  wordpress blog | 
Posted - 1/14/2008 1:22:07 PM | i've started up a new wordpress blog, and i'm going to be doing most of my blogging there for a while. i'll post updates here from time to time, but if you're interested, point your browser here:
http://steelgolem.wordpress.com
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| ActionRPG | 
Posted - 1/13/2008 1:52:46 AM | i was gonna build the npcs into actionrpg, but i realized i don't really have enough of the other stuff built yet to properly support them. well, i put them in anyways:
so yeah. i've got yellow statues of everyone standing around town. even got the dead guy laying in front of the "church". his code handle is DeadGuy. yep, real imaginative. so you can walk up to everyone and the TriangleButton action will toggle Talk on and off as you approach and face them. you just can't talk to them yet. i'm just pretending they're statues for now.
so yeah, i'm putting npcs on hold until there's more of a reason than chat panels to get them going any more than i have. all of the npcs in tristram (except for farnham) do things other than chat, and i need to start looking at that stuff. most of them want to sell you stuff, so that requires a trading gui. cain wants to identify your items at cost, and pepin wants to heal you. on top of all of that, everyone wants to check your quests and sometimes give you new ones. since i don't have any of that ready for them to use, there's just no point in going any further with this right now.
what it does mean, is i have a few new things to focus on. i think if i'm going to do anything, i'm going to work on doing magical item drops and working the different qualities in: swords come in a variety of flavors such as short and bastard. i'm gonna start looking at dlvl and all of that stuff.
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| Thursday, January 10, 2008 |
| Space Fortress code | 
Posted - 1/10/2008 5:38:51 PM | if i had known it was going to turn out this way, i woulda started off as simply as possible. i'm working on the collision detection and response code again, and its just such a pain in the ass.
ok so i've gotten it so you can crash into the fortress and slide along its walls. there's no prob there anymore. the problem is more about aesthetic as far as i can tell right now. see, what i wanted to do was have a PreCollisionLogic and PostCollisionLogic bit, and have the collision be done by a generic collider in between. i overcomplicated it before it was even working, i know.
here's a general idea of what i'm doing in my game logic right now:
- move player along x.
- check for collision between player and tilemap.
- if colliding, reflect velocity in x and move player back along x.
- move player along y.
- check for collision between player and tilemap.
- if colliding, reflect velocity in y and move player back along y.
now you can be sure this code works. if i could leave it be, i'd be golden. but i can't. i just can't. see, i'm going to need to do collisions between more than just one tilemap. for every object (or list) i need to collide the player with, i need to add the code twice. looking forward, every other object that needs to collide with the tilemap also has to go through this process. thats why i came up with the precoldet and postcoldet stuff.. but i can't seem to come up with a way to do the above code in a cleaner one-step manner. i have to move twice, and check for (and deal with) collisions twice.
anyone have any clues i could use?
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| burn out | 
Posted - 1/10/2008 3:41:56 PM | yesterday i was hooked on Ken Silverman's Homepage, playing with his Voxlap demo. played a little more ff12ds before bed. i think i've been burned out or something. gonna tackle the code now.
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| Wednesday, January 9, 2008 |
| ff12ds | |
Posted - 1/9/2008 6:58:04 AM | so yesterday i forked out $60 for Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings, the ds ff rts. i made it through the first chapter (basic training), but just barely. i had to die three times on stage 1-4. i'm not super good at rts games yet, but i considered myself at least passable - continually being raped in 1-4 made me awfully angry. was it me? was it the game? when i beat the level, i was thrilled, but i didn't want to play it anymore. it exhausted me. all of the walking around town i did probably didn't help, either. i slept like a frickin rock.
having said all that, i'm going to probably pick it up again today just to make sure of whether the game does or does not hate me. i'm not going to have $200 of free-spend GST cash to wander the town with, though - and keep me from my code. i'll be a good little game coder and get some work done. i promise.
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| Space Fortress | |
Posted - 1/8/2008 7:16:24 AM | collision detection.
so i had a thought yesterday, on my collision detection and response pains.
wait, lemme fill you in a little on what that means exactly. you see that crappy breakout below? yeah, well i was doing that because i needed collision stuff for space fortress. i thought, i think i want the same response from running into stuff as breakout has. as you might expect, detecting collisions between two rectangles was fairly easy - the problem was what to do with the information i had found out. i couldn't seem to get good results from rebounds, even with something as simple as breakout.
after a while, someone in #ludumdare suggested i use a movex-check/respond, movey-check/respond method. i was golden. then i tried the exact same code (cut&paste!) in space fortress. for some reason when you pushed up against the map, you'd zip along the other axis until you were around a corner. it didn't happen all the time, just when you were below a certain velocity and trying to get yourself flat against a wall. and even then it wasn't happening all the time, only along certain x or y values, like all along the top or all along the edge between tiley=31 and tiley=32. stupid stuff like that.
i'm still not exactly sure what it was about, but i'm guessing that it's an issue with floating-point error. and so i got to thinking: if we're dealing with tilemaps and sprites, why am i stepping outside of pixelspace? as long as i plan on using a 1:1 pixelspace:d3dspace conversion, why am i using sub-pixel tests and positioning? why not just trunc all my floats and deal with ints again? wouldn't that solve my problems, and make it a whole lot easier to think about these things in the future?
i didn't get any time yesterday after work to start this. i will be today, though. i'm hoping this will work out as i expect it to. don't get me wrong though! i still think that i need to use floating point values to store position and velocity. imagine trying to accelerate using only integers! no no, i'm only suggesting that collision detection and draw positions be pixel-aligned.
when i succeed (or fail horribly) i'll post more about this.
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| Space Fortress | |
Posted - 1/6/2008 9:15:30 PM | so i've finally gotten this underway again. i had a hell of a time with collision and response between squares/rects and tilemaps. there was always something not quite right. thankfully x-out in #ludumdare gave me the tip i needed to get out of my bind.
i don't have any screens worth showing yet, but i do have a bit of the controls and fortress interaction on the go. you can fly around and into fortresses, you can bounce off the walls and stick to them, and shoot them. i've got a slew of things i want to implement still, but most of the player input is in.
i'll post as i make leaps forward.
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| winforms breakout | |
Posted - 1/4/2008 3:32:16 AM | yeah yeah i'm sure you're screaming at the monitor by now. WELL PIPE DOWN! i had a reason to do this. in the first place, i actually haven't ever successfully built breakout. sure, i had the bat and ball - but i couldn't figure out what to do in response to a collision detect between ball and brick.
after two very late nights with rtwilli and guntar in #gamedevelopers over on starchat, and x-out and co. in #ludumdare on afternet, i finally defeated this cursed problem! the result:
sg-breakout-200801040413.zip (offline) - 60.56 KB, req .net
[edit: fixed 'er up, now it REALLY works right. you don't wanna know how stupid i was being.
vvv use this one instead vvv]
sg-breakout-200801050241.zip - 74.00 KB, req .net
mouseover the form to move the bat around. the corner collision response isn't *perfect* but its gonna work well enough in most cases that noone's gonna bitch at me about it. i think.
anyways, why'd i make this atrocity aside from laying the demon in my past to rest? i actually needed the response code for space fortress. simple answer, huh? its 4am so i'm gonna go to bed now that i'm done with it.
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