-->
Recent Projects:
Current Project:
Exceptional Journals (in no order): [Eliwood] [Steve Healy] [Ravuya] [Mark the Artist] [Scet] [Ysaneya] [Mayan Obsidian]
My Personal Website
| Tuesday, February 28, 2006 |
  Upcoming! | 
Posted - 2/28/2006 12:10:29 AM | The Assignment -- Of Doom!
Me and the CS teacher I'm assisting teaching for has devised a project for me to do so he can have a bit of an easier time marking me. At first I was a little apprehensive, but I think this is pretty doable:
I am to write a applet+servlet that will allow students to log in from school/home under their network logins and submit assignments and files to their respective directories. This system will be used for the entire school.
"Hm", I thought. "This only seems a little bit daunting". I pondered a bit more and drew out some diagrams/UML-esque images and realized that this might be pretty simple. In a nutshell, the user would enter their login info and connect to the servlet. The servlet (this all in Java by the way) would verify the login data with Novell (somehow; I'm clueless on this part), and send confirmation back to the client. Then the client would open an FTP session with the server and send the assignment to the proper directory based on their student login and the course it's for.
The main difficulties I foresee will be learning Swing, figuring out digital signing (for the applet), and somehow interfacing with Novell to verify logins. The rest should be pie. ;)
Advice on this very welcome; the above is by no means in stone. Those more experienced than myself on the matter please offer your wisdom!
Skirmish Online
...is in a lapse of inactivity. Don't worry, it's not like it's dead or on hiatus or anything. Just a lot going on right now. It'll get there. :)
Here's the v0.04 Roadmap for those who are interested in the progress on the pending release.
Star of Shadows
...may get a rewrite. I'm really unhappy with the current structure, which was more or less a product of ugly Cowboy coding. It gets more hackish with every coding session, and that's just no good. I'm going to be structuring the rewrite's development on the Agile cycle, which is outlined in Eliwood's (a trusted friend and excellent developer) recent gamedev article, "How to Make Your Games Succeed". I'll work on this more than v0.04 of Skirmish is out the door.
Waterloo Computer Science Contest
Saving the best for last, or maybe the last for best*, is the contest I'll be participating in tomorrow. The University of Waterloo (a big-shot University up here in Canada, for CS/CE :P) holds a Computer Science contest that has two phases. In the first phase each highschool writes the initial contest. Those who do well enough go to the University itself and write the latter part. I'm told that free pizza is involved in this portion. I don't even know what the prize is for the winner(s), but fame and fortune is likely to ensue.
I was reading over some questions from previous contests, and it doesn't look too difficult.
Wish me luck!
| |
| Friday, February 24, 2006 |
| Physics Fun! | |
Posted - 2/24/2006 10:58:17 PM | I didn't really do anything pertaining to game development today. However, I'd feel awfully guilty if I came here empty-handed. So I decided to dig deep into the archives and yank out an old physics demo I wrote in C++ with Tokamak and Allegro several months ago, and revamped the graphics to non-solid-colour sprites. :P
Hopefully you'll get a bit of a kick (hoo hoo, pun!) out of it. ;)
Download Physics Fun
(Whee!)
| |
| Thursday, February 23, 2006 |
| A gun in one hand. A gun in the other hand. Wow. | |
Posted - 2/23/2006 12:17:08 AM | Today's additions are as follows, dear reader:
Machineguns
These aren't anything fancy, yet. The main thing behind machineguns is that they freeze your movement for about one second so that you can't run around while firing. MGs will see more glory once I get in multiple ammunition types for them, like Armour Piercing.
Dual Pistols / Dual SMGs
This was the main 'beef' today -- which also consisted of realigning projectiles that are shot locally so that they appeared in the right places remotely (for multi-shot guns like shotguns or dual weapons) -- whereas you can now use dual pistols or dual SMGs to spew forth even more firepower. The balance to this is that the recoil-per-round is increased, the reload time is higher, and you cannot use active-utilities/tools (not implemented yet :P) while holding both. So hopefully with some tweaking they'll become nice and balanced.
(I'm always having so much fun while playing with my testers that I keep on forgetting to take screenshots. So, you keep on getting just boring old me. ;P)
Framerate-Independant Timing
This no longer should haunt me. For a long time now testers with lower-end systems had strange things occuring, like blood spewing out further when players died, or taking a longer time to come to a stop, or getting more recoil than everyone else. D'oh, I had forgot to apply the framerate-independance to the friction on particles/players. This was a little tricky because I was applying the delta value to the friction, which already tiny, so some precision issues arose. I still need to get this tested by the testing folks, but I'm pretty sure it's fixed up.
Overkill
I love overkill. The concept actually originally came from a game I had written back in ~2001 where the player's corpse would be flung back with a trail of blood depending on how much damage you delt to him on his death. Therefore a shotgun blast at point-blank when your enemy has 5% health will send his corpse flying back, and a simple pistol shot from afar will only nudge him a little. Essentially only a visual goody, but (future) snipers and close-range folks will definitely get a kick out of this.
(Ewwww. Or is this a little too gory?)
| |
| Wednesday, February 22, 2006 |
| HUD Revamp(ing)! | |
Posted - 2/22/2006 12:32:33 AM | With the addition of the utility list on the right-hand side of the screen, things were starting to get a little hairy. For one, the framerate was going down the tube, and all of that text was starting to make the whole playing area feel really cluttered.
Here's a shot of the new HUD so far, which will likely see more changes in the near future. (Like a real artist to draw those boxes :P)
(Feels cleaner, don't it?)
Eventually the weapon-slot box at the top-left will have more information in it as I add more weapon data.
The main issue right now is that players won't know which guns are which, aside from guessing based on the weapon genre icon displayed. Anyone have any ideas on this? I want to avoid cluttering with text, so I'm thinking of having a unique icon for every item. Would this get unwieldy, or is it reasonable?
I also implemented score updates via the server. Now every 10 seconds or so (or when a client first joins) the servers sends out the kill/death/etc data on every player, to ensure that everyone has the proper score information displayed. Previously I'd get stuck in arguments with my testers (one in particular :P) about who was actually winning a battle. No more of that now. ;)
Another new quirk is that firing weapons now not only applies a recoil value to your crosshair/aim, but also pushes your player back via their velocity depending on the weapon's recoil. This idea was mainly spawned from the fact that some of my testers were able to win battles quite easily by simply facing the enemy and then charging at them with their weapon firing. By doing this, their charging speed will reduce greatly, and thus so will their maneuverability. Thus giving the stationary fellow an easier time in dispatching them. Thus creating a bit more strategy in the gameplay. :)
Next up on the Roadmap: Machineguns, Dual SMGs/Pistols, and Sniper Rifles!
| |
| Thursday, February 16, 2006 |
| Alive! (somewhat) | |
Posted - 2/16/2006 5:05:46 PM | No big spiffy entry today, just a quick, small update to let everyone know I'm still alive. ;)
Development has hit a bit of a bump as of late, and in combination with a bit of gaming and a recent case of the flu/cold, it may be a little while until things get rolling again.
So lower those pitchforks. Yes, that means YOU.
EDIT: Oh, and to ward off the Vultures of Code:
(All of those utilities work, too :P)
| |
| Saturday, February 11, 2006 |
| Mr. Dagger, teach us more! | |
Posted - 2/11/2006 12:52:09 AM | The Teachin' Lingo
As I've mentioned below, I've got myself a position assisting teaching a Grade 11 computer science course for a semester. Today was our first 'real' day of teaching, and it was very awesome. It was the typical 'get started' business: show everyone how to load up BlueJ, dish around the few pages of intro material, and start coding up those 'Hello world!' programs. Was better than it sounds. ;)
For the majority of the time I was simply walking around the classroom peering over students' shoulders checking up if they needed any help. At first a lot of people had the issue of their sourcefile name and class name not matching up, generating errors. Doh. And then the business with Java being case sensitive; unlike Pascal, which the course had previously used. Those two hurdles done, people were spewin' out lines to the console in no time. Was great to see that my efforts helped those people along to getting their programs done. Sure, sure, it's may be just ego points, but it feels good. :P
Got wrapped up in a conversation for a bit with myself and several other students who were interested in game development and going into the game industry. Mind you I'm no gamedev industry pro here, so I could only offer the smaller things: beef up your math marks, code code code!, build up a portfolio of your programs as you go, make sure you finish what you start, and of course visit gamedev.net daily. (Couldn't resist plugging the site for them, heh) And bookmark the Java docs for easy reference.
They seem to be a really bright bunch. The teacher's really flexible as to how the course is going to be taught (we're making it up as we go :P), and I'm to write a few little fun applets over the weekend to serve as some example material on Monday. Guess I'll need to do some hardcore commenting!
</rant>
More Skirmish!
And what's a Friday without some work on Skirmish Online?
Fixed up some peevish bugs today, where the game object (desks, trees, rocks, etc) collisions were broken. Bullets and players could simply walk right through them. Very weird. I then discovered the cause was related to the feature I was implementing at the time: MINIMAP!
What game is complete without a nice juicy minimap? Took a bit of painful work to get the tiles/graphics compressed to the proper dimensions and placed onto a large-ish texture, but I finally got everything right. Then the blips came in: self, friendly, and hostile. Maybe a neutral blip type later if there's ever a game mode that requires it. By default blips will not appear on the minimap, but rather only with the inclusion of somesort of radar item. I'll launch into a rant on how the inventory system is to work (it's groovy), but every item plays its balance into things nicely.
The next item on the list is utilities. I need to get a vertical list of utilities on the right side of the screen with keymapping and names being listed beside them. And of course bugging Draffurd (the proud artist!) for some utility icons. The first utilities I'll likely make are simple ones like medkits and adrenaline injections. Then others like radar and motion sensors.
EDIT: No screenshot? Let's fix that:
(Opacity will be customizable eventually!)
Fun times ahead. :)
| |
| Wednesday, February 8, 2006 |
| Taking the criticism. | |
Posted - 2/8/2006 11:26:35 PM | Star of Shadows / Critiquè
Ouch. I got whacked pretty hard on the noggin' by a lot of the feedback I got on the release of Star of Shadows. At first I felt the urge to systematically rate down all of the people who were harshly negative about my game, but I instead thanked them for their input and rated them up. After all, I did ask for what everyone thought about the game. I'm just thankful that peope took the time to try it and tell me what they thought; good or bad. I just get really peeved at the negative whiners that are really vague. Grah. :-/
The general feedback I got was:
Pro
====
- Nice looking sprites! (kudos to Overlord!)
- Good scripting engine (me pride an' joy!)
Con
====
- Game feels very slow (this one has plagued me from the start)
- Very hard to catch/talk to the drunk in the Inn (doh)
- Sometimes quests would reset themselves on some NPCs
- Forgot to 'close' some quests (could steal gold from drunk multiple times, etc)
- Sprites don't fit with background (need a tile artist; still stealing from FF2 :P)
In this release the negative far outweighted the positive, but certainly leaves me with room for cleaning-up/improvement in v0.04.
I'm currently heavily considering a rewrite, actually. I wrote this in BlitzMax, which is wonderful for small, simple games, but for a bigger project like this is rapidly becoming a nightmare. Thinking about Java, perhaps. More on this as I figure it out.
Skirmish Online
Got the general v0.04 Roadmap together for this release, and this one looks like it'll introduce a lot of key features that will make the game considerably more fun to play.
Tonight I converted the Win32 editbox for chatting to a custom drawn-on component that cooperates well with fullscreen, and finished reimplementing the Free-For-All (DeathMatch) mode.
Next on the list is the Utility system. Utilities come in two flavours: passive and active. Passive utilities are items like armour, cloaking, medkits, or shields. Active utilities are the fun stuff like grenades, melee weapons, or landmines. I'm positive that this addition will kick the action up a notch. >:)
Teachin'
My CS teacher is still finalizing through the principal for me to be able to assist teaching the Grade 11 CS class, although odds are I'm in. Better yet, my mark will count towards my University transcript. Woot. He's decided to switch over to Java this year from Pascal/Delphi, which I think is a wise move. This means I'll be writing up a lot of the small assignments and example sourcecode for the course. Groovy to think that in several years time, students will be still be learning their Java off of my sourcecode. :)
| |
| Tuesday, February 7, 2006 |
| Phew. Released. (z0rz) | |
Posted - 2/7/2006 11:05:07 PM | Finished up Star of Shadows RPG v0.03 tonight. Hurrah. Another milestone passed! :)
You can either read the fancy dancy Announcements post here, or simply grab the game and start playing with the link below. It's all your preference. :P
As always, suggestions/comments/explosives/feedback/criticism is all welcomed and encouraged. Serves as good beef for getting me going on v0.04. ;)
Download Star of Shadows v0.03
| |
| Skirmish Online v0.03 complete! (And other oddities!) | |
Posted - 2/5/2006 7:04:14 PM | Has it been 10 days already? Sheesh, I've been neglecting my journal! Sorry for keeping everyone in the dark, hehe.
Skirmish Online
Guns a'blazin!
Skirmish Online is progressing wonderfully! v0.03 is finally completed, and I couldn't feel better about it. The roadmap ended up more than twice as big as I had originally planned, and I wound up implementing tons more features than I had thought. For those who like scrolling, I present the v0.03 Roadmap. I'll go over the major additions since the last update:
-> Player->Projectile, Player->Scenery, and Bullet->Scenery collisions are now much more accurate. Feels good to not have players get stuck inside crates anymore!
-> More accurate rotation info on players (2 bytes rather than rounding 1..360 to 1..256. This meant more accurate projectile trajectories.
-> Revamped the heck out of the movement prediction. This was done by making player movement more acceleration-/velocity-based. Movement overall initially feels somewhat akin to ice skating, but you get used to it quickly. Player velocity is now compressed and bundled into movement packets, giving a massive accuracy increase. To show comparison: previously it would sometimes take 20-30 bullets to kill an enemy on your screen, because the prediction of the remote player was off. Now bullet accuracy is about 95%, which means it usually takes around 7-10 shots to kill someone. This was a huge step in enhancing the game's playability.
-> Reliable player addition and death packets. Sometimes a player wouldn't get added to some clients, or a killed player didn't show as dead on another client -- just standing still. These are now fixed and, like above, presents a big improvement in the game's 'funness'.
-> Basics of 'Team War' mode and game modes in general. Team War is a standard team-based battle mode where the two teams combat until eachother's reinforcements are depleted. When a team-mate dies, you lose one reinforcement. The reinforcement counters aren't in, but the system of teams, friendly-fire, team-mate appearance/colours are implemented. Works well.
-> Playerlist/score menu. Holding down the TAB key (like many shooter these days) shows a list of connected players and their kills/deaths as well as latency. Helps me prove to Alex when I've beaten him thoroughly. :P
-> Submachineguns (SMGs). Another weapon-type down. In contrast to rifles, they are typically lower-damaging, have a faster firerate, and less recoil.
-> Shotguns. These were a real treat to test, hehe. These babies blast out 6+ projectiles with large recoil, but at close-range are very deadly. My testers enjoyed themselves: hiding beneath trees, waiting for me to walk by, and then pelting me with a full round of shotgun shells into me, draining half my health. Ow.
-> A heap of bugfixes, which is common to any development cycle. ;)
Of course I'm THAT good :P
We had a very interesting surprise on the night of the pubtest. I had previously implemented a 'test key' for decreasing one's health by 25% to test the healthbar and death functionality. Unfortunately I had forgotten to remove it. The key was also the spacebar, which is very commonly used. So the first 5 minutes of the test was composed of people setting their fire key to spacebar, and repeatedly killing themselves suicidally. 'Twas fun, heh. Four of us decided to illustrate this, as well as what happens when you play too much Skirmish Online:
Additionally, Odin, a friend of Draffurd's, has offered to construct us a website for Skirmish Online. I haven't seen any of his material yet, but I'll see how it goes. If things don't work out properly, I still have the original option of brushing up on my CSS skills and making something nice. I'm planning on learning some PHP down the line to integrate some dynamic pages within the site. Things like online player listings, scores, and other goodies.
Star of Shadows RPG
Now that v0.03 of Skirmish Online is done, I had promised myself to finish v0.03 of Star of Shadows. This hasn't seen a release in a few months now; mostly due to my harddrive failure not too far back.
The main things to add are a few bug fixes, some maps for the indoor areas of Test Town, and some new quests to keep testers happy. (And you folks, but of course!) :) Hopefully this will be done within the week and out for everyone to enjoy.
Hey! Mapping was never my strong area!
Real-Life (Yes, the last one on the list :P)
Exams are over, and a new semester shall commence. My last semester of highschool this time. I'll be taking the course I need for University, Discrete Math / Geometry, as well as assisting in teaching a computer-related class if I can sort out the final details with the head of the computer department. Otherwise it means some boring filler course, which I don't want at all. (For background sakes, I'm already graduated; returning to highschool for a math credit I need for uni)
Also on the job hunt. Fast food has taken its toll, and I've had it with the food industry. Going to apply this week at Rogers, Best Buy, Future Shop, and Staples. Hopefully I can get in one of them and enjoy a more technological position. :D
GOSH DANG'D CANADIAN SNOW! It's been snowing non-stop for over 24 hours now, and the shoveling is killing me. It's the really wet and heavy sort, that makes shoveling a pain. I need to vie for one of those ergonomic shovels next Christmas!
I'll digress on whining about my electric shaver breaking, too. I can only divulge so much real-life information at once without losing journal readers. ;)
| |
"Good night, Monster Land."
"Good night, brave warrior."
|
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S | | | | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | | 6 | | | 9 | | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | | | 23 | | 25 | 26 | | 28 | | | | |
OPTIONS
Track this Journal
ARCHIVES
August, 2009
July, 2009
June, 2009
May, 2009
April, 2009
March, 2009
February, 2009
January, 2009
December, 2008
November, 2008
October, 2008
September, 2008
October, 2007
September, 2007
August, 2007
July, 2007
June, 2007
May, 2007
April, 2007
March, 2007
February, 2007
January, 2007
December, 2006
November, 2006
October, 2006
September, 2006
August, 2006
July, 2006
June, 2006
May, 2006
April, 2006
March, 2006
February, 2006
January, 2006
December, 2005
October, 2005
September, 2005
July, 2005
June, 2005
|
