Elite: Dangerous, Empty MMO

Disclaimer: I backed Elite on kickstarter, and have been a fan of Elite since the version my dad had on the ZX Spectrum 48K that we loaded from a cassette tape. Took something like 4 minutes to load and didn’t have a progress bar. Thankfully it loaded pretty reliably.

Things have rather moved on since those days and I can’t say it’s all been bad. Also I still consider it my day, so you won’t yet hear me say ‘Back in my day…’. As you probably know there have been 3 more entries since the original elite. Elite: Frontiers (Presumably where Frontier got it’s name after Ian  Bell and David Braben went their separate ways) followed by Elite Frontiers: First Encounters (Elite 3) and of course more recently by Elite: Dangerous, named after one of the titles you get on the path to Elite, and incidentally the highest rank I achieved in any of the games as combat was never really my thing.

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Text Adventure Tutorial: Multi-Routing

[Edit: Sorry about the formatting, still working on/learning WordPress!]

I had originally planned to look at nouns for this weeks tutorial but I’ve been thinking about multi command sentences a lot, and considering it would be easier to implement now when the parser is quite small rather than at the end when it’s full of all kinds of commands, it makes sense to tackle it this week. Don’t worry, nouns are coming soon!

Building on what I’ve got

I’ve been thinking a lot about some advice that @Darkestkale gave me when I was making my first game. I’m paraphrasing but it was pretty simple, get the best out of what you have, then release something.

I’ve given myself around 2 years to complete Test Flight, and that’s a long time to be doing any project. And I suspect, like all projects, it’s going to take longer than that. Especially factoring in work and family stuff since I can only do this in my own time, which I don’t have a lot of these days! But that’s ok, I’ll get there, ya know?

Text Adventure Tutorial: Parsing Thoughts

So in the last tutorial we set up some structures. Now it’s time to use them. In today’s lesson we’re going to set up a simple parser, the tool that does all the decision making, to look at our environment, and move around in it.