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Author Archives: Kyzrati

Adventures in Map Zooming, Part 2: Engine-level Architecture

Taking a different tack from last time, I decided that it would be worth getting really dirty with low-level engine work for the next attempt at map zooming. One of the main reasons we’d need to go this route if there’s ever to be hope of reasonable performance in software mode: Dirty rects. If we […]

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Adventures in Map Zooming, Part 1: Realtime Image Scaling

A few years back I introduced an experiment to demonstrate a potential “overmap” implementation that still obeys the rules of the terminal interface. What about the opposite–a way to zoom the map itself? Obviously this would be intended for a completely different purpose, addressing one of the more common complaints about Cogmind, that on some […]

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Experimenting with Drone PIP

Early this month I was streaming a Cogmind run on Twitch, at one point once again sending out drones to scout around as I like to do. Drones are generally pretty fast, and I’ll often just make sure I’m in a relatively safe spot and keep an eye on what the drone(s) find while I […]

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Projectile Deflection

Ever since my first design docs from Cogmind pre-alpha, written back in 2013, I always wanted a projectile deflection mechanic. Like it doesn’t get much cooler than that, being able to swat away bullets or even send beams back at an attacker, or redirect them into other targets. Every few years I think about the […]

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A Simple Approach to Player-Designed Robots

I like the idea of designing robots, putting together builds for a particular purpose or with particular capabilities in mind. As I’ve stated many times before, my first influence for Cogmind was the original BattleTech board game, where my friends and I wouldn’t just take stock mechs, but designed our own based on the rules, […]

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