| Wednesday, November 29, 2006 |
  rebounds - Membrane Massacre | 
Posted - 11/29/2006 11:35:31 PM | To HopeDagger:
i've been analyzing collisions in your game and i don't have any reasonable answer to what you're doing, yet. its obvious to me that your ship's collision shape is a circle. you've made it so that the ship's collision circle can eat the walls of the map in certain circumstances:
- you can fly through very thin bits of wall
- if you fly very close to a wall, you can eat it a little bit as you fly by
i can smooth a corner by just flying along it. when i go fullbore at a wall and drift into it, i bounce off in a direction that isn't usually unreasonable. how the hell are you doing that?! i honestly can't figure it out. the reason i haven't ever done a game like this is because i could never figure out a good way to guess the rebound direction. i know how to check to see IF you're touching, and i know how to get a rebound angle if the wall is represented with vectors, but i could never figure out a decent way to guess what the wall's angle was with bitmaps.
i think you mentioned that you hadn't either.
the solution is to figure out what the normal of the surface you'd be rebounding off of would be, right? i'm guessing at a possible solution here, but lets pretend we can figure out an average point of contact between our sphere and the wall. lets take a small area around that point and look at the bitmap data there. for every solid wall pixel in that area, we could make a vector from the pixel to the ship's center, couldn't we? lets suppose we did that and we took an average of those vectors and pretended that it was the perpendicular to the wall.. using our original average point and this new perpendicular, would that be unreasonable to figure out the reflection vector with?
there's no way for me to know unless i actually write a test and see it with my own eyes. maybe that'll be tomorrow's exercise ^_^
[edit:
a couple of last thoughts before bedtime. scattered pixels would try to average themselves into a wall, so thats something i have to look at too. just ploughing through loose pixels and erasing them isn't an unreasonable solution to me.. you must be using the contact area sum as a part of the rebound/erase decision..]
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| not dead, i promise! | 
Posted - 11/29/2006 5:51:28 PM | anyone who hangs out on #gamedev knows i'm still around.. still not much to report, but i AM doing something. when i have more than the idea i'll post, hopefully i'll have a demo. blame hopedagger for this!
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| Saturday, November 25, 2006 |
| random musings | 
Posted - 11/25/2006 12:33:36 PM | played hopedagger's membrane massacre - all done in allegro, it hurts me that i haven't done anything of this calibre yet.. SURELY i could do that :P well honestly the problem is feature creep on that. i tried making a spaceship game and it turned out that i wanted to have a vector-based world that would be fully destructable and properly rebound collisions and stuff. i wanted buildable bases and all sorts of nonsense that i just didn't have plans for, and ended up giving up on it. membrane massacre reminded me of all that fun stuff. who's to say i won't pick up the reigns on that again?
i finally brawled through the important bits of Accelerated C++. wtf? like nothing at all in it on streams! i'm gonna need to buy an stl-specific book. sucky deal. but oh well i'll pick up what i need to as i work through Game Coding Complete, which is what i'm on now.
the topic on my mind right now is how much of a game needs to be known before one should start work on it. like, i realize that i should know everything about the game before i sit at the compiler. but who really does that? like, seriously. but how else am i ever gonna get anything planned if i don't know exactly what i need? i guess i answer my own questions.. ^_^
its funny that i'm reading a thick textbook on making video games and i haven't ever really sat down and figured out exactly what i want out of any of the projects i wanted to make. a racing game where you smash cars up, a spaceship game where you fight big moving bases, an adventure game where you look for items to make yourself more powerful... hasn't all this stuff been done before already? i mean, taking membrane massacre as an example - what sets this game apart from other spaceship games? honestly, not much. but i still had fun with it. isn't that what really matters? i guess thats the real question, what makes something fun?
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| Monday, November 13, 2006 |
| feeding the dinosaurs | |
Posted - 11/13/2006 8:19:40 PM | so yeah i'm playing ff12 and for some reason i'm fascinated by the dinosaur in the first outside area you get to play in. its one of the first things i saw in the game, and i wasn't sure how strong it was so i avoided it mostly. well, being the masochist that i am, i saved at the east gate of rabanastre and went out and attacked the beastie for 0 damage. 715 damage was his response, and i only have 222maxhp. huh. go figure, ITS A DINOSAUR.
anyways, i noticed while i was playing around him that he leaves me alone if i leave him alone - he's got a green healthbar so he's neutral. i was fighting a Wolf nearby him and all of a sudden he charges the wolf and eats the thing! i was like WTF! so i brought more wolves to him. he ate them too! fascination took over. so i studied the dino a bit.. until i attacked him by mistake and was mauled again.
from my savepoint, i ran directly to the dino so he wouldn't eat anything. i wanted to catch him at his weakest. i cast libra on myself and targetted the beast to reveal:
Lv.30 Wild Saurian A
HP 6111/6111
i had some wolves tailing me already so i just waited near the saurian, and...
Wild Saurian A uses Cannibalize.
Wild Saurian A feeds on Wolf E, growing stronger.
yay! lets look at him (careful not to attack!)
Lv.36 Wild Saurian A
HP 6205/6771
wheee! eat, my pet! so i fed him some more..
Lv.43 Wild Saurian A
HP 6299/7541
Lv.51 Wild Saurian A
HP 6638/8421
Lv.61 Wild Saurian A
HP 6732/9521
Lv.73 Wild Saurian A
HP 6826/10841
Lv.87 Wild Saurian A
HP 9080/12381
Lv.99 Wild Saurian A
HP 9194/13701
after lv 99 he Cannibalize wouldn't make him any stronger.. so i attacked him! 0 damage?! then he hits for 9999 damage. my poor hp. well, there you have it. i wonder if you get more exp if he's a higher level? i hope he's still there when i'm a higher level, so i can go fight him :)
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| oh yeah, i forgot.. | |
Posted - 11/13/2006 4:39:36 PM | i finally got a decent c++ book, Accelerated C++ by Koenig & Moo. i've barely opened the cover to it, but now that i quit McDonald's, i've got my weekends freed up again. i'm fighting opening the cover right now - but the lure of FF12 is just too great. off to the console!
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| completely random post ahead! beware of text! | |
Posted - 11/13/2006 4:32:59 PM | 4 months of no gdnet+ and i put the $40 bucks forward and re-enlisted. i wonder to myself if it was a wasted $40 - do i need a journal and ftp space here that badly? then i realize that i'm going to be blowing 4x that on fast food this month.. yeah its worth it. even if i only write three entries by the time my subscription renews, it'll still be worth the money.
any of you that know me would know that i'm a longtime penny-arcade fan. for the past two years they've been putting on this thing called Child's Play, and they're doing it again this year. you pick a children's hospital near you and buy something off an amazon.com list that will be given to the children there - video games, books, dvds.. all of the ds' for Halifax have already been purchased. since amazon doesn't do paypal i ended up donating $40 directly instead of buying something, i don't have a credit card. but seriously, even $20 could make a sick kid happy over christmas - its a damn good cause. just do it.
i didn't realize that a person could be oversaturated by gaming goodness, phoenix told me recently that it happens. but i'm starting to feel it. i've got a library of probably about 40 games across a variety of platforms that i want to be playing, but i don't have time for them all. its hard to just pick one and go with it sometimes, but the other games aren't going anywhere so its not too bad i guess.
right now i'm playing final fantasy xii. i thought i was going to hate it - i bought dragon quest viii and played the accursed demo disc and had my mind made up about it. then i cracked and put the $50 on it and took it home. worst case, i'd have something i could trade in at eb games for a decent price. the battles are a little tedious, just like they've always been, but their stories are always stellar and this time is no different. i'm hooked.
in my downtime i've been playing Children of Mana for the ds. it isn't a stellar game, but its pushing console action/adventure even closer to Diablo, and thats where i want it. i still say Sword of Mana is the pinnacle of the Mana series thus far, but children's still good times. it makes me happy to see that people are still making 2d sprite-based games. i've seen some beautiful 2d sprite games, and sometimes you just can't get that anime feel quite right in 3d. the tales games is a good example of that - compare their 3d games against their 2d games and you might see what i mean. the 3d just doesn't look as good.
i've become a Tales enthusiast, even a fanboy if you wanna go that far. i fscking love Tales games. take a standard console rpg and do the fights in realtime. i'm on my second playthrough of Tales of Legendia. the american voice acting was pretty tight this time around. there's no Colette, at least. i'm super pumped about the Tales of Destiny ps2 remake, i'm even considering buying a japanese PS2 and importing it - its hard to tell what they're going to do to it if it ever comes over. the air-combo system is insanely cool looking.
i picked up Tales of the Abyss, and i got it started a little, but i didn't get a chance to really get into it yet. they finally added free-roam to their battle system, it really pissed me off that it wasn't there in Tales of Symphonia. i really like the fonom circle system, it makes all of the element attacks more complicated, but it really gives you a sense of how powerful the characters in other games really are. cast a spell on the ground to give an area a particular element, and then perform a standard special attack from there and it upgrades to something more powerful. Lightning Tiger Blade, for example, requires you to put down a lightning area and then to perform Tiger Blade while you're touching it. i thought that was a really awesome idea. unfortunately, putting it into practice is a pain in the ass for me still. i haven't pulled any enhanced attacks off yet.
it looks like zelda twilight princess is going to be out soon. i'll probably just pick up the gamecube version. i can't justify buying a wii for it alone. maybe if a Mana game came out for it along with a Tales game.. alot of people are going to buy it just because its new and interesting - i'm curious but i don't care all that much. i just don't have time for all of these games! i just picked up guitar hero 2 and its awesome but i don't think i'm going to play it much on my own. the gf loves it, and that'll mean i'll be logging more hours on it before i die, so i guess thats cool. i'm in the middle of okame (i got my sis' bf hooked on it) and i highly recommend that you at least rent it and give it some serious attention.
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