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sinku
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game dev bulletin board

Post by sinku »

Share your work: research, code, writing, art, screenshots or video, problems or solutions, how it makes you feel, and anything that will get you talking about your game or stuff related to it

I spent the past week reading articles on wikis and websites, scans of technical manuals and reports, and emailing smart old men about their computers back in the 1960s.

At some point I bought the game Tunnet, which is an addicting indie horror-incremental game about building an underground computer network after some apocalyptic scenario, and dodging a few monsters while you do it. You drill your own tunnels and lay miles of wires and build networks and subnetworks using a limited set of upgradeable tools. It is a 'zach-like' game, which I think is a funny name. It is unique and atmospheric and I enjoy a lot of things about it. However I became frustrated enough with its design that I wanted to design my own. Your focus is on building and optimizing a network. You can do stuff like yank all the wires up every time you want to optimize the whole thing again. But there are fundamentally only two shapes a network in Tunnet can be: a tree or a straight line. There’s no realistic way to create a graph or route packages non-linearly. There also isn’t any risk to stopping everything and redoing it again.

There is money in the game, but you can only earn it and spend it, you can’t lose it through poor performance or inaction. You earn lots of money which never stops flowing in as long as one mainframe is hooked up, even if it is inefficient. That bothered me, because I like tycoon games with a creative element, but also potential risk and competition. The idea that was percolating in my head and across a few notes grew really large, because in real computer networks there are a lot of moving parts, and I wanted a very granular level of control over both the WAN network and the node LAN networks. For me, a total novice, it would be too big. So I split it in half, a 'state networking' game and a timesharing game, and I’m focused on the latter right now, and spent my time researching for.

I had no idea how old computer networks and timeshares worked logistically, so I started reading about the earliest ones. Things like what they charged for and what costs of running were like. I aimed at the earliest systems from the 60s and 70s because that felt like a very ‘ripe’ moment where a player could realistically take over a position managing the bills, what equipment should be bought, which terminal goes to who, negotiating with the phone company, etc. Where Wizards Stay Up Late is a great book for learning about ARPANET, and I have liked reading it so far. It goes for a very nice level of detail in terms of the overarching design, person-to-person interactions, who influenced who, reasons for the network coming to be and the early history and character of ARPA. More technical information about how the network functioned is fairly well documented too.

But learning about the nitty-gritty of how early timeshares operated and in particular handled remote connections was more spotty, though. I ended up focusing on CTSS the most so far, because there is a lot of information about it and Multics on multicians.org; But plenty of questions left unanswered. I was compelled by the idea of people remotely accessing CTSS from home via modem, but had no idea how they did it. I emailed Tom van Vleck about it and it turns out, they had a PBX for the local telephone network, and opened a second ‘Data PBX’ specifically for interfacing with computers, that users could dial into from as far away as Europe. If you wanted a terminal in your home office, or the university wanted you to have one, you could buy a second phone line and have the cost reimbursed, then call in with your terminal of choice. Engineers would ‘break in’ the lines when they were installed to reduce echo and noise.

The Data PBX was automatic and when you dialed in, it would search for an open line in ‘hunt groups’ until it either found one or had to report back that number was all tied up. I have to imagine there were callers fighting to get online once the system got popular. CTSS’ hardware and surrounding infrastructure is neat. They had European calls they occasionally received and had to set up in advance, and weird modems they had for various network related experiments which weren’t wired into the normal system. Their mess of modems were all on the floor behind their communications controller, the IBM 7750, because every remote connection needed it’s own receiving modem at the mainframe.

I found the naming conventions of this old computer hardware confusing. The 7090/7094 CPU had ‘data channels’ which seems to refer to both the connection type and the units attached to the CPU which handled peripherals or tertiary units. As of 1963 the 7090 had five Data Channel units of different types delegated to different responsibilities. All of the networking duties were handled by a 7909 labeled channel E, which connected to the 7750 communications controller that handled teletypes. Also of note, was a project that used the 7750’s high-speed 1200 bits-per-second adaptor to connect to a PDP-1. It was a project for Alan Kotok’s master thesis and according to Stan Dunten, who I emailed to ask about the 7750, was never used and barely worked. I will be emailing Alan with questions about it.

The 7750 is neat, both because of it’s weird 48-bit word length and split memory, and because the one at MIT at the time was only outfitted with two 28 channel multiplexing channel adaptors. It had a total of 56 connections, but it could handle as many as 16 MCAs, so up to 448 possible connections! CTSS could only handle thirty concurrent users due to memory and processor limitations, but a beefier computer could theoretically handle many more through that interface.

All this information is being poured into a game I am cooking. It's been a good time. But I have a lot of work to do. I’ll post with new information and progress on my game. Right now, I’m designing a UI library :). I want it to look like smalltalk on a Xerox Alto, black and white with maybe some splashes of primary colors for style.
Last edited by sinku on Tue Jun 11, 2024 10:29 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by maru »

@sinku solicited me to talk a bit about my research over the past year, so here's a brief statement on that, so far as I remember things.

I wanted to write about a lot of things. For one, I wanted to know why people kill and hurt others; I wanted to understand sadism abstractly. I read and watched in depth about the BTK killer, saw the Chandler Halderson prosecution statement, Joel Guy Jr. statements ... a lot of kids who murdered their parents, actually. There's something strange to me about how an impossible thing becomes a possible thing, invisibly. It enters action space. And done once, it's so easy to do it again and again.

I also liked how dispassionately the BTK killer talked about candidates. He was constantly just seeing who would work out -- walking home, oh, she seems to always be alone. Okay, one day I'll step in at night and kill her. It doesn't always work. Sometimes a kid runs away. He doesn't seem to care at all when they escape.

I was wondering how common incest was. Something like 10-15% of siblings. 1 in 7,000 people are the direct product of parent/child or sibling incest. This was weird to me -- my own family was very, non-affectionate, no touch, no love. To imagine many families getting this close made me wonder what was going on inside other people's houses. I wanted to imagine what it would be like to be a brother/sister pair where the boundaries of love were extremely blurry.

What else comes to mind ... I suppose this study on ectopic pregnancy involving the liver. I have more in mind. I can likely write it later.
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Post by sinku »

maru wrote:For one, I wanted to know why people kill and hurt others; I wanted to understand sadism abstractly. I read and watched in depth about the <a href='https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Rader' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>BTK killer</a>
Did I ever mention Israel Keyes, and his kill kits hidden all over the united states that they still sometimes find, to you? I had no idea about it but he called BTK a wimp for showing remorse according to wikipedia, which is darkly humorous.

I reckon I find an at once dispassionate and inept killer very compelling. Like, someone who has briefly thought about their present situation and for whatever reason comes to the conclusion they have to kill. Maybe their plan for the murder is complicated or simple; but they aren't skilled killers, and either can't complete their plan because they are inept, or they slip up through their behavior after they commit the crime, or their plan was not as perfect as they thought and they leave a bunch of evidence. A really good example is <a href='https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Daniel_Brophy' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>Nancy Brophy</a> who was a crime novelist. Something media really latches onto when talking about her is her article she wrote titled 'How to murder your husband'.

I never considered the decision could be rooted in sadism, because the cases I looked at most closely are always like, compulsive liars or selfish people killing to jump dealing with embarassment or struggle. It seems like a different impulse from sadism.
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Post by sinku »

Lately I have been working on a 'starfield' effect and trying to learn to do perspective projection from world-space to screen-space. Understanding the math is a pain in the neck but I am nearing something complete and that I would be happy to post and share about. I am most satisfied with the internals that I have been refining and trying to figure what would be worth spinning off into an object or deleting entirely and making implicit. Stupid programmer stuff all around, only sort of tangentially related to making games, unfortunately. But I have been composing for an indie shooter recently as well. That has been a good time.
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I FINALLY COMPLETED THE EFFECT, in two forms, a C++ and a D version:
https://github.com/sink666/starfield-d
https://github.com/sink666/starfield

It was a totally unnecessary diversion if I'm honest. But, it feels good to be finished with it! Next up idk. Finally got to use D, which I have been wanting to use ever since I saw a user making games in D + Raylib on twitter. I joined the language user discord, and I ought to join the forum too as it is quite active.
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Post by sinku »

i decided i was bikeshedding wasting time trying to come up with my own libraries for stuff. its not even my goal. i just want to make games. so i will make games instead of framework bullshit unless i really really REALLY feel stifled by godot.
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I've mostly been polishing. We meet every few weeks now so I feel more like I need something to show. It's gonna be a long term project though.
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Post by maru »

Getting background assets lately. I really like how this church one came out after the post-processing. It really does look like the filtered photo aesthetic of the Monogatari manga we've been channeling, I think. (The character sprite is our initial design, not the final asset.)
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Post by sinku »

maru wrote: Tue Aug 13, 2024 1:11 pm Getting background assets lately. I really like how this church one came out after the post-processing. It really does look like the filtered photo aesthetic of the Monogatari manga we've been channeling, I think. (The character sprite is our initial design, not the final asset.)
so cool!! i love all the character art from your game that i've seen its really good. rn ive been working on a design document for a game - a different one from the networking tycoon game i outlined above. I will post the pdf once I finalize, do some more illustrations, have some character design ideas, etc.
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in the last like, six months or so, ive really hit this new level with my coding ability. i didnt learn it in school or anything because i'm too old for them to have taught anything beyond spreadsheets in high school. it's been about 5ish years since i started coding for realsies? so i think i have a decent knowledge base by this point even if it's scattered.

i've been touching on older systems and reworking them, stuff i started 3+ years ago, to try and bring it all in line with a new systems, and i'm just struck by how clumsy and amateur it is. i had such a weird idea of how objects should be set up, like i'm just passing a yearbook around to be signed by people randomly and at one point it'll be 'done,' with all the proper values filled in. lengthy variables, like, "character.variables.set[x].face[y].color" copied over and over and over instead of stored in a reference, because i used to be really nervous about reference/value problems and i didn't properly understand them.

it's been a real headache!! but also it is very validating - i really am getting better at this stuff. i hope in 5 years i am at another higher skill level, but i am hoping the gap in understanding isn't as big. it'd be nice to think i'm developing the 'write for the future' skill as well.
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thursday wrote: Mon Oct 07, 2024 2:36 pm in the last like, six months or so, ive really hit this new level with my coding ability. [...] i really am getting better at this stuff. i hope in 5 years i am at another higher skill level, but i am hoping the gap in understanding isn't as big. it'd be nice to think i'm developing the 'write for the future' skill as well.
Making big leaps and bounds developing a skill is so exciting. I most commonly get that sensation, like that realization that im ahead, with music. The production side primarily, but also in terms of writing melody and harmony. Are you building a custom engine or building on top of an existing one? What are you focusing on as of now?

I've been sketching out a bunch of little game ideas and right now I'm really zoomed in on making a clone of The Great War of Prefectures. Its a really cute, weird little strategy game that I have ideas about how to elaborate on. Economy and balance stuff. I'm a fan of map games like this and it even seems ripe for multiplayer, which could be really enjoyable to try and learn to implement.
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sinku wrote: Tue Oct 15, 2024 5:21 pm Are you building a custom engine or building on top of an existing one? What are you focusing on as of now?
i'm working in unity but am increasingly disillusioned with it. a hope of mine is that i can ship-of-theseus this engine to not need unity at all after a few projects, but idk how much energy i want to put into that. regardless, i hope to leave unity sooner or later.

idk what you call this. is it still an engine if it's on top of unity? i'm trying to make something i can make games with for a few years at least, at the very least my Big One after this. i'm hoping systems i design here will be useful in the future even if i can't keep using everything as a whole. right now i'm working on getting screenspace shape, textures, and text drawing hooked into my weird shader setup and event system, which hopefully should handle all of my UI needs.

unfortunately for me factorio: space age released a few days ago
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Post by willow »

recently i've gotten a bit into lisp languages, and there's acurrently running lisp game jam that i'm going to try out. i've never made a full game before and i've never written completed lisp program before so there are lots of firsts for me here. my plan is to target web assembly using this game jam template

my concept for the game is to make a sort of turnbased roguelike dungeoncrawler where you ascend a tower. the game loop will be as follows
  • advance to floor (n) of the tower
  • prepare to explore the floor
  • fight enemy
  • loot the room
very simple, but im still afraid it's going to be way too much for only 10 days anyway. there are lots of systems i need to figure out how to implement, like menus and actual engaging turn-based combat.

the really hard part im afraid is going to be working with my limited energy to actually complete this in time. im so tired all the time and it's very difficult for me to focus on anything ever... but that's enough complaining and talking for now. after i do some chores around the house i'll be off to the editor and start hammering it out. wish me luck :)
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