| Tuesday, November 27, 2007 |
  ActionRPG | 
Posted - 11/27/2007 7:36:15 PM | 
i don't like the dx font system, since it doesn't outline easily. so i've implemented a bitmapped font system. its nothing fancy but it sure does make it look alot more like a game. i'll need to put background behind the text, it doesn't look so good floating like that over the map.
you might also notice i've got bigger item drop sprites now. i decided that my oneWeekGame had the right idea, so i changed things around. i didn't have a 16x16 potion sprite, so i just grabbed the healing item from crystalis and changed the stat text. the inventory was grown to fit them too.
you can't really see it, but i also got a basic animation system rigged up now, and the hero animates through a walk animation in all 4 directions. he also swings his hand, but the sword doesn't swing yet, it still just appears for its timeslot. i'll be getting to that.
ideally i'll be doing the button-display next.. but i may stick to cosmetics for a bit yet.
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| Saturday, November 17, 2007 |
| ActionRPG | |
Posted - 11/17/2007 8:15:28 PM | another minor update, i spent a couple of hours combining all of the item drops into one class and wound up cleaning up my code a whole lot just by doing that. after i did that i rebuilt the inventory to take in these new items, and now i can display information about the items in each slot:
one step at a time. after i did that, i wound up with like 6 new things to do based on that alone - the list just keeps growing, even if i get something done! 
moving along...
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| Thursday, November 15, 2007 |
| space fortress? | |
Posted - 11/15/2007 11:23:56 PM | finally got started on my 2d geometry thinger. i built up a Shape class and it takes care of all of the drawing stuff, but it doesn't do a whole lot more than that yet.
so yeah. the plan is to overlap a pair of these bad boys, and do some boolean operations with them. the most important is boolean subtraction, since thats all i REALLY need to get going with space fortress again, but i'd like to have addition for some things. basically if i increase the size of the rectangle, shrink the size of the circle, i've got a fortress shape and a bullet/hole-punch shape.. and the triangle is good enough for me to be a ship for now.
rarrr back to work!
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| Tuesday, November 13, 2007 |
| Untitled | 
Posted - 11/13/2007 9:50:07 PM | [ffa tileset grabber]
well the first version of this is done. i had it run through all 900+ ffa tilemap bitmaps, and compile every unique 16x16 tile it found into a single bitmap. it shows its new findings as it goes, so you get to see it fill up. i like seeing that progress more than just watching a bar fill. it took about a half hour or so to complete, and i got:
a large portion of this is water tiles. i was expecting it to happen. the water tiles (ocean, river, and waterfall) all animate by appearing to slide along at a fixed rate. it could be entirely possible that these tiles DO have 4 or 8 "partly slid" tiles, i'm not sure -- all that matters is that it's taking up a whole bunch of space that i'm sure i could save somehow. right now i'm going to leave it as-is and just run with what i've got.
after, i restarted the process for 8x8. every map, every 8x8 tile tested for uniqueness and added if they are. i let it run for 2 hours and it was about halfway done - then i realized i could just treat the bitmap i had built above as if it were another map. ran it through and about 5 minutes later i had this:
this thing is much more compact, as many of the 16x16 tiles use alot of the same 8x8 tiles. that also explains why it contains less than half of the info. this is great, the texture itself is one-quarter the size of the 16x16 one.. but look at it. if you needed to use a texture to build a tilemap with, which do you suppose would be easier to do mapping with? even if you were mapping at an 8x8 tilesize, wouldn't you think you could draw a pot much more easily with the 16x16 loaded in as an 8x8 sampler? sure, you'd have alot of repeats again.. tell me how long it takes for you to find all four 8x8 tiles of the pot.
i can come up with a bunch of ways around this issue - having a 16x16 swatch list you could add to and use to rubber-stamp completed shapes would give you a big leg up.. but i see that as a bunch of extra work, too. i also don't think that particular 16x16 tileset texture is really all that big. and i'm probably not going to stick with it forever either.. so i guess all this thinking is kinda silly, since its supposed to be a temporary texture ANYWAYS. jeez!
hopefully the next project i'm going to start is the 3d thing i was ripping these graphics for.
[actionrpg]
oh i got the inventory cursor moving around now, and the player can't move while they've got the inventory open anymore. the next step with the inventory is to come up with a ItemDrop class and inherit from it to make the three different drop types, and then show the info when the user has an item selected.
[rune factory]
i can't put this friggin game down! what the hell is wrong with me, ITS A FARMING GAME!! i think i'm going to go for either the shy bookworm or the mysterious cave chick. i'm enjoying all of the inter-relationship goings-on between all of the townsfolk. they seem more real to me than most of the characters i've seen in video games, and not in a "i'm in love with a girl in a game" way - they seem so much less two-dimensional. i've beaten the first two caves and i'm getting close to my first winter. ITS A FRIGGIN FARMING GAME!!!
| |
| ffa tileset grabber | |
Posted - 11/13/2007 7:05:32 AM | what a pain in the butt. i figured this wouldn't be too hard, and boy was i wrong. conceptually, its not. in fact, i could probably have written this in allegro and had it completely done by now. but noooooo windows had to be a pain in my ass.
first off, if you close the program while its running its junk, it doesn't close the thread off before it disposes itself - so the thread tries Invoke on a now-disposed UI thread and throws an exception. i don't know what the crap i'm doing here, so of course i don't have any solutions to that. i tried having the form wait in FormClosing until a bool is set in the worker thread's finish-callback, which hangs it. i tried putting an abort bool into the mix, and returning from the threaded loop function early if it sees the abort bool - at every level in the worker thread loop. no go. right now i'm just dealing with it. i don't know what the hell to do about it.
the other problem is that gdi+ isn't doing what i asked it to as far as i can tell. when i got up from the desk, i had just found a stupid mistake - and i'm sure i've got more, so i'm not going to give in until i'm sure i'm screwed.
what a crap-filled weekend for code.
| |
| tons of fun | 
Posted - 11/9/2007 7:18:39 AM | [rune factory]
well i bought the game when i got paid last week and i played it maybe 5 times so far. beat the boss in the first cave, and didn't go talk to everyone about it yet. there are a few things i like about the setup, but those things aren't really unique - realtime battles with levelling up of individual weapons/tools, small cast of somewhat interesting characters (instead of a bunch of cut&paste nobodies).. actually thats all that's really interesting about the game. the farming bit is more a chore than anything, but i only have 3 plant patches to care for right now so its not too much work on upkeep. i wouldn't recommend this game to anyone, mostly because i don't know anyone that liked harvest moon. sucks that the only two women i want to bang in it are the two that have kids - but doesn't that mean they might put out again..?
[FFA misc]
i've finally visited every map in Final Fantasy Adventure, using my trainer. i've got about 1000 map captures and 14 htmls with tables that align the pics in meaningful ways. you don't really get any sense of the puzzles or flow of maps because they packed all of the maps together, around each other - and the map caps themselves don't show any event information. mapsets 0, 1, E, and F are the most "readable"; 0 obviously because its the world map, E and F have the town maps, and 1 has Dark Lord's castle 'outside' sections. all of the rest of the mapsets sport painfully similar dungeon rooms.
so far i discovered a couple of songs that didn't make it, a couple of items (the item-type Nuke and Nuke2 spells). last night i discovered that they originally had intended for Volcano to end halfway through. hidden in an unused section of mapset F, i happened upon Iflyte quite by accident - and he promptly killed me. well i followed the path away from him, and 3 screens had been build rather nicely and the stairs at the end had a warp attached to them - to the 3-door screen midway through the volcano. when i tried going back, it just took me where i would have had to go normally, but it was still interesting. aside from that, all of the "unmapped" areas of the mapsets contained garbage or all-exit screens.
i can't think of anything else i need to do with the trainer for right now, i dont' have much interest in pursuing all of the game event bools. but i might pick it up another time when i want to figure out the partner stuff. it seems partner flags are tied very tightly to the game event flags.
[actionrpg]
well i'm leaning heavily towards starting another side-project that will let me build 3d block-maps, and i'll probably use some of the ffa towns as a means of getting started. to that end, i'm going to build a tool to compile all of the tiles in all of the maps i capped into a single no-repeats-allowed tileset bitmap. gdi+ is pretty easy to use and i'm sure i'll have no problem putting this together. a much better idea than doing it by hand, as i discovered with the statusbar cropper i built the other night. who wants maps with status bars on them? not me.
i haven't come up with a very good scheme for the items yet, but i'm thinking it's going to be closer to diablo than zelda now. until i have more confidence in that, i'm going to have to push forward with the same ultra simple inventory system i had started, and stick to that until i know wtf i'm doing with the real one.
i finally found out why i was getting artifacts when i switched to this new box - dad didn't install the ati drivers at all! windows must have had something that just worked.. but i couldn't use opengl hardly at all and other stuf. i guess you can't really see the artifacts very well in any of the screens i posted, but they were there. and now they're not! getting better performance now, too. bonus.
[etc]
been thinking about starting up space fortress again. with d3d it should be a cinch - and so much faster - but i'll have to throw together a shape geometry deformation thing so i can break my shapes again.
can't install the tablet due to some HID invalid data thinger, so i fought with the canoscan and got it up and running. meh, whatever gets me by. but that does mean i might be up for some good old fashioned Draw Night again.
i gotta get the last ffa youtubes done up so i can get it completely out of my system. i hope i can resist doing all of that stuff i did with ffa - with zelda: link's awakening... i want the sprites and tileset from that too <_<
it never ends.
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| Wednesday, November 7, 2007 |
| being sick sucks | |
Posted - 11/7/2007 6:36:28 AM | ugh what a crappy last bunch of days. i've been sick and struggling to maintain consciousness, let alone a coding mindset. miraculously i coded a tool to go through all of my screencaps from ffa and crop the status bar off of them, and learned how to use a worker thread for a progress bar. i should be able to take the concept and expand on it; big shout out to ra for all the help with that. i needed to learn it for the next tool i want to build - one that will create a tileset bitmap out of all of those screencaps, with no repeats. should be pretty easy.
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