (the LiveJournal Cross-Poster) seems to just work. That’s a lot more than I can say for WordPress’s own post by e-mail feature…

Let’s see - this makes four nights in a row now that the baby has slept only 6 hours, meaning we’ve had even less.

He is so getting moved to his own bedroom this weekend. Yay - I get my desktop back!

The baby’s been fussing since 4 AM… again. It’s bad for me, but it’s gotta be worse for Diana, since she sleeps right next to him.

A few things were broken with my old Approach action, but now it’s much improved. There’s still one kludge left in it that keeps it from going into the main Zyps library, though…

OK, I’ve been playing around with Ruby’s YAML library, and have confirmed that I need to take Procs out of Zyps. YAML has no problem serializing a Proc, but the moment it tries to load it again, I’m hit with:

Error: allocator undefined for Proc

This is probably why things blew up when I experimented with setting up a server with DRb (which I believe sends YAML over the wire). Everything was fine until I created a creature with a Behavior. Never got a real error from that, though; it just locked up.

:::sigh::: Too bad, Procs are such a cool idea… I should probably be blaming the YAML and DRb libraries instead, but I need them more than I need Procs.

Continue Reading »

…but our Halo 3 is on pre-order from Best Buy, for in-store pickup September 25th. See you all that evening.

Recipes learned this weekend:

-Mojitos
-Blue Hawaiian

All girlie drinks tested and approved by our QA department (Diana and Katrina).

$ itch --find "Chemical Brothers We Are the Night" --print-info "%n: %r stars"
No Path to Follow: 3 stars
We Are the Night: 1 stars
All Rights Reversed: 2 stars
Saturate: 5 stars
Do It Again: 2 stars
Das Spiegel: 3 stars
The Salmon Dance (feat. Fatlip): 4 stars
Burst Generator: 3 stars
A Modern Midnight Conversation: 2 stars
Battle Scars: 2 stars
Harpoons: 3 stars
The Pills Won't Help You Now: 3 stars

…Come on, guys. Where’s the next Dig Your Own Hole? At least Saturate was good. (Blessed, blessed distortion!)

Man, Ruby-Gnome2 widgets are an absolute breeze. I got a GUI slapped together in four hours, and I had never even used input widgets before.