#noxico

[kawaoneechan]

I just realized that the oldest post on the Noxico devblog is dated November 12 2012.

Looking in my archived copy of the older site, the plans file is from February 2012.

A super old copy of the logo in the same folder is from October 2011.

Duke Nukem Forever took 14 years, 1997 to 2011. I started on Noxico that same year.

I'm nearing DNF-tier development time and it's still not in a state I'd consider worth playing.

Taking on other projects probably doesn't help but jesus fuck.

[kawaoneechan]

I wouldn't call it a dungeon crawler (it's a roguelike) but I feel like adding "pooltoy" bodily descriptors would be perfectly doable in Noxico.

hyperfixations merged, now I want to make a dungeon crawler where you turn into a pooltoy

[lba-stock]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8QJjjIGh18)

AKAI x EIKI present Djane Ki & Dj Bouto aka the BRAND NEW BASTARDS : live set at Electroloco #7.

- ELECTRO LOCO #7 : powered by Brainstorm'X - 13-04-2019 @ Le Moloco, Audincourt, Fr.

- LINE UP : Boris Rockwell, Tess Wassila, Kiko, Noxico, Brand New Bastards.

- CREDITS : live vjing improvised and captured by Eiki, soundtrack captured thru stereo microphone by Martial Daunis.

- BIG UP TO : Dj Noxico, Noëlle Mammaire, Sound & Light Crew, Laser Système show, Rurals Ravers & Dusty Dancers.

- Produced by AKAI x EIKI (p)&(c) 2019 at LBA Studio - Strasbourg (Fr).

http://akaixeiki.tumblr.com

http://brandnewbastards.tumblr.com

http://labandeadhesive.hautetfort.com

[brandnewbastards]

¿ ® U ready to take the flash ?

[nucleoakatintasucia-blog]

Gracias a @muphasamc a todo el equipo @noxico y a la banda ! Nuevo vídeo en YouTube en el canal oficial del quinto de lo que fue nuestra pasada por el estudio luís Alberto espinetta. #rap #hiphop #eltrianguloestudio #24siempre #nucleoakatintasucia (en Vorterix Radio)

[logopending-backup]

Ladies. Go home. You're drunk.

[kawaoneechan]

I should work on Noxico some more. But I feel like what it needs more is data, which would guide what code it needs…

[kawaoneechan]

I just did a steamboat% run on Noxico, as in "how fast can you add Mickey Mouse to a game he has nothing to do with?"

Eight minutes, but his tail description is broken and he's lacking his iconic outfit.

[kawaoneechan]

Last night I made the save button in the key remap dialog for Noxico actually, y'know, save. It was marked TODO since I first added that dialog.

I'd added that dialog box in September 2019.

[kawaoneechan]

GitHub repo status update

SCI Companion - updated today, six issues

The Dating Pool (private) - today

SCI 1.1+ - two weeks ago

Asspull IIIx ROMs - August 29, four issues need help

Asspull IIIx main emulator - August 29

Softporn Adventure (C rewrite) - December 26, 2022

KiSS thing - October 22, 2022

Noxico - September 3, 2022, four issues

There are more but they don't matter.

[kawaoneechan]

Get me up to 5.000 followers and I'll put sex in Noxico.

[kawaoneechan]

Why I don't like Unity

There's three reasons, basically, besides my personal inability to get any custom character assets into Unity, Unreal, or Godot.

Let me tell you below the readmore.

Reason #1: it managed to fucking bluescreen my system just trying to start.

How do you fuck that up? I download an installer and run it. This gives me a launcher. From there, I'm supposed to install the actual product I wanted to begin with. That's bad enough, to be honest. But then the fucking launcher managed to break so badly, I had my first BSOD in several months. With all I do to my poor laptops, I so very rarely got crashes like that it honestly threw me the fuck off.

If the launcher is gonna play like that, forget about installing the actual product.

Reason #2: CPU pegging up the ass.

On my previous laptop, attempting to run basically any Unity-based game would peg the CPU, all cores, until the poor thing ran so hot within mere minutes, it'd commit preventative sudoku. Maybe if I was lucky, I'd get a chance to set all the things to "lowest", and that might let me, I dunno, play long enough to get through the goddamn tutorial?

And I'm not even talking about state-of-the-art 3D games, but simple 2D games with low-resolution pixel art. Why would those run a dual-core at 200% until it fucking kills itself? Makes no sense.

Now, Phil Fortier of Icefall Games is an acquaintance of mine via SCI shenanigans, and when he released Snow Spirit (soon to be rereleased as part of Chronicles of Cascadia), I lamented to him about how his use of Unity would mean I couldn't run any of his stuff. So Phil looked into it and found a Big Fucking Thing to optimize. This basically makes Phil's SCI games the only things made in Unity that I can personally trust won't Do That.

Reason #3: About those 2D games...

I'm gonna dip into my Twitter archives for a bit and repost some stuff for this part.

*wavy flashback effect*

This is Angel Jump, a simple little arcade jumping game that's available on itch.io:

It's delightfully low resolution and has like four seconds of audio all added up. Can't be more than a few MB, depending on which sane development framework they used, right?

33 MB, actually. Because Unity. Let's see how it breaks down:

Unity main exe: 623 KB

Main game assets file: 1.19 MB together

A folder full of support DLLs like terrain and cloth: 7.17 MB, 90% or more of them never called because this is a 2D pixel-art game.

Unity's default resources: 3.41 MB. Mind that of these, only the splash logo is actually used because Angel Jump was made in the free edition.

Mono embedded runtime: 2.61 MB, and each game gets its own copy, much like how Electron apps each have their own copies of Chromium.

And another 17 MB for the Unity Player.

All in all, 33 MB of files for a game like that. Why? Because Unity is a bloated crapsack, I'd conclude from a cursory study like that. Let's compare that to some other games.

This is Elevator Girl, which is not on itch.io.

It has a lot of different animations and three fairly long background music tracks. It's only one file, 18.7 MB. I'm willing to bet most of that is the BGM, but I can't confirm it because it's just the one file.

And just for some historical perspective, the entire Crystal Caves trilogy is 1.31 MB, including some chaff. Commander Keen 4 on its own is 740 KB. Now, Keen and Elevator Girl both have OPL soundtracks, but the latter's is probably streamed.

Noxico is only 1.25 MB to download as a .7z file. Its only optimization that I myself actively apply is that I crunch the PNG files. The rest is text, and since the game uses a .zip file by another name as a game data source... yeah. That's a cheap win.

Now, back to Angel Jump. I went through the game's own resources to see what size it could conceivably have if it was not made in Unity. 54 textures, ten of them actually used. Tiny font stored in a weird way, possibly for distance field trickery which has no business in a 2D pixel game if you ask me. 921 KB of WAV files, high-quality bleepity-bloops, two of them jingles. 4.22 KB of PNG files, crunched like Noxico, for all but the creator's logo and the font. 973 KB for a copy of SDL, and I'd estimate at worst two MB for the main EXE.

The entire Angel Jump game could be no more than 4 MB and a half-dozen files, It's actually 33.2 MB, 92 files.

There's a more general computer programming issue that this reliance on Unity for even the simplest, smallest games seems to spring from: the bigger and better the computers get, the more lazy the developers get. Only have like four MHz, 640 KB of RAM and, what, 720 KB of diskette space, and no guarantee of an HDD? Better make the most of it, developers! But now the pressure's off and there's no more reason to exert any effort into keeping small games actually small.

*sigh*

[kawaoneechan]

One thing I've had in mind for Project Special K from the start is to have a text construction system like in Noxico. @demifiendcruithne may remember setting me off on that.

In Animal Crossing, characters may refer to random things like magazines, TV shows, and such, but the rest of those sentences are completely fixed.

This system is intended to allow more dynamic lines. Given this test data

and the starting sentence "<ws:?:greeting>", this system can randomly pick variations from the list, which may themselves contain more "<ws:...>" tags.

So one time I run this, I get Mitzi saying "Hello, Kawa!", while the next time she says "Hey, Kawa!". Which is a super-simple example but still!

You might notice I had a question mark in the starting sentence, and there's another in the "greeting" line. That's the personality placeholder. I picked "normal" on mostly a whim, but if there is no current speaker (it's the player?) it can fall back to "normal", and if there is a speaker but there's no line for their personality it can still fall back to the same.

Plus, I didn't test this but something I implemented some time ago: when retrieving these strings from storage, there may be a condition instead of a map of translations. Depending on that Lua expression, it can retrieve one of two other strings, so whenever personalities aren't enough for this new system to handle, there's another one right below it.

Here's what a conditional looks like:

[kawaoneechan]

When I said I'd put sex in Noxico at 5,000 followers I didn't mean porn bots, folks.

*reloads shotgun*

[kawaoneechan]

What project(s) of yours would you recommend checking out?

Take your pick! There's the big ones:

The Dating Pool (DOS, point & click)

Noxico (Win/Mono, erotic roguelike)

Project Special K (Win, Animal Crossing clone)

Asspull IIIx (Win, fantasy console)

And there's the smaller fry:

Untitled Corti game (Win/maybe Mono, platform game)

Farrah's Ordinary Work Day (Z-Machine, text adventure)

All of them are on my github, but not all of them are public.

[kawaoneechan]

Some "achievements" a'ight...

So here's me looking at the achievements for NetHack Legacy, a Steam version of NetHack that apparently does not have the original developers' blessing and costs like five dollars unless you're willing to try and find the source code and then build it yourself. And the only reason the source code is there for free to begin with is to pay lip service to the original's license.

What do you get for your efforts? An in-game soundtrack, a CRT filter, some QoL from other NetHack forks, and of course achievements. So I'm looking at the list and...

Hmmm. It seems they couldn't think of any achievements for a roguelike either. That's the whole reason I started looking into the topic in the first place — Noxico used to have 'em for a short while, on my own self-hosted imitation system. There were like... two or three, mostly for testing purposes.

In NetHack Legacy, you get achievements for starting the game, one for each class, and another for having started at least once for each class. How is that worth anything? You expended literally no effort to earn this! You get one achievement for beating the game (good luck) and another for beating it as specific classes, and with various conducts. That's so much effort, statistically almost no NHL player even has any of these.

First of all, beating NetHack is not an easy feat and you're very liable to die trying. Two, beating the game while adhering to various conducts is among the most "proper achievements" stuff I've listed yet, but it's still super hard to beat the game in the first place.

And then there's the "NetHack Master" achievement. Description is hidden but the internal name is `ACH_ASCEND_ALLACH`, so that's the "beat the game all these other ways" achievement, if I had to guess.

According to Steam, "YES!" (the "beat the game at all" chive) has a 0.7% achievement rate. See? Statistically nothing. Specific classes? 0.1%, same as the conduct-specific ones. In case you doubted my words about NetHack being hard.

And then there's the quest and location achievements, which can be gained simply by playing long enough. Be a specific class, you're almost guaranteed to drop into your class' specific quest map.

The only standout I could find was "NetHacker", description hidden, but the ID tells me you get it for cheating in the Sokoban minigame.

Compare all that to Team Fortress 2. The "Crime and Punishment" achievement is earned by playing as a Heavy and killing ten enemies carrying your team's intel. This is achievement worthy because Heavy is slow and whoever carries the intel is likely to hotfoot it the hell outta there. You may even jump the gun and accidentally kill them before they grab the intel, and that doesn't count.

I don't think I need to tell you how different that is from, let's say, finding the Oracle in NetHack, which you are almost guaranteed to just stumble upon. I know this from personal experience with the original.