There’s a time in everyone’s life where they think, “This is it, I’ve gone too far this time, I’m actually going to die.” In my case, that’s more like several times, ranging from the time I climbed over the fence protecting my frail human body from a local power substation, to the time I was hit by a van travelling at enough speed to cause me to literally lose all memory of the impact. Today, that feeling returns again with an energy shot which is so obscure, it doesn’t even show up on Google. Think about that for a moment. This may very well be the first LSV Shot review in the world. I feel both pride and terror. I’m like Christopher fucking Columbus here.

The bottle identifies itself as an “Intense Mixed Fruit Flavour Drink with Sugar and Sweetener”, which worries me deeply. The chemical content is fairly tame, though — 75mg of caffeine, and some vaguer quantities of taurine, and glu… gluco… glucuronolactone. What’s the worst that could happen, he says, while opening the bottle and spilling a sweet-smelling splash on his t-shirt. My god, do they ever want to give value for money, this gunk is literally filled up to the brim.

Speaking of the smell, it reminds me a fair amount of the Monster energy shot; it’s a fairly gentle, sweet, pleasing aroma which almost makes me not regret this whole escapade. Maybe I’m weak or maybe the bottle is unusually tall, but I’m inclined to swig it back in three shot-glass-sized mouthfuls, each about as jarring as the last, and…

And here’s where it gets crazy. No, not because I swear the image on the screen out of the corner of my eye is jittering slightly. The madness comes because the flavour — while tinged with the sharp, brackish edge that plagues most energy shots (is this what caffeine tastes like?), the flavour is gone remarkably quickly, leaving very little aftertaste. I’d dare say it’s even moderately pleasant to swallow, as insane as such a suggestion might be. Certainly not the kind of flavour I’d want to kick back with in a tall glass at the end of a long day, but as far as energy shots go — especially ones so low-priced, as evidenced by the branded price tag — it’s really quite good.

The low caffeine content is the kicker, though. 75mg? I’d get more caffeine than that licking the counter-top at Starbucks, and likely cheaper, too. Still, I’d take a dozen of these over even one of the horrible alternatives any day of the week, and at least this way, maybe the Starbucks staff will stop looking at me with such disdain.

Well, it’s been a pretty crazy 24 hours since I decided to implement my plans for a pseudo-3D engine in Remnant Core, but I’m happy to say things are mostly working. In the process I’ve crushed some old bugs — including one that’s been around since the very first version, 0.0.1! — and struggled with some new ones that have cropped up, while inadvertently changing the data storage structures in such a way that they literally take a quarter of the space they did before (despite the addition of 3D space). It’s been a long, strange trip, but the engine is now well on the way to fully supporting this new 3D environment. And did I not say I’d post proof-of-concept screens when I got it working?

First, we start off on the street at ground level (fig.A). This is nothing special. But let’s go up to the second floor (fig.B). Suddenly things get interesting; the dark blue is the street below, we’ve already seen it at ground level so it’s “remembered” at this level up too. Now we blow a hole in the wall (fig.C) and have a clearer view — if we hadn’t already seen the street below, it’d be seen and remembered by this point, vision extends one Z-level above and below the player. Blowing a hole in the wall of the opposite building (fig.D) lets us take a look in there too, but dropping back down to street level (fig.E) we can only see ground level again; the destruction is not visible, as it happened on the second floor.

Of course, that’s just the tip of the iceberg as far as the potential of this 3D engine goes, but it should give a fairly decent example of how the game handles multi-storey buildings, without separating them into completely individual spaces. Not bad for a day’s work, huh?

I know I said I wasn’t going to do any more major code re-writes, that Remnant Core was getting to the stage where I was really happy with its internal workings and had no particular urge to rebuild its core functions further. But like Archimedes discovering the displacement of water in his bathtub, I was suddenly struck with possibly the greatest idea I’ve had so far — and, more importantly, the method in which to implement this insane plan.

I’m talking, of course, about the third dimension. While I’d already planned on expanding the city-building algorithm to create buildings with multiple floors, I was struck by some fundamental flaws in that design: Could the player not simply run up a flight of stairs and be instantly safe from whatever horrors lurked below? Would time stop on anything but the current layer of building? None of this seemed terribly adequate for my grand designs, until suddenly the idea and method of execution popped into my head.

Now, I don’t want to explain how I’d implement this — something I believe I can reliably work into the existing 2D code in a matter of hours — but the plan would allow for some truly unique mechanics, such as explosions that not only damage the structure of the current level but the levels above and below, or perhaps a scenario I regaled a friend with while elaborating on the plan — the player could run up a flight of stairs and set a trap at the top for the following hordes of demonic horrors to run into, or perhaps destroy an outer wall with a grenade and jump out of the second floor, landing (and taking minor damage from the fall) on the street outside, having time to flee before the horrors catch up.

I think this’d add an extra dimension — if you’ll pardon the pun — of strategy and depth to the game, something which I honestly haven’t seen outside of Dwarf Fortress; most roguelikes treat each two-dimensional “floor” as a separate entity entirely. And let it not be said that I’m all talk; if this plan works out as well as I’ve imagined it in my head, I’ll be posting proof-of-concept screenshots the very moment I’ve got it working.

Keep your eyes peeled. Shit is about to get real.

Edit @ 2:58pm: Terrain data structures modified, three-dimensional world is now partially working. There’s a lot of things (e.g. dropping items) that are going to need work, monster AI still doesn’t work in 3D, LoS is broken but not difficult to fix.  Gravity is going to be a bitch.
Edit @ 3:35pm: Line-of-sight, terrain flags and visibility fixed, “copypasta” routine used in area generation now 3D-compatible. Taking a break!
Edit @ 9:43pm: Things are more or less working great, including visibility to lower levels (standing on a rooftop looking down at the city, etc.), though it’s introduced a slew of new bugs and brought some obscure old ones to light which have been floating around since around 0.17 or so. This’ll take a few days to clean up. Screenshots soon!
Edit @ 11.00am: Oh dear god what. One of the bugs that’s surfaced could easily have been a part of the code since the very first version of the game. We’re talking 0.0.1 here. It’s become pretty ingrained and will take some effort to budge.

For those who may or may not be wondering where the hell I’ve been lately, the answer is mostly along the lines of being up to my ears in code. I’ve been working pretty hard on Remnant Core, the roguelike project I started in October and put on the bench for a couple of months before digging out again. While there isn’t anything to show off to the public yet, all I can do is assure those who have shown an interest in the project that things are coming along nicely, and I’ve got some screenshots in the Remnant Core section of the site if you want a peek, though it’s early days yet.

Truth be told, most of the work so far has been going into the engine and the structure of the game; I admit I’ve made a lot of mistakes in the early days and more or less had to scrap and re-build everything from scratch around December, and it was largely put on hold aside from a little tinkering until March, but it’s been coming in leaps and bounds over the last month. Debugging has also become less of a pain in the ass, as I’ve got some nicely integrated code to output a more helpful message during segfaults, and recently solved an infinite-loop problem with the city generator which had been baffling me for a good hour before I finally broke down, wrote extra code to output logs to a text file, and sifted through the several megs of output.

19:02 building_a(): Mapping out secondary rooms.
19:02 building_a(): Second sweep for secondary rooms.
19:02 building_a(): Viable green areas found: 0. Cutting out corridors.

Oops. That’s what I get for making assumptions: The secondary corridor routine requires at least one green area (a colour-coded identifier for a certain shape and type of generated rooms), preferably a dozen or more. At least now that’s nailed down, I can see about re-implementing the limited-tries system (which will grudgingly accept below-average quality constructions after trying more than a hundred or so times — with a little luck it won’t segfault this time), and start work on the second building generator. Complicated stuff, but it’ll all be worth it in the end, I guarantee it.

And there it is. Perfect. Pure. This is what I wanted in my stomach today. Oh yes.

To say I don’t cook very often would be an understatement; in fact, I’d go as far as to suggest that the vast majority of my diet is based upon microwaved ready-meals and various pre-made concoctions that come in tins. Occasionally I’ll branch out and experiment — such as the time I successfully re-heated cooked sausages by using a toaster — but for the most part, it’s best for everyone’s sake that I refrain. Today, I decided to attempt an ill-fated experiment with making enchiladas, courtesy of an Old El Paso meal kit. Having had excellent results from the nachos kit in the past, what could go wrong?

As it turns out, a great deal.

Given that the kit provides enough food for 3-4 people, I decided to go halves on the ingredients. Easy — I’d bought two packs of cooked chicken and a bag of grated cheese, but it was easy enough to separate the cheese and only open a single pack of chicken. The pre-heating the oven and slicing the chicken parts went pretty well, too, though of course I got a couple of oil splashes from stir-frying said chicken. The fail begins when I was instructed to mix the “spice mix” powder with hot water, and combine that with both sachets of tomato sauce. I did so, splashing tomato substance all over the kitchen and myself numerous times in the process, and it was only after I looked upon my creation with pride before I remembered the whole halves thing.

Shit.

I feel like a kid on Christmas Eve who just discovered Santa isn't real.

Time to fry up more chicken and acquire more minor oil-burns (including, of course, fumbling and pouring far too much oil into the pan), realizing the bowl wasn’t even big enough to combine the new quantities of chicken and cheese required and thus having to combine them clumsily into a larger bowl (more spillage), chicken going everywhere as I tried to combine the un-mixed and mixed parts together. But surely, even if I end up with too much food, it can’t go wrong now?

Wrong again. Now it comes to spooning the filling into the tortillas, during which point I somehow managed to get spicy tomato sauce all over my leg without even fully understanding how. I also realized that the baking tray it required was currently used to house the sauce/cheese/chicken mixture, requiring yet another messy transfer before my truly appalling attempts to wrap the filling in the circles of corn and wheat. And then I realize the baking tray is far, far too small, requiring the kind of desperation that only a starving chef could appreciate, literally forcing the things down into a barely-coherent mass in the tray, my miscalculations on filling size providing less and less in each tortilla, which helped only slightly. Pouring on the rest of the sauce and the remainder of the cheese, more tomato goodness went everywhere.

Finally — not sure if the tray is oven-safe or not but hardly caring at this point — I thrust it into the kiln-like depths and awaited the result.

The results: Not quite as advertised, though I blame myself entirely for this failure. A mass of gooey, red-and-yellow sludge topped with what almost resembles elbow macaroni, concealing beneath a sad, crushed amalgm of god only knows what, forced into far too small a space with all the wrong quantities, begging to be eaten just so it can be put out of its miserable existence.

And this is why I’m not a chef.