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  Round Two! | 
Posted - 10/30/2006 11:23:47 PM | 8-Day GameDev Challenge (Day Two/Three)
Progress is still moving along steadily. Today was a little short due to the gamedev club meeting (and booking the darn projector!), but I have high hopes for the rest of the week.
As for the obligatory screenshot:
You're looking at:
- Full player movement and physics; aiming via the mouse. (the white circle being the temporary 'cursor')
- Particle engine; shown here via the ship's two thruster trails.
- Collisions with the map, and ship reactional physics to said collisions.
- A little minimap, which I feel makes the map look ugly. It seems to look a lot more carefully crafted when you're up close.
Not a smorgasboard of progress, but still enough that I'm confident that I can complete this game by Sunday evening. Next up is the weapons system, then I can worry about how the heck I'm going to implement enemy pathfinding later. ;)
Plug
Be sure to check out EasilyConfused's excellent latest completed game, Orc!
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| Round One! | |
Posted - 10/29/2006 12:42:58 AM | 8-Day GameDev Challenge (Day One)
Today I kicked off with a great start. When I woke up this morning I sat in bed for 40 minutes or so planning the game out in my head, then wrote it out in a semi-formal design document after food/shower. I won't go into detail about what it's about, just that you play the role of a heavily-shrunk space fighter inside a human, battling various bacteria infections! Oh darn, I gave it away.
Alright, so the idea of the game is to navigate several randomly-generated levels while killing off waves of enemy bacteria colonies. The goal is to destroy them as fast as possible, since they can deal damage to the body by eating away at the cells around them. This is represented by having a destrucable environment (a la Liero and Worms) that the bacteria can actually destroy. You need to destroy them while minimizing damage to the body's cells. Sounds tough! Good thing you'll gain a new unique weapon with every stage you manage to clear.
The working title is "Gone Micro", but it's obviously tentative. I'm using C++ with Allegro for this project, and so far it's proving more than sufficient for the task.
Here's our screenshot for the night:
Features of what you're looking at:
- The foreground's texture uses flipping+repeating to appear seemless across the whole level.
- Using 640x480 resolution, so double the level topography precision that Liero had (320x240).
- The background can be dynamically coloured for each level type, and scrolls 'slower' than the foreground to give a cool distance effect.
- Although not shown, the sprite manager is now also implemented.
Motivation has not waned yet, so all is well! :)
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| Saturday, October 28, 2006 |
| Hereby challenged! | |
Posted - 10/28/2006 12:19:57 AM | Skirmish dropped
I'll be dropping Skirmish now. I don't know if it's on a 'for now' or 'for ever' basis, but that's the status it'll be taking on. It's primarily a matter of time; which my university workload doesn't allow me a lot of. I'd just rather focus on completing games, rather than spending (potentially) years on an online game that is never truly complete. I apologize to everyone, of course, but with that I hope you all understand my motives.
8-Day Challenge (Part One)
Today I was cordially challenged to an 8-day (we didn't like one week) game development challenge, by an old developer friend, splattergnome. Just a friendly gamedev battle between gentlemen, really. But in light of the above events, I accepted. We discussed and discussed, and decided upon the following ruleset:
- A 2D game.
- Must be sufficiently playable in one or short sittings.
- Must contain some element(s) of randomness in the gameplay, to enhance replayability.
- All code must be from scratch, sans existing libraries.
- No language/library restrictions.
- Game must involve the theme, 'bacteria'.
- Game must be completed by midnight on Sunday November 4th, GMT.
So far I'm baffled for a way to incorperate this theme, but I'm sure I'll come up with something. I'm pretty much midterm-free this week, so how else better to spend this time?
I assume splattergnome will also be updating his journal, contained here. Good luck all around!
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| Alas, a wasted weekend! | |
Posted - 10/22/2006 11:40:29 PM | For some reason, I just can't summon up motivation on the weekend. This means no studying for my (three!) midterms this week and no development on Skirmish. I did manage to watch all of the Full Metal Alchemist anime though, which I absolutely loved. Was it worth losing a weekend over? Likely not. Ah well. Live and learn.
GameDev Club
I met with Kasra (the pres!) today at our usual time and place, and with him was our new Art Director and Audio Director. Awesome. With 4 heads bouncing ideas around, it was far more intense than just Kas and me, so I'm really looking forward to seeing what gamedev havoc we'll get to wreak. Bwahaha.
Knowing how tight my week is going to be, I wisely got started on the slides for this week's meeting on Wednesday, for which I'll be handling the Beginner session. Which means I need to keep these folks busy for roughly an hour (more like 45 mins :P) full of gamedev goodness. I'll post up a copy of the slides the day before to get some feedback from you guys; you all know that I respect your opinions when it comes to gamedev matters. (Well, most of you :P)
1493!?
Gah, my rating has been sitting at 1493 for weeks now. Can someone(s) be a pal and boost me up to 1500 to gratify my ego? Seriously*, it's starting to affect my work. I'll dish out metaphorical cookies!
* Okay, it's not. I just felt I had to rave about something. 
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| Saturday, October 21, 2006 |
| So little time! | |
Posted - 10/21/2006 12:32:57 AM | I'm just baffled by how cramped my schedule is! Assignments, studying, midterms, gamedev club, Skirmish Online, miniscule social life, and so on. But irregardless, Skirmish presses ever-forward.
It's worth mentioning that I'm again switching sources, to my in-progress C++ rewrite. The old Delphi version is just too marred to continue development with, and although this less-developed version is obviously not as far along, it will serve the best in the longrun. So please bear with my somewhat repetitious development, even though it won't be developed the exact same way the Delphi version was.
For those of you who haven't been following Skirmish's progress from the begining and wonder what I mean by 'Delphi version' and 'C++ version': the development for Skirmish began in January 2006 using the Delphi programming language. Things fared well for 5 months, but the source gradually got uglier and less efficient. So I began a rewrite in C++ in late July 2006, which proved a little more challenging, but had greater longterm benefits. In frusteration of being set back to far, I claimed to have switched back to the Delphi version, but now I've settled once more on the C++ flavour. It's a pain to re-develop, but it's the best way to go.
Today's development saw:
- Ping updates now function properly. You can see your own ping, and everyone else's, updated by the host on a 5-second interval.
- Movement prediction improved. Previously I was predicting player rotation too, which apparently was a cause for a lot of inaccuracy, and 'jerkiness'. By having rotations occur instantaneously, it looks a little more non-smooth, but results in more accurate player prediction.
- Stripped out a half-baked "multiple camera" system. Just not needed.
- Word-wrap was a little much for today's session, so I implemented a hastier 'character-wrap' which only wraps to the character, not the word. It's good enough, so as to prevent longer messages from going off the screen.
- Map drawing is now highly optimized. On my compuer the framerate lept from ~130 or so to ~400. I'm still seeing what increases other testers are experiencing. Was just a case of reducing the number of batches being rendered.
- Fixed a run-away reference to MSVCR80.DLL that was preventing some testers from playing. (I'm using MSVC71, hence the annoyance :P)
- Capped minimum player speed. Firstly, this fixes the problem I was having with players appearing to 'jitter' on the spot -- due to rounding -- but it also enabled me to optimize network "player-movement" packets so that non-moving players save a whopping 12 bytes PER movement packet. Woot.
- Fixed a crashing issue when a player in a certain position in the playerlist left the game. I wasn't removing their Sprite object from the game properly, or somesuch.
(Woot! FrameRate++)
Not major changes, but now the way is paved for the bigger additions of this version, such as the new weapons system. Accompanied by player death and respawn, of course. Things are flying along faster than before, and I'm even working on a smaller timeframe.
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| Plugs or drugs? | |
Posted - 10/16/2006 12:05:46 AM | Uh, we'll go for the former, methinks.
Free Plugs!
String Theory - A game by Toxic Hippo with a fantastic concept, and equally fantastic physics to match. I haven't managed to beat the game yet, but the possible implications for such a concept scream out "SEQUEL!". Check it out!
72-Hour GameDev Competition - Run by Jeff Verkoeyen, a member of the GameDev Club over at the university, this contest has already had several (very!) successful competitions thus far, and it look like another one is right around the bend. Tell your friends!
Line Runner - Oh cripes, what an awesome way to spend half an hour. Even more awesome if you check out some of the YouTube videos of what a few fanatics of this have managed to construct. Gah! And yes, I'm intentionally not mentioning what this is because words can't quite do it justice.
Skirmish Online - More clean up!
Not much progress this weekend on Skirmish. I have an Algebra midterm on Monday, a Philosophy project (and a CS assignment) due on Thursday, and a Calculus assignment due on Friday, so I essentially spent the last 48 hours paralyzed with fear. ...Or playing Oblivion. Anyways:
Some bug fixes did take place, however.
- Previously players could not leave a game (either from Joining or Hosting) and then run another game, which was due to some silly array indexing on my behalf.
- Also important, mouse aiming is now fully operational; no more complaints from our mouse users now, hopefully! Gamepad/joystick support is next, then!
- Friendly/self-owned mines will appear on your radar in fuchsia.
- All shrapnel projectiles (via Nail Bombs or Claymores) are now rougly twice as fast. Depending on how the next testing session goes, the damage may get increased, too.
- Explosions are now 25% more lethal, making a well-aimed HE Grenade much more deadly than before.
Oh, and I cleaned up/organized the above listing for my recent project and Skirmish. Look nicer? It's Phase One of my Journal Beautification Project, arr!
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| Saturday, October 14, 2006 |
| Taming the beast! | |
Posted - 10/14/2006 1:16:36 AM | 30k
First off all, I wish myself an Almost-30K-Views. I was going to wait until it got there, but 29,978 is pretty darn close. Huzzah for me staying in the loop this long!
Skirmish Online
Today saw a juicy ~5 hours or so of development, to which I feel extremely happy about. This was more or less my first time tackling the Delphi source since early June (~4 months ago!!).
MESSY! I'm really happy that in 4 months time my 'standards' as far as code goes has increased so nicely. And I realized how incredibly poor my error-trapping was. Gads! Lots of that clean-up going on as well, including more prolific commenting. It's a slow road, but I'll get there. It's only ~4200 lines. :P
Resumed development also means a total overhaul on the networking system, as well. Hopefully the final. With it will come a more class-oriented approach, reliable UDP packets (finally! the lack of this has been the source of MANY issues), prioritizing packets, and enhanced movement/movement prediction. It's going to be really fun, but really painful. I can't wait.
The Skirmish forum is now organized somewhat, with a few obligatory posts in the News section. If you're interested in Alpha Testing for Skirmish, or already are, please drop in an informative post here. I'd like to get it all archived so I can appropriately distribute credit where credit is due.
In short: development is resumed, and it's going just fine. I'm very motivated to get the show on the road again, and hopefully the testers are too. It feels good to be back on board!
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| I am Untitled. Who are you? | |
Posted - 10/13/2006 12:32:39 AM | UW Game Development Club
On Wednesday evening we had our first official meeting of the University of Waterloo Game Development Club.
It was great. But first I must balk about the hardships following said greatness:
I had to get up at 7AM (early for me :P) to get posters printed and spread them liberally around campus. Run over to the library -- which my residence is the furthest away from -- and print them off, then a jog over to the Engineering building to start my quest. However, the main office apparently lended out their stamp which I'm required to use in order to put up posters. I would have put them up 'illegally' anyways, but it would have seemed suspicious if I asked to borrow some tape after being told I couldn't put them up. So I cursed silently and ran over to the Math/Computer building to get to work there. Crap; the office there doesn't open until 9:30, when my first class is. So I sit on my arse for a while, go to class, and then run around putting up posters at both the Math and Engineering buildings, followed by blitzing my math assignment (which I never got around to handing in). I think I had some lunch somewhere in there.
Not long after, 4:05 rolls around -- the meeting being at 7 -- and I get an email from Kas about booking the projector for the meeting. Crap! So I call the AV guys up and ask to book it, and they inform me that I need to go over to the Student Life Centre, fill out a form, and then pick up the projector. All by 4:30. And recall that my residence is like a 15 minute walk away from anything. Run run run! Patter patter patter are my footfalls as I race over to the SLC! I blitz the paperwork, then bolt off to the Engineering building to get the projector. With only a few minutes to spare I recover the legendary Data Projector of Ogres (+7), and all is nearly well. Er, except the suitcase containing the darn thing is uber-heavy, so it's a long walk back.
Then the faithful time comes to get to the SLC (we booked a room in said building) by around 6:45, all the while lugging my expensive projector paperweight along with me. First of all, the room we had totally sucked. There was only eleven chairs, a worn-out table for the projector, and all of the doors except one were locked. Ugh. Perfect.
By the time we're ready to start -- and Kas arrives (the President) -- we had maybe 9 people show up. Okay, okay, not that great. But not that bad, either. I'm reasonably sure most of them will show up again. During the meeting about 3 more dropped in, so it was a pretty good number all in all.
Back to the meeting: yes, it was good. Kas did most of the 'presenting' of the PowerPoint, and for the brief pieces I did speak in I realized that my presentation skills were pretty bad, although it was still fun. We covered what the club was about, who we were, our open positions, the Beginner and Advanced groups, did an introduce-yourself bit, some Q&A, and then I showed a few of my games upon request. After I finished, one of the members asked if he could show some of his, to which I naturally (and enthusiastically!) agreed to. This guy -- Jeff Verkoeyen -- was fantastic. He showed some of his completed games, which got a great response from the crowd. He seems to love this stuff as much as I do, and I'm sure he's got plenty to offer us and the members. Can't wait for the next meeting!
Skirmish!
Apologies for allowing the above section to dwarf Skirmish's, but my free time for my own gamedev adventures has been hazardously low! Assignments and labs are plentiful, midterms are popping up everywhere, and I have a devious Philosophy project around the corner! It's a myriad of academic woes!
Back on topic, my Bell Sympatico internet is now fully functional, and I'm already working on getting us online once again. The Skirmish Online Discussion Forum is once again alive, although all prior posts were sadly lost. I'll be posting updates and other crucial information to both testers and potential testers there in the near future, so drop by now and then. 
As far as development goes, well, that's about as far as it goes right now, heh. :P Been uber-busy, but I very much want to get on to some code very soon! If I don't, you guys can feed on my brain. Or something. I think. (/pun)
So I bid you all good night, and will leave you with this politely on-topic comic:
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| Tuesday, October 10, 2006 |
| Hereafter | |
Posted - 10/10/2006 11:34:39 PM | Skirmish Online - Now and The Future
Hey folks. It's been a while (again!). University has been keeping me plenty busy with assignments, reading, studying, and lately midterms as well. But I've been putting in a solid effort to keep Skirmish progressing. Lately it's been in the form of design/brainstorming, but that certainly counts.
The Shop System(tm) and the areas surrounding items and item management have been a big topic of as of late, both on the design paper and in discussion between me and Draffurd. I won't throw the whole spiel at you, but here's some keypoints and a nice mockup:
- There will be a Shop. It will be accessable only if the player is in Spectator Mode (to be later discussed/implemented) or after a player has died (prior to respawning).
- Player inventories will be consistant and persistant. If you buy that rifle on Tuesday on Bob's Server, it'll still be there on Friday on Dave's Server.
- There will be no 'maintenance costs' associated with equipment. What this means is that you won't need to constantly purchase more ammunition for your guns, or replenish your supply of grenades. Every time you respawn, your ammunition for all guns/explosives/tools will all be set back to their maximum.
- Each item is essentially a container. A rifle with 200 ammo is like a grenade with 4 ammo, internally, at least. The grenade is the base item with an ammunition count, not 4 grenade objects in the inventory. This is less flexible, but makes the system considerably more simplistic to implement AND use.
- Semi-persistant items will exist in the gameworld that can be 'picked up' to replenish item supplies. Semi-persistant meaning the items will be removed upon the end of a game or if the server closes. Examples of such items may be: 'generic ammunition' dropped upon a player dieing that refills all guns by a certain percentage, a Medic dropping a medkit which refills your existing supply (yes, you must own the base medkit item first), or a dead player dropping a resupply of grenades. It might be fun to allow said grenades react to local explosives as well.
And of course, the (ugly) mockup:
(Picture it with proper spacing/alignments, gradiented/outlined windows, and nicer visual effects!)
However, implementing said system is still rather far down the line. I'm currently waiting for my recently-subscribed Bell Sympatico service to be activated in my res so I can get Skirmish hosted again, and resume development.
The order of operations is:
- Unpack the old Delphi-based Skirmish source-code. I've decided that it'll take me far less time to revamp that source than to keep on my rewrite in C++.
- Rewrite network code into a flexible class-based library WITH support for reliable UDP messages. This process will take a while, and a lot of testing. But the result will be bugless network code, more network efficiency, hopefully lower pings, and better movement prediction.
- Player speed and physics is going to get a rework, too. We need more speed in these guys, and less ice-skating. :P
- Projectile physics revamp. Grenades still get stuck in walls, bullets don't always seem to hit the map/objects quite right, and the throwing arcs for grenades just aren't perfect. This'll need some work, too.
- Game modes! This will involve implementing the actual round-based game system, and the addition of the Capture-The-Flag mode.
- Player classes. Some classes will be missing their prominent items for a while (engineer, medic, raider, etc) that need special coding. Also, no shop, so players will be handed a static set of equipment (temporarily) for each class.
- The Shop. Woot.
- More fixes/bug-catching/minor-additions along the way. Of course.
That's a very on-the-spot roadmap, but I hope to refine it and have it published on the (soon-to-return) Skirmish forum in the very near future.
University - Calculus Midterm
Owned it. ^_^
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"Good night, Monster Land."
"Good night, brave warrior."
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