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Bits N Bobbins

Short post on progress things.  Things have just been lots of grunt work and non pretty things.

Will have things to show real soon.

Honest.

  • basic player object ..er.. exists and rotates properly.. mostly.  need to knock out some better test sprites and stuff to be able to make things actually ‘work’ together, but the fundamental concept of 8 direction independently moving head, torso, arms, lowerbody seems to work and will look pretty cool.
  • monster entities can be spawned and basically kept track of.. no AI or whatnot but still it’s a start.
  • Implemented basic box2d physics for player and monsters. this will have all sorts of fun payoff later I hope. Force waves, shapnel etc 🙂
  • Got the macro tiles wired for a* pathfinding.
  • Got the World generating a Maze and then replacing it with matching macrotiles that randomly match the exits of the cell.
  • started on map rendering
  • camera instance screen objects so I can have a smooth moving controllable camera that chases the player.
See.. lots of neat stuff… however nothing that you can actually look at other than a bunch of  diagnostic log output.
Performance wise it seems to be running at ~240 fps on the low end test machine and ~somewhere over 3,000 fps on the new machine.
So I might need to add in a ‘laptop’ mode which disables the whiz bang pretty stuff I hope to get put in.
and damnit .. http://www.garagegames.com/products/torque-3d the introductory price will be ending soon.
So I’ve got to grab that soon.
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Screenshot Saturday

Managed to get the web editor exporting tileframe data nicely, and with a few modifications was able to get TGB to import the new map data and render the maps in the existing tilemaps.  🙂 yaay.

New tilemaps in Game Engine.

Now if I can only find out what makes it crash when you touch the mouse……

*scratch head*.. well at least it’s progress..

Oh and we have new and very awesome epic in-game music now from www.indiegraphics.net

So it’s  been a good week overall.

[Edit::]  Found the Crash.  it was to do with the checks for various player positions on the tilemap for shooting.  Which is totally obsolete, due to the new tilemap, so it was crashing.

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Mar 7 update – alpha 4 released

Whew, so It’s been a while since I released alpha 2… Soo much has changed and been improved.  Here’s a brief changelog of stuff I can remember off the top of my head.

  • New main menu and faster startup times. 
  • Lots more assets to load at startup so it’s actually doing stuff while you have to look at the pictures.
  • New map. A huge dungeon assembled off arenas from the web map generator.
  • Rooms seal upon entry and then depending on how deep you are get harder and harder.
  • Sounds!  ok just some basic sounds but man does it make a difference.
  • New look for gameplay areas and tiles. 

Alpha 4 new main menu

Aplha 4 - screenshot 2 gameplay

Lots of hooks are ready for easy insertion of new enemies, powerups, and the special items that will be included in the store  you can visit between levels (soon).

Overall I’m incredibly pleased with the amount of progress.  I’m mostly excited about having reached a point where I can do so many thing (new graphics, monsters, quests… the mind boggles!!!)

For now, I’m just gonna play a bit.

As always you can download it here(~12mb), and as always use it at your own risk, I make no claims that it won’t terrorize your cat, melt your eyeballs, or do any other unpredictable things..  But it seems to be working just fine for me.

[edit] changed out some sounds for better samples of what I intend for the end product. [/edit]

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A good weekend’s worth of progress.

ss0Made a pretty hefty chunk of progress over the weekend and last two nights.

Some behind the scenes work with putting everything in the level controlled by a manager object that keeps track of what’s going on and what to spawn next.

 

 

 

 

 

ss1

Off the top of my head:

  • WSAD controls work.
  • Money powerup (yellow dots)
  • Magic powerup (blue Sigils)
  • monsters drop money and score interfaces.
  • New guis
  • Basic fundamentals of waves are in place. 
  • Object thresholds are in place so (in theory) it shouldnt crash due to too many simultanious spawns.

 

As always this is an alpha build, play with it at yer own risk.

 Graphics are primarily placeholders.. No there isn’t any sound yet. 

You can download it here www.swiftthought.com/BSDDoD/BSDD0D-alpha002.zip (3.94mb)

Feedback always appreciated.

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Been learning flash..

Been playing around learning some flash bits n pieces..and Holy moly!  it’s starting to make sense. Gradually…

But man.. is flash slow performance wise.  Anyway here’s today’s little excercise.  It’s not entirely properly OOP since I didn’t extend the base MovieClip class and just slapped the functions into the various instances.. But New classes are the next thing I’m tackling.. and then passing and fetching javascript data back and forth for flajaxy goodness.

tilebounce

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Easy as cake

Hmm so I’m grandually getting comfortable wiht the whole MCV arhictecture of dev elopment.  I’ve decided to more or less just give a pass to Ruby on Rails for now and see about getting cakephp up and implemented to my workflow. 

Having a hard time with the initial mental gymnastics to fully embrace it but it’s gradually starting to make sense.

For now, though, It may be time to just take a break and take a look at some bigger picture items and play around with my paints while things gel.

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The end of the year.

So, It’s been a good year.  Overall… Though I’d say the first 7 months or so really…er.. sucked.. The last 5 have been absolutely spectacular.

The holiday’s are just about gone.  My christmas tree is still up and glorious and the presents are scattered around the house.  The remnants of nerf battles past lie scattered around in the corners.

The amazon wish list was a success Including an awesome score of a copy of Descent: journeys into the dark, Feersum Endjinn, a nice iPod alarm clock and other goodies!

But, it’s about time to start a pet project… and no time like the beginning of a fresh year to do so. Soo… I’ve cracked open some Ruby on Rails tutorials and am gearing up for the start of an actual development.  I need to crank out some milestones and a basic design guideline and then go from there.

But on the other hand… I did get some cool canvas boards that are just itching to get slathered with paint, not to mention my copy of painter has been doing good things.. so maybe that will distract me.. 

Boy, life is hard with too many hobbies… 🙂

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Turkey Time approaches.

Well the year sure went fast. 

Been playing with some basic python and pygame stuff.  Seems like a pretty easy to learn language and api, just havent gotten myself convinced for the need to learn yet another language… oh well Im sure I’ll think of something to use for an excuse.

But it probably wont be until Xmas.  Letting the brain relax and just enjoying some neglected games and movies and such.  blah blah blah blah..

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Productivity Paint & Pretty Lines

Soo it’s been a fairly productive beginning of November.  I’ve got the version 1.0 of the new http://www.beautifulbasics.com up and running.  Still need to put up some instructions etc etc.  But the core functionality is there and it works fine.

Yaay and It’s actually quite addictive, and embeddable into myspace/facebook etc etc.  I’ve got a whole list of secondary features to add to it and minor bugs to iron out.  

I’ve been playing with the acrylics again and starting to get a feel for it.  Maybe things actually get easier with practice…. nahh.  Anyway it was quite fun  to just glop paint around and see what emerged.  Can’t wait to do it again.

 

just messing around
just messing around

Oh well back to the salt mines.

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Joomla seems like a good thing to know

Bought a book about Joomla a lil bit ago and just reading over it makes it seem like a wonderful platform for doing a whole bunch of really really neat things.  It kinda makes me want to redo the custom CMS i’ve been making at work for the last 3 months for fuddruckers.  Well ok there’s some pretty significant things that aren’t in there for that particular job.  Nonetheless it looks like a very robust foundation to know and be able to expand upon.  So I’m goind to get started on the Drakkheim.com lan planning / management site just to get more comfortable with the ins and outs of the system.  

Hopefully once I knock it out I’ll have the knowledge to use Joomla as a base platform for many many other things that I’ve got planned both at home and at work.

In completely unrelated news Robert Asprin and Lody Lynn Nye have released another book in the wonderful MYTH series called Myth-Chief..   Jeez come to think of it I’ve been following those for close to 15 years now..  Well here’s to another 15.