michthro
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I meant in terms of players using mods. When I applied Doom's tar/mud mod I didn't have the foggiest idea why it worked. Had his instructions involved editing drod.exe it would have been all one to me. What I mean is, applying a binary edit is just as much like plugging in a printer as applying a text edit is. As far as Caravel not supporting binary edits goes: Well, if that's their policy, I respect and abide by it, but still, I don't see why. If, let's say, they'd be ok with a .ini mod making spiders visible, why not a binary mod doing the same thing? The greater knowledge angle obviously doesn't apply to the developers themselves, while those who use a mod don't need to understand what they are doing.

eytanz
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Now, I don't think Caravel's decision regarding what can be modded and what's supported in-game are necessarily the best, but the overall reasoning is sound - as long as there are on-line highscores, it's caravel's responsibility to ensure that people are playing at a level field. Modding the binaries allows uncontrolled changes, and that's opening a can of worms.

____________________________
I got my avatar back! Yay!

michthro
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eytanz wrote:
Modding the binaries allows uncontrolled changes.

I think that's the whole thing right there. The .ini file system doesn't enable cheats. (Although tar/mud mods can be debated. I'm all for it, though.) I was thinking that Caravel could always remove unwanted binary mods, but the current situation shows that it could all too easily happen a bit late, so maybe it's best to restrict mods to those that can't potentially do any harm. On the other hand there's nothing they can do about people privately using and distibuting mods.

Speaking of level playing fields and cheating, let me say again that I thought it was ok, and that the era of unlimited undo in DROD had arrived. I suppose I should further implore those who did download the mod not to use it for the purposes of high scores, but my experience with the human race tells me it would be a waste of time. And please don't PM me asking for the mod. I won't be distributing it in any way.

EDIT: When being a bit sceptical of those who downloaded the mod, I'm not referring to Swivel, who shows a surprising grasp of the concept of integrity for someone so young, or, of course, Larry.

---

[Last edited by michthro at 02-05-2006 04:22 PM]

Oneiromancer
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michthro wrote:
Also, the original post, made over a week ago, is about a program that gives players unlimited undo, among other things.

Well, according to the Caravel policy, since Lemures' program isn't hosted here (and thus implicitly approved), the post is allowed to stay.

Anyway, I won't be posting it anywhere else - if you don't like it here, you obviously won't like that either.

You can take Mike literally. Give it to Saqqara to put on her DROD fan site or something...no one official will try to make her take it down. Your choice, though.

As for the issue of unlimited undo itself: I feel it's high time for it to be included as an option, but I'll rather go into that in a more appropriate thread.

The biggest reason for not including it is because of high scores. Unlimited undo just makes some rooms too easy, and therefore almost trivial to get the highest possible score. Remember, everyone has unlimited undo in the editor, so one could always recreate a room that is really giving them trouble in the editor and play it with unlimited undo in order to see how to solve it, then come back to the real game and at least know what they need to do.

By the way, would a mod making spiders visible be ok? I ask because that woud be a lot like the widely used transparent tar/mud mods.

I certainly don't see any problem with that, for the same reason you stated.

Game on,

____________________________
"He who is certain he knows the ending of things when he is only beginning them is either extremely wise or extremely foolish; no matter which is true, he is certainly an unhappy man, for he has put a knife in the heart of wonder." -- Tad Williams

larrymurk
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Larry is for (things that make life easier for the player):
Transparent tar/mud
Visible spiders
Digital/serpent clock
Unlimited undo
Save anytime
Skip room

Larry is against things that solve things for the player:
Orb solver
Room solver

But Larry, you contradict yourself. You say here you don't approve of the orb solver yet you're one of the biggest proponents of it. What's up with that? Basically, I approve of an automated orb solver/ room solver until we get the "skip room" option. Let's face it, we all know there are many holds that we enjoy most of the rooms but we stop playing because 1 or 2 rooms aren't the type we enjoy. For some rooms even having hints or a demo isn't enough, we just want a "Skip room" button.

coppro
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Actually, I'd like to see you try to make spiders visible. The alpha channel is modified by the engine, so making them always visible would be very difficult without a source hack. Plus, you can always use the hints and solutions board. (I've said too much)...

michthro
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coppro wrote:
Actually, I'd like to see you try to make spiders visible. The alpha channel is modified by the engine, so making them always visible would be very difficult without a source hack.

Much of the previous discussion was about the fact that making spiders visible would require a binary mod, and whether that would be allowed.

Are you sure it wouldn't be a problem, Oneiromancer, considering the binary mod issue?

Oneiromancer
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Well, I'm not really that competent in programming issues, so I was assuming that one could replace spiders by modifying the graphics files in the same way one took care of tar/mud transparency. Since they were directly compared I assumed that they would be achieved in the same manner. Apparently this isn't the case. I'd have to say that if you can't achieve it given the modding tools currently available to you, then it probably won't be hosted on this site.

Remember, DROD is in a tricky situation. The free program is open source, and Caravel is trying to make money off of the content and CaravelNet. But just because the free program is freely modifiable doesn't mean that Caravel is under any obligation to support those modifications on its own website. This is why Caravel says "do what you want, but you can't necessarily host it here."

Game on,

____________________________
"He who is certain he knows the ending of things when he is only beginning them is either extremely wise or extremely foolish; no matter which is true, he is certainly an unhappy man, for he has put a knife in the heart of wonder." -- Tad Williams

ErikH2000
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michthro wrote:
I apologise, while I'd like to point out, in my defence, that I did say: "If ... the devs don't veto the idea ...".

Michthro, you're cool. Don't worry about it. And I salute you for coming up with the clever mod.

By the way, would a mod making spiders visible be ok? I ask because that woud be a lot like the widely used transparent tar/mud mods.

There isn't really much wrong with a spider visibility mod. But I don't want binary mods in general on the forum. They can create some difficult support issues for us when a mod has unintended effects. Binary editing will get performed incorrectly by some of the people you give it to. New versions of the engine will invalidate the mod. Even a correctly performed mod can appear to be fine when you've actually done something harmful like overwriting a terminating zero on a string. And then maybe the mod works perfectly until a certain arrangement of memory makes a string length check hang or crash the app with a seg fault.

Here is an example of a kind of support case that is likely to happen once we open this Pandora's box. Somebody really loves these binary mods and has hacked a bunch in. One of them makes DROD crash. The support conversation goes like this:

DUDE: DROD is crashing on me. How do I fix it?
ERIK: Where does it crash exactly? What is happening right before the crash? As much detail as you can give me is helpful. Also, please send me your drod.err file which is located... Also, do you have the latest version of DROD installed? Also, have you installed any binary mods?

And some responses could come up here, i.e.:

Response #1

DUDE: I've got 2.0.13 installed. I tried 2.0.14, but it wouldn't work with my mods, so I went back to 2.0.13.
ERIK: Well, let's just upgrade to 2.0.14.
DUDE: But what about my mods?
ERIK: We don't support binary mods, sorry. And I need you on the latest version of DROD so I can give you good troubleshooting advice. The problem you are having may already be solved.
DUDE: That sucks. I really like those mods.

Response #2

DUDE: I've got 2.0.14 (the latest) installed along with some binary mods.
ERIK: We need to rule out the possibility of your binary mods causing a crash. Let's get a copy of DROD without mods running on your computer.
DUDE: How do I do that? Am I going to lose my data? Also, that sucks, because I really like those mods.
ERIK: ...lengthy walkthrough of installing mod-free executable...

Response #3

DUDE: I've got 2.0.14 (the latest) and I'm not running any binary mods. (It's a lie. He doesn't want to admit he has mods, because he knows I'll ask him to uninstall them.)
ERIK: Well, great! Let's begin a lengthy troubleshooting session based on the assumption that your executable is not containing dangerous hacks over which we have no control.
DUDE: Sounds good to me.

So that's the support issue.

And without getting into exactly what, there are a number of possible mods that would cause larger problems for us than something as relatively benign as making spiders visible. By just saying no to binary mods in general, we can avoid evaluating them case-by-case and having to explain why X is a good binary mod and Y is not.

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)

michthro
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OK, Erik, I see your point. Didn't really think about the support side of it. So sure, no binary mods then.

eytanz
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On the topic of unlimited undo - One of the things worth remembering is that you get unlimited undo in the editor playtester. When building rooms, I use that as a measure - if I need to make use of the fact that I have unlimited undo to solve a room I created, that means the room is not well designed.

When we developed JtRH, we had unlimited undo in the dev version. I made a point of playing through the entire hold without ever pressing undo more than once in a row - if I pressed it twice, I immediately pressed 'r'.

I find that using unlimited undo, I tend to solve rooms by trial and error instead of thinking of the solutions. Other people who've played DROD in versions with unlimited undo report the same. That's why I'm against unlimited undo - it becomes a crutch.

Similarly, I'm not in favor of a "skip room" function. If a hold feels too linear, it's not well designed (note - by this I'm not saying that linear holds are badly designed. Just that if players feel that the linearity is a problem, then it probably is). Other than that, however, there's nothing wrong with allowing the player to get stuck. If there was just one hold in DROD, then maybe I could see why people would want such a feature. But there's such an array of possible places to play available - and much of it high quality - that if you get stuck, you have plenty of other opportunities to still enjoy DROD.



____________________________
I got my avatar back! Yay!

---

[Last edited by eytanz at 02-05-2006 09:56 PM]

Lemures
Level: Goblin
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about the unlimited undo and it changing it into trial and error: that is what i use my program for. trial and error. however, i dont use it until i am stuck. most rooms i dont even use it on. some of them though, rooms that almost require a bit of trial and error (like rooms with lots of goblins or something), i do use it for.

Also, my program replays the moves very very quickly. i dont know how the score system works, but would this be detectable? maybe you could make it so that people have unlimited undos, but if they use more than one without a full restart, it says so in their score somehow. *shrug*.

on a side note... has anyone actually tried my thing? lol. im still hungry for complements/criticisms

michthro
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OK, Lemures, good job. Feel better? One big flaw is having to hold down alt the whole time. Otherwise it looks good. I didn't actually use it, because
a) I don't run executables I don't know I can trust. (nothing personal.)
b) I refuse to support, in any way, these new languages that are cropping up all over the place.
Why use something like AutoIt when there are already too many tried and tested, widely used languages such as C++, VB, Java etc.? Things are bad enough as they are without more and more languages being added all the time. So maybe this isn't such a bad one, being merely an automation script, but still, the same job could be done just as easily in C++, despite the claim that AutoIt makes this kind of thing easy. Many people have said that there is no such thing as one language being better than another, which is perfectly true (at least for the well-known ones), but what they seldom point out is that there is such a thing as one language being a better choice if you don't know one already. That language is C++, for the simple reason that it's the most widely used. If you're looking for examples/tutorials, or you get hold of the source for something, it's more likely to be in C++ than any other language, especially if you're interested in game programming. All I'm saying, Lemures, is that you'd be doing yourself a huge favour if you stopped messing around with silly little things like AutoIt, and learned C++ instead.

ErikH2000
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Gads, man. Are you really about to start a "Language X is Better" war? I don't care, actually. Go to it! But somebody ought to wake up Alefbet so he can get involved.

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)

michthro
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Hey, I said there's no such thing. I only said that C++ is a better language to start with, because of it's popularity. (Although I was just thinking that it might be interesting to sit back and watch the action, in which I will not get involved...)

michthro
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Awww, my feelings are hurt Yes, there is that, but achieving that (or anything fishy) and unlimited undo by changing one single byte would be absolutely astonishing, which is why I posted editing instructions rather than (a link to) a modified .exe so that people would feel safer, knowing that it can be checked exactly what the mod does.

---

[Last edited by michthro at 10-23-2006 10:04 AM : Attached player file to get it to Elfstone. Removed now.]

Lemures
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i DID include the source, so you can read through it and compile it yourself if you wish, but i totally understand.

also, i know c++, vb, and java. i just like autoit its VERY easy, you just code in a text file then compile it. the alt limitation i think is good though, because that way the program can tell those keys are meant to go to DROD, instead of something else.

michthro
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I know you included the source, and I looked at it. My reason for not compiling it was given in 2). If you know c++, vb and java, then why oh why not give the source in one of those much better known languages? (preferably c++) It's far more likely that people will be able to just download and build it straight away.
The problem with the alt limitation is that it's inconvenient to hold it down while playing. Of course, with a proper language the program would be able to tell where the keys are going.

Lemures
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fortunately, i program enough to understand your zealousness towards c++, and you do have a valid point, alt wouldnt be needed. still, ive grown qutie accustomed to autoit, but it normally isnt used for apps like this. i normally use it for what it was originally designed, windows scripting, like clicking certain buttons, etc.

main reason i didnt use c++: dont have it installed. and im lazy. plus, originally, this app was much smaller, only a page or so of code that worked better in autoit than anything else, and over time its grown past the point where c++ would be a better choice, i just never switched over.

(i wonder if i could get hiddensoft (.com) to pay me for all the pimpage i do of their language ><)

michthro
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Oh, it was laziness? Why didn't you just say so? Now I understand completely.

Lemures
Level: Goblin
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Registered: 01-27-2006
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it was laziness that caused me to program it in the first place, i got sick of starting rooms over and over from the begining =P

michthro
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Lemures wrote:
it was laziness that caused me to program it in the first place, i got sick of starting rooms over and over from the begining =P

Perhaps you should express your feelings on life without unlimited undo here. Leave out the part about being lazy.

AlefBet
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ErikH2000 wrote:
Gads, man. Are you really about to start a "Language X is Better" war? I don't care, actually. Go to it! But somebody ought to wake up Alefbet so he can get involved.

This was a pretty good chuckle for me to wake up to.

I've got to admit that I'm a big fan of C++ and I think I've used it enough to know its strong points, weaknesses, and how to use it pretty effectively. I'm mostly negative about Java because in my opinion they took out many of the better parts of C++ and put in some of the worse parts of Java and called it a language.

However, I also think that if you know several languages, it empowers you to pick the right tool for the right job, so to speak. Even though most of my research programming is done in C++, I frequently (almost daily) use other languages such as Bash, Perl, and Python. And from time to time I also use languages like PHP, Ruby, and JavaScript. I find that scripting languages generally make for much better glue between other programs than C++, and you've got to love SCons (Python).

I don't think there's anything wrong with more programming languages coming out, as people come up with newer programming paradigms. I'm actually kind of excited about Microsoft's new shell programming language, and a bit disappointed it won't debut on Linux. The only annoying thing is when a half-baked language like Java sells itself as the solution to all programming needs. It's taken over a decade for the Java language to incorporate solutions to problems C++ had solutions for in the first place (such as generics).

Not that new languages need to sprout fully formed. Most new languages are half baked for a while. It took Perl decades to marinate, and Ruby is still only maybe 3/4 cooked. My biggest beef with Java is that they had C++ and came out with Java anyway. (I have some gripes about C++, too, but apparently all the different ones from the Java creators.)

____________________________
I was charged with conspiracy to commit jay-walking, and accessory to changing lanes without signaling after the fact .

++Adam H. Peterson

Insane
Level: Master Delver

Rank Points: 154
Registered: 08-06-2005
IP: Logged

The Numpad doesn'T seem to work for me,
It only records q/w. I'll try using your movement setting and trying out movement setting 1.

-Insane

NiroZ
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 1302
Registered: 02-12-2006
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AlefBet wrote:

ErikH2000 wrote:
Gads, man. Are you really about to start a "Language X is Better" war? I don't care, actually. Go to it! But somebody ought to wake up Alefbet so he can get involved.

This was a pretty good chuckle for me to wake up to.

I've got to admit that I'm a big fan of C++ and I think I've used it enough to know its strong points, weaknesses, and how to use it pretty effectively. I'm mostly negative about Java because in my opinion they took out many of the better parts of C++ and put in some of the worse parts of Java and called it a language.

However, I also think that if you know several languages, it empowers you to pick the right tool for the right job, so to speak. Even though most of my research programming is done in C++, I frequently (almost daily) use other languages such as Bash, Perl, and Python. And from time to time I also use languages like PHP, Ruby, and JavaScript. I find that scripting languages generally make for much better glue between other programs than C++, and you've got to love SCons (Python).

I don't think there's anything wrong with more programming languages coming out, as people come up with newer programming paradigms. I'm actually kind of excited about Microsoft's new shell programming language, and a bit disappointed it won't debut on Linux. The only annoying thing is when a half-baked language like Java sells itself as the solution to all programming needs. It's taken over a decade for the Java language to incorporate solutions to problems C++ had solutions for in the first place (such as generics).

Not that new languages need to sprout fully formed. Most new languages are half baked for a while. It took Perl decades to marinate, and Ruby is still only maybe 3/4 cooked. My biggest beef with Java is that they had C++ and came out with Java anyway. (I have some gripes about C++, too, but apparently all the different ones from the Java creators.)

to be honest, i have no idea about programming, but if what you are saying about java is correct, then why do so many programs over the net(and web sites) use java?

larrymurk wrote:
Larry is for (things that make life easier for the player):

Digital/serpent clock

you do know that somewhere on the offical drod community website, they have a digital/serpent clock?

---

[Last edited by NiroZ at 05-05-2006 04:04 PM]

Doom
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 3310
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NiroZ wrote:

larrymurk wrote:
Larry is for (things that make life easier for the player):

Digital/serpent clock

you do know that somewhere on the offical drod community website, they have a digital/serpent clock?

Do you maybe mean this?

NiroZ
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 1302
Registered: 02-12-2006
IP: Logged

Doom wrote:

NiroZ wrote:

larrymurk wrote:
Larry is for (things that make life easier for the player):

Digital/serpent clock

you do know that somewhere on the offical drod community website, they have a digital/serpent clock?

Do you maybe mean this?

sounds like it, i never could be bothered to test it.

Doom
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 3310
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NiroZ wrote:

Doom wrote:

NiroZ wrote:

larrymurk wrote:
Larry is for (things that make life easier for the player):

Digital/serpent clock

you do know that somewhere on the offical drod community website, they have a digital/serpent clock?

Do you maybe mean this?

sounds like it, i never could be bothered to test it.

Yes, yes, but look at the author. Does anything ring a bell?

NiroZ
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 1302
Registered: 02-12-2006
IP: Logged

Doom wrote:

NiroZ wrote:

Doom wrote:

NiroZ wrote:

larrymurk wrote:
Larry is for (things that make life easier for the player):

Digital/serpent clock

you do know that somewhere on the offical drod community website, they have a digital/serpent clock?

Do you maybe mean this?

sounds like it, i never could be bothered to test it.

Yes, yes, but look at the author. Does anything ring a bell?

see sig
and take into account that its 2 in the morning. (for me)