29 July 2019

I've Designed And Developed A 1D Game

I wanted to spend my time learning for the exam after being fit again. Turns out I'm still ill, and this crazy idea got stuck in my head. And guess what? I did it!

What Is 1D?

Cover art used for itch.io
You probably know the difference If we go down to 2D, we toss aside either the height or the width and keep the other one. This will result in a horizontal or vertical line, depending on which dimension we removed. And that is considered 1D.
between 2D and 3D games. When we switch from a 3D game to a 2D game, we give up on the depth and keep width and height.

You can view it mathematically as well. If 3D is a room and you take away the depth you're left with a plane. Removing another dimension leaves you with a line. Technically, stepping down another dimension will result in a point (0D).

Graphical Dimension Versus Gameplay Dimension

As you might have heard of 2.5D, we have to differentiate in the represented dimension and the one the player moves in. However, it's not standard for the player to move in a higher dimension than the graphics communicate. More about that on another blog post. There is a game made by Tim Ruswick, which shows the player moving linearly, but the game objects are placed in a plane. Just like Flappy Bird, an obvious contender for the 1D gameplay and 2D graphics.
Regardless, my goal was to make a game with 1D gameplay and 1D visuals.

Game Development

I wanted to make this game in Unity since I had the most experience there so far. After setting the release and in-editor resolution to 1x800, the rest of the development of the game is pretty simple. Unfortunately, this is not the case for the UI. We can't represent text or numbers in this format. Even if you would let them scroll they're not distinguishable. Something we can do, however, is to color-code them. If we, for example, say that the digits of a number can be colored the following way:
  • red - zero
  • orange - one
  • black - two
  • white - three
  • blue - four
  • yellow - five
  • green - six
  • brown - seven
  • purple - eight
  • gray - nine
While this is confusing to the player at first, there's no better option I can think of. Additionally, the player will learn the coding over time.
Next up, we need a game idea that works. I wanted to think simple since I only want to prove that a 1D game is possible. I had a few different ideas, but Guitar Hero seemed to be a good choice. A rhythm game itself would take quite a while, so let's paddle down. How about... having targets fall down, and you have to hit a key on the right timing? It's more or less the same, just no music or specific patterns.


The Release

Now that things are done, the game is ready for release. Something I've noticed is that it doesn't run well on a dark background, and it is hard to see. I don't think to resize it is a viable option, though. Anyways, after this blog post, I'll be writing the short page and add a link to the itch.io page. So, you can check it out yourself.

Check It Out >>

Next up... a 0D game! Wooo!


27 July 2019

My Experience With Grammarly

This is not sponsored!
I can't even explain how it came to be, lol. I was trying to find a context-sensitive Japanese translator, and that was when someone suggested Grammarly. Spoiler alert: It doesn't support Japanese.


Usage So Far

So far, I've been using Grammarly to work over all my old posts. This is the first post that actively uses it. This means that all correctness issues and clarity issues, which can be found by Grammarly, have been fixed in the older posts, while with the up-coming and future ones I'll be trying to avoid the premium alerts.


The Result

Honestly, I have no idea how much of a difference Grammarly makes. So, I'll leave this to you to find out on yourself. I'll list the top five pages from an overall score, from the Flesch-reading score and the respective five worst pages from each of those categories. You can also compare this post to those.

Highest Overall Score


Blog PostOverall
Score
Flesch
Score
CharactersWordsSentencesReading
time
Speaking
time
Word
length
Sentence
length
Guild Wars 2: Legendary Armor - How Long? (Part 2 - PvP)9782790614781355.9011.373.410.9
Guild Wars 2: Tyria's Gravity977854061054584.208.102.718.2
Picross - How Many Possibilities?96924928915863.657.032.310.6
Guild Wars 2: Precursor Collection Workload966967301095814.378.424.113.5
Update: Guild Wars 2: Fractal Grind - How Much More?9583785214232895.6810.933.24.9

Highest Flesch Score

Blog PostOverall
Score
Flesch
Score
CharactersWordsSentencesReading
time
Speaking
time
Word
length
Sentence
length
Guild Wars 2: Danger Level at Desmina's Platform - Part 27996642111313144.528.703.33.6
WildStar: Expedition Prime Scaling Data809454089222743.687.083.13.4
Picross - How Many Possibilities?96924928915863.657.032.310.6
WildStar: Proc Chance of Prime Drops Result Update7792584111391004.558.753.611.4
Guild Wars 2: Magic-Warped Packet - Worth It?89911054319572827.8215.0536.9

Lowest Overall Score

Blog PostOverall
Score
Flesch
Score
CharactersWordsSentencesReading
time
Speaking
time
Word
length
Sentence
length
Game Design: Horizontal Progression in MMORPGs79595322887593.536.824.915
The Magical Meaning of Colors77585251827763.306.354.910.9
Accessibility of Difficult Content745883691429815.7010.984.717.6
Weekdays and Associated Gods74585059793763.176.105.110.4
Can Power Levels in Anime and Games Be Applied to Real Life?765757471035574.137.954.418.2

Lowest Overall Score

Blog PostOverall
Score
Flesch
Score
CharactersWordsSentencesReading
time
Speaking
time
Word
length
Sentence
length
Boku No Hero Akademia: Midoriya's Gran Torino Training736472701318765.2710.134.417.3
WildStar: Physics - Velocity of Movement727951479031233.606.934.17.3
WildStar: The Value of Pure Soulfrost638640887261612.905.583.94.5
Representing the Leveling of Language Comprehension537957181049954.188.074.211
36711717278501.102.134.65.6

Working With Grammarly

It's nice to see more machine learning solutions. However, these solutions require a lot of time to learn. There's a ton of variety in language depending on which writing-style you want to use (for Example: informal, formal, analytical, etc.). I've noticed a few issues, and these include:


- Errors caused by missing terms in the dictionary.    
(for example, specific technical terms)
- Correctly marked errors, but wrong suggestions.
- Errors I don't understand.    
(for example, wanting a maybe when it clearly should have been a may be.)

Luckily, the more you use Grammarly, the more you will learn about working with it. Trying around a little bit, allows you to analyze and solve even the premium issues. (This is also something I'm experimenting with within this post.)


Conclusion

Since Grammarly is available for free, I can only advise people to check it out. Regardless of whether or not you're writing, blog posts, scripts, documents, or something else. I will continue to use it myself. And if I figure something out about the premium stuff, I'll make another post about that.





Blog PostOverall
Score
Flesch
Score
CharactersWordsSentencesReading
time
Speaking
time
Word
length
Sentence
length
My Experience With Grammarly998641657223012.885.553.62.4

24 July 2019

Guild Wars 2: Mount Speed

Which is the fastest mount? Well quite simple. The beetle when you move on the ground and the griffon if you can use it. Well, if you use the abilities. I've always wondered which is faster if you don't use your abilities. Also, some mount engage abilities have quite an insane forward motion. Lastly, to crown it all I already did a calculation on the movement speed and it would be interesting to compare that to the mount speed.

Procedure

Screenshot of the Gilded Hollow bridge in Guild Wars 2
To find these things out, as with most things we will need to find a place that fits our experiments and is measurable. You can compare this to the DPS benchmarks done by Guilds like Snowcrows, except that we're doing speed benchmarks instead of DPS. The velocity is calculated via the distance laid back in a certain time frame. The only way for us to measure the distance is by using the skills and abilities that have a radius given. To have accurate values we need a straight flat track with a clear start and a clear end. This turns out to be harder than one would expect. Back in the old post, I used the World vs World bridge, that's found south of the alpine borderlands. Unfortunately, it's not possible to use mounts aside from the Warclaw, so we need to find another one. The bridge in Lornar's Pass near Durmand Priory one of my ideas. It reaches a total of  4890 units. Another idea I had is the Guild Hall. If I could get the rights to build I could make myself a bridge that's as long as I want. That's when I saw that there was a bridge already in the Gilded Hollow. I went there first to measure the width and it turns out that from the stairs the entrance of the building is 7905 units. I couldn't come up with a longer bridge without building myself - which again would require the rights to build in a Guild Hall, which I don't have.

Screenshot showing the
small bumps on the Gilded Hollow
bridge in Guild Wars 2
Unfortunately, the bridge in the Gilded Hollow Guild Hall is not perfect. It does have a long-distance, it is straight there's a clear beginning and a clear end to use and it's flat. Well mostly, since it does have three small bumps in it. While these do not stop your movement directly they do have a tiny slow effect. Given this, our calculations do have a small inaccuracy. Testing this with walking results in hardly if any change of speed. Thus I'm gonna ignore it for these test cases. Another issue is the dive/flying ability of the griffon. I tried to use the high buildings near the bridge beginning pointing towards the middle of the Guild Hall and used Commander with markers on the map to determine the track and try to fly as accurately as possible. This turned out to be harder than expected so I would take the griffon results with a grain of salt. They may be accurate enough but there could be deviations of up to 0.50 seconds I would say.

The Actual Experiments

The actual experiments aside from those issues are quite simple. We move from point A to point B and whenever we move over point A or point B we respectively start and stop the timer. For the timer, I use my smartphone app again. keep in mind having to manually start and stop the timer results in a short delay due to the reaction time. I did not calculate in my own or the average human reaction time into the calculation so again values may vary by ~0.6 seconds or so. I performed this experiment on each of the eight mounts there are. Experiments were run on normal walk speed meaning not using the ability of the mount, Spamming or repeatedly mounting and using the engage ability and lastly using the mount ability and testing a few mechanics respective to it, such as double dive or the roller beetle speed after the boost.

The Result

I will represent the result in a table again. The table is sorted by time. Each mount has it's own color per row to allow an easy distinction which behaviors time belongs to which mount. The type of behavior is explained by the note. The time is given in seconds and milliseconds where one second is equal to 100 milliseconds. Calculation of the units per second is done by taking the bridge's length in units (7905 units) and dividing it through the measured time (e.g.4''21''') which will then yield the result (e.g. 7905u / 4.21s = 1877.67u/s). The m/s use the conversion of units to meters which is units multiplied by 2.52cm / 100 = 0.0252m. (e.g. 1877.67u/s * 0.0252m = 47.32m/s). I've omitted the conversion from u/s to feet/s to mph. I have also recalculated the walking speed with the mount name being "None" to be able to compare the mounts to the normal walking speed without boons.


Mount NameNoteTimeu/sm/skm/hmph
GriffonAbility (One boost)4''21'''1877.6747.32170.34106.26
GriffonAbility (Double boost)4''03'''1961.5449.43177.95111.01
RollerbeetleAbility4''72'''1517.2738.24137.6585.86
RollerbeetleRolling (After Ability)5''75'''1374.7834.64124.7277.80
GriffonAbility (flight)6''47'''1221.7930.79110.8469.14
RaptorAbility8''60'''919.1923.1683.3952.02
JackalAbility9''41'''840.0621.1776.2147.54
RollerbeetleEngage Spam10''06'''785.7919.8071.2944.47
SkyscaleAbility (Charge)10''31'''766.7319.3269.5643.39
SkimmerEngage Spam11''20'''705.817.7964.0339.94
JackalWalking12''65'''624.915.7556.6935.36
WarclawAbility12''80'''617.5815.5656.0334.95
GriffonAbility (Flutter)13''11'''602.9715.1954.7034.12
RaptorWalking13''18'''599.7715.1154.4133.94
SkyscaleAbility (Flight)13''27'''595.715.0154.0433.71
RollerbeetleRolling13''41'''589.4814.8553.4833.36
BunnyWalking13''72'''576.1714.5252.2732.61
SkimmerAbility14''00'''564.6414.2351.2231.95
SkimmerWalking14''37'''550.113.8649.9131.13
WarclawEngage Spam14''37'''550.113.8649.9131.13
WarclawWalking14''44'''547.4413.8049.6630.98
JackalEngage Spam14''71'''537.3913.5448.7530.41
RaptorEngage Spam15''33'''515.6612.9946.7829.18
GriffonWalking15''82'''499.6812.5945.3328.28
SkyscaleWalking15''87'''498.1112.5545.1928.19
GriffonEnage Spam16''37'''482.912.1743.8127.33
BunnyEngage Spam16''88'''468.3111.8042.4926.50
NoneWalking20''11'''393.099.9135.6622.25
SkyscaleEnage Spam20''15'''392.319.8935.5922.20
BunnyAbility22''15'''356.898.9932.3820.20

Conclusion

#1 Majestic Griffon
So, as you can see the griffon seems to be the fastest way of traveling if you can get one or two dive boosts in.
#2 Roadorolla-Beetle Da
The roller beetle is the fastest if you can't use the griffon and even after only one boost you have a decent constant movement. 
#3 Rapping Raptor
If both of these do not apply, the raptor is next on his third place. Though it comes short when you have to move uphill.
#4 Jackal with it's Portal
 Moving uphill I'd probably advise the jackal as it's ability is more dependable in an uphill scenario.

It's really awesome to see that using the roller beetle you could basically roll around the streets of some countries such as Germany. even though cities only allow 50km/h at maximum and the highway often has a limit of 100 or 120km/h. Then again if you had the mounts from Guild Wars 2 aside from some people sexting Asura's or whatever we would have portals and waypoints. I would definitely pay 1€ to teleport to university or work to port back for 1€. Worth it!

Oh, by the way. I heard there is actually 3rd party software that shows the current speed and you could basically take that. The thing is that from talking to someone who uses it the values might vary depending on the direction. Like for example a griffon with a downward motion has a faster vertical movement that gliding straight and some ground tracks you roll with your roller beetle aren't even or maybe you're in a curve or not moving straight. All these aspects can have an effect as you travel more distance in a zigzag than a straight line.
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About Me

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I'm a B.Sc. Games Engineer and I created this blog to share my ideas, theorycrafting, thoughts and whatever I'm working on or doing.