Allayloo ta nuv
Not much development recently, if at all. Espionage Inc is still in a bit of a hiatus, but really I can’t be arsed to pester anyone anymore–at least, not now. ToH is on a bit of a break too; I coded like 24/7 that one week that I’m all ‘coded out’ for a while. EXRP is about the same, as I’ve said in earlier blog posts I’ve just been really bored with GMod/Lua recently. Not to worry, everything will return to activity sooner or later.
So, what’s been going on with me? Both a lot of something and a lot of nothing. I’ve been really frustrated with school, since I was put in a class that I didn’t really want to be in, but was assured it was something completely different than it actually turned out to be, and now it’s too late to get out. Also, did I mention said class requires me to go to school on a couple Saturdays or else I fail–one being my birthday? Yeah, just brilliant. I’ve also been playing a lot of SWG lately, hence the post title. I’ve levelled up quite a lot since I last played, not sure how. It’s pretty awesome though, I have ~500+ DPS without using actions or buffs, a droideka, and I’ve done an assload of “higher-level” quests and instances–my house is full of trophies and crap. Really fun game, it’s a shame to see people leaving it. There was a free week of play last week that I was completely into that just ended today for me that I got really into, and I’m resubscribing when I get home.
One thing that I’ve been playing with lately is something called “theta brainwave meditation”, which is basically ambient music with a soft hum in the background at a certain frequency called ‘theta’ that somehow tricks your brain into becoming more relaxed and everything. You can find some here. If you’re going to go out and buy that track you hear in the video, it’s called Astral Journeys. Very nice easy listening if you ask me, great for getting yourself relaxed after a lot of stress. Anyway, just thought I’d share that with you. If you’re in need of a good game to play, check out SWG. Now then, back to school…
02.11.09No soup
Lots more progress, of course, however no soup. My stomach’s been really grumbly the past couple days, not sure why, but I’ve been really bloated and foul-smelling burpy. Seems to be getting better, though. I just think it’s coders’ withdrawal–haven’t coded as much as I did last week. Regardless, I have got some pretty cool stuff done. I’m nearing around 5000 lines of code, which is kinda freaky and kinda cool at the same time. Guess it just shows how much work has gone into this so far. Anyway, yesterday I implemented a map portal system for edge-based portals and tile-based portals to ‘teleport’ to different maps. The edge ones work by defining a map to switch to if you go beyond the upper, lower, left, or right bounds of the current map, and you appear on the opposite side of the map so it seems as if you’ve traveled to it. For example: We can have a huge field made up of several different maps, and you walk right to go to the next map, left to go to the previous map, etc… Instead of having just one huge map, which would be huge. The tile-based portal system was a bit easier in theory, as it’s basically just when you step on a certain tile you mark in the collision layer it teleports you to the specified X and Y of a selected map. I’ve also done a couple tweaky things to the map editor, but nothing specifically worth mentioning. Just look at the screenshots in the dump below and you’ll get the idea. Next up are NPCs and the sprite editor tab.
02.7.09Progresso Soup
I’ve been making a lot of progress with the new ToH. I’ve done everything that I said I’d do in my last post, which is great. I’ve also done some new things, like fringe layers (that draw above sprites), a collision editor within the map editor, and surely a lot of behind-the-scenes cleanup work that, since it’s not asthetical, I really don’t even remember. Most of the changes are from the backend, so not too many “wow!” screenshots–however those will be coming from now on. I’ve finished what I consider to be the ‘base’ to build everything else on top of, where everything is in a completely working state and all the ‘hard’ code has been completed. The official ‘to-do’ list is as follows…
- Map portals (by filename)
- Map *edge* portals (by filename)
- Recursive NPC loading (by ini file)
- Sprite placement tab on map editor (by image, NPC, item)
- Items system w/ recursive loading
- Inventory
- Equipment system (weapons, armour, etc…)
- Battle system (press CTRL to swing sword, basically)
- Health bar (hearts that disappear by exclusion overlay)
- Map properties window in editor (music channels, edge portals)
- Doors/buttons/keys
- Shopkeep (from dialogue)
- Dialogue tab in editor
- Basic multiplayer (position networking as NPCs, chat, player name, login/character saving by ini file)
- Quest flag set&get methods for dialogue (tied to character)
- Admin commands
- Add/fix ToH graphics + music
As you can see, it does seem like a pretty hefty list of things to do. However like I said, I’ve already done most of the ‘hard’ stuff, so the rest should be relatively straight-forward. I think I’ll have things in a more or less functional state mid to late next week, then after that it’s just a matter of adding content (graphics, sound, maps, etc…), bugfixes, and tweaks. Of course there’s always room for new features, but I’m more focused on getting us up to par with what we had before than adding anything new right now. Anyway, that’s pretty much it. Do check out my image dump for today as I have added some screenshots. If you’d like to test how things are working out so far, feel free to ask me in an IM or something. On a completely unreleated note: Progresso soup is really good, but I wish the rice was less crunchy. More soupy brothness and less rice would be nice.
02.5.09Nuclear Shitstorm Detected
So the past couple days I’ve been redoing my map file system so it saves multiple layers, collision layers, properties, etc… I’ve been using XML, and following a tutorial to do all of this via XNA’s “content pipeline”. Basically it’s a type of project you can create within C# that ties in with XNA to create unreadable, optimized binary files out of pretty much anything on compile. While it sounds great in theory, it’s actually the biggest coding mess I’ve ever seen. You can’t simply make one file that tells XNA how to read and write the files, you need four different files with completely different concepts and layouts just to read a file. Why it’s split up so much is completely beyond my comprehension–if it was just two files, one for reading and one for writing, that’d make sense. However four files, each of which I have a hard time comprehending their purpose, is nonsense. Plus the guy in the tutorial must’ve deliberately found the most overcomplicated way to do this, because the code around that pipeline project is just a horrible mess. Maybe that’s just why I find the content pipeline so useless, though. Or maybe it’s just not the thing for me; of course, I want to be able to network maps to be downloaded whenever so I don’t need Son to send me the new maps he’s created and then recompile it just to change a single tile in a map. The content pipeline can only open files from within it’s own confines–if the file isn’t loaded into the content manager, you’re SOL and will never have access to it until you manually add it and recompile. I guess it makes sense for strictly singleplayer games, but for this it’s just awful.
That said, the past two days have gone to waste. I’ll be redoing all of that loading and saving tomorrow, as well as work on recursively opening a directory to load files and merging all the map layers into one file (right now each layer has it’s own file) and I’ll probably be using XML for that. However, I’ll be writing my own class completely seperate from the content pipeline. I saved a file without the content pipeline a couple minutes ago, just as a test, and it’s unbelievably easier. I guess the whole idea behind the content pipeline for saving files is that you just pass it some variables and it instantly knows how to format and save them, but I don’t even think that’s worth the trouble. So basically, for tomorrow, I have to…
- Load sprites from the disk
- Load tiles from the disk
- Load NPC dialogue scripts from the disk
- Load maps from the disk
- Merge all the map layer files into one XML-based map file
Once I’m done all that I think I’ll start splitting the actual game project into two: Server and client, then start making it so the client basically just does prediction for it’s own player and rendering crap, then everything else is just handled by the server which then tells the client what to render. That probably sounds extremely complicated, but in all reality it’s actually a hell of a lot easier than reversing this shitstorm I’ve created by using the content pipeline. Pray for me.
02.3.09Substantial ToH Progress
Lots of progress on ToH within the past couple days. I expect to get the basics of everything done by Thursday, but then of course there’s a lot of stuff to tweak, clean up, and a few new features to add. My main goal is to get the map editor in a working state before the weekend so Son can toy around with it a bit more. The editor hasn’t changed all that much since Sunday, but I don’t think I posted a screenshot of it then anyway so it’ll be something new to the majority of my readers here anyway. The main stuff that I’ve added is specific to the behind-the-scenes engine code and the game code, as we now have a player that can walk across the screen and some NPCs. We also have a collision layer that specifies whether you’re just completely blocked by a tile coordinate, or if you can still walk through it just slowly–like mud. Again: I haven’t really talked about the development until now (not sure why), but I have some screenshots from earlier versions that I’ll be posting just about now, and they’ll make more sense if you know what changed between them all.
I’ll be updating that with a couple screenshots pretty much every time I change something or add something that’ll have a visual impact that you can look at and see some progress on. Don’t mind the graphics right now, those are just some placeholders I found on the net by searching around a little bit. By the weekend they’ll turn into some appropriately themed Zelda graphics. My guess is that’s when things will start to get a bit more exciting. I have lots of cool new ideas that differ from our old method of doing things with ToH, for example: The ability to rotate tiles in the map editor, the ability to treat all sprites as entities and all sprite-based entities the same (NPCs, trees, animation tiles, etc…) and be able to place them in the map editor. Buncha stuff to think about. I had one really good idea about a checkbox but I forgot it in the shuffle. I do remember that it was going to be a really good idea, so that just adds to the shame of forgetting it.
Anyway, I’m really liking XNA and C#. It’s just so easy to do anything, and the syntax is a lot like a mix of Lua, VB, and C++ except that it makes sense. I think the biggest noticable difference between my usual Lua coding and this is just all the freedom you get. For the collisions, I’m pretty much moving the player where they want to go regardless if it’s inside a wall or not, then checking if they’re in a wall and moving them back if they are–you couldn’t do this in Lua. In C# (or any ‘non-dependent’ language like that) you can tell it exactly when to render the frame (at least, you can in XNA) and render after you’ve done all your calculations. With Lua, your code is essentially called after the ‘default’ code in C++ (in the instance of GMod) and since it’s compiled on runtime you get an extremely significant slowdown that can put you frames behind the actual game engine if you’re not careful. In fact, it always will no matter what, so if you want to do something like what I’m doing with the collisions in Lua, you’re SOL. Putting that specific example aside, I’m really enjoying this. It’s like I’ve been stuck in this little tiny box for the past two years, now I can finally get out and take a nice stretch; do whatever I want however I want. It’s really nice not to be restricted by other peoples’ code as well, in the case of both GMod and the “old” ToH (dubbed version 2, this new one I’m making is version 3) which was using someone else’s premade engine written in VB6 (and therefor using raw DX7, which was a pain in the ass I assure you.) Words cannot describe how great the feeling is while coding with so much room to do things your own way as I am now. Since I’m doing everything from scratch as well, it’s a lot easier to know exactly where everything is and how to change things that would otherwise be declared core gameplay mechanics with the slightest of ease. When you use an engine or platform someone else has made, you don’t really know where everything is and what everything does–at least, not in the grand scheme of things.
The past week or so I’ve been thinking to myself about whether or not I really need a forum–again! It’s never really used besides for the occasional MistCMS question or help thread, and in cases like that people can just email me with the contact form I have on my site anyway, so there’s no real need for a forum then. I was thinking of making it more of a community thing by putting up some tutorials and whatnot, but I don’t think I’ll ever get around to that. If I do, why not just post it here on my blog? That brings up another something regarding my site that I’ve been thinking about lately: Do I really need to seperate my ’site’ from my blog? For the longest time I was just using my blog, then I switched when I made MistCMS to showcase and utilize my proud creation, but in most cases I don’t really see a need. Just have different categories for films, games, scripts, etc… and there you go. I do like the idea of keeping “Dvondrake Studios” something personal to only include myself and quite possibly the occasional Son, then anything else done in a bigger team (like Espionage Inc) I think everyone would be a lot more comfortable with our own studio name. Back to the whole ‘using a blog as a site’ prospect, I think that would make it a lot easier to substitute something for a forum: comments. Plus it’d make my blog more read surely, and now that I have a (finally) acceptable blog design… Ah well, let me know what you think. I’m tired, so much coding in such a little time span tends to do things to one’s mind, as you can probably tell by how unstructured this blog post probably is. My apologies, hopefully I’m more coherent once my sense of logic becomes more logical by figuring out exactly what the hell C#’s modulo operator is supposed to do. On the plus side, I apparently made no typos in this post. Also, I finally remembered to tag my post. Boo-yeah, awesome!
Edit: I remembered my brilliant idea. A checkbox to hide the map editor grid. Mind-beinding, ain’t it?!
02.1.09C#, XNA, and the new ToH
As you probably know, I got a new computer recently. As you also may know, I didn’t buy new hard drives; I used one as a backup to move all my ‘important’ files to and reformatted the other. Well then, I’ve got some good and bad news. Bad news: I lost the server files for ToH. But don’t panic yet! The good news is that I’m going to recode ToH from scratch (and not use a premade engine in VB) so I can do things the way I want and have everything work out a lot nicer. I’ll be using C# and XNA–which are really quite awesome. Today I’ve been coding the basic tile engine, camera movement, and tile editor. Nothing playable yet, basically just the editor to make maps and the game only views them, but it’s all in a working condition right now which is great. Still a lot of stuff to do of course, but once I get all this basic ‘core’ stuff done the rest won’t be too hard I’d immagine. As for C# and XNA, this is really my first time using either. I’ve been toying around with C++ every now and then, and it’s just too… Well, nothing seems logical to me. In C# however, everything just comes naturally and makes sense. XNA is quite nice too, as it really is a pain to get all the DirectX crap done manually. In retrospect, it’s hard to even think that I’m using XNA as it only takes up like three lines of my solution, and thus isn’t even noticable. Anyway, not too much else happening lately, so there’s not much else to post. I’ll give you some screenshots of what I’m working on once there’s something decent to show.
01.27.09Get back to work!
Well, guess I’ve broken that rule that I had earlier about making one blog post every 2-3 days. I guess it’s just more like a guideline, anyway. Not too much new; you know, the usual frustrations with school, playing of games, coding, and thinking about coding. And also something I don’t do very often: reading a book. I’ve been reading I, Robot the past couple days–you know, the original by Isaac Asimov that has nigh nothing to do with the movie. It’s really great, rarely do I stumble upon any form of media that really gets you thinking philisophically. Plus it’s a great, classic Sci-Fi that talks about the year 2008 as if we’re flying about in hover jets all the time, so that’s always fun. As for my aforementioned playing of games, I would up buying Hitman: Blood Money and playing it again, and it’s great. I really hate the boat mission, though. I can never beat it, and if I do it’s just be sheer luck and a lot of killing of… Well, everybody.
Regarding coding: recently, I don’t know what’s been up. I’m kinda bored of coding EXRP since it’s really frustrating to just build upon what someone else has already made, especially due to all the restrictions and bugs that you can’t overcome and that he won’t do anything about. Plus GMod just hasn’t really been on my mind that much lately. Espionage Inc has been making some progress, but honestly not that much. Right now we just seem to be having some kind of communication problem between all the developers. I can’t do anything until I get some maps and models to work with, our texturer can’t do anything until he gets some models to work with, Son’s mapping on and off (which is great, at least he’s doing something), and I’m not sure what the modellers are doing. So until I find a nice way to motivate people that doesn’t cost me an arm and a leg (or anything at all), I don’t know if we’ll be making much progress. I love the idea though, and I’d love to get some content in so I can get to work, but… Well, you know. I’m also thinking of starting a new project that’ll feature “programmer graphics”–that is, everything will be procedural and made from code, no premade models, maps, etc.. involved. Which is great for me, since then I can do everything myself and therefor blame myself if I miss some deadlines. I won’t speak too much details of what the game is, as I think it’s definitely something genuine, original, and extremely fun–I don’t want to ruin the surprise, nor do I want anyone to steal my idea. Either way, what am I doing rambling on about it when I could be coding it!? Damnit Doug, get back to work!!
01.20.09Two projects at once
If you haven’t read my latest EXGN news post, do so now. I’m planning another rehaul of the script, but this time building off Lite since that’s treated us well over the past few months–or however long it’s been. I basically need some crazy ideas that I would’ve otherwise classified as “over-complicated” or “too much trouble to code” so we can set ourselves apart from other RP servers and scripts. As DarkRP is to DM, EXRP needs to have it’s own spotlight for something. So, get suggesting.
Anyway, this brings up one thing: I’ll have two big, high-profile (for me at least) projects going at once; EXRP and Espionage Inc. Now, you may think that I’m abandoning one and going for the other–definitely not. Right now I’m waiting for some more content (models and maps) to work with before I start the majority of the coding. After all, most of the coding involved in a SourceMod is just adding weapons and map-specific things like triggers, cinematics, etc… I’d just like to clear this up. When I was posting the news thread, it occurred to me that people may think I’m giving up on Espionage Inc. or putting it off for a while. I’m not, we’re still going to be in constant, active development, and I don’t want it to wait just because I’m doing my own thing. Just thought I’d get that out there–especially important to post this, if not just for the other devs to see. I’m still around, keep working!
01.18.09Espionage Inc
I’m extremely proud to announce the development of Espionage Inc–the SourceMod I was talking about in my last post. We started last Monday, and I just added the page for us on ModDB on Friday night. There’s been a lot of development given this small amount of time, and I’d like to keep it that way. At this rate we’ll have one of the quickest development cycles out of any SourceMod out there right now–but don’t get me wrong, we’re not going too fast. The problem is just that other development teams are going way too slow, especially so since most of them have around 10-20+ people. We just have 5 of us with one person specializing in each field, other than modeling where we have two people. It helps the pipeline, really. All we need is someone to do audio, whether that be in terms of VO’s, music, or sounds for gunfire and whatnot. Let me know if you can help. Anyway, you can check out our progress and such at espionageinc.net, which has our link to ModDB as well as a bunch of screenshots.
Aero FTW
On an unrelated note, I officially love Vista. I’ve been playing around with it since I installed it on my new rig and I absolutely love it. Every negative comment you’ve ever seen about Vista is just someone jumping on the bandwagon. The menu layout takes a little while to get used to coming from XP, but once you do it just makes so much more sense. Aero does NOT run when you’re in-game, and I find Vista to hog less resources than XP. Slap some VistaGlazz on there and this baby comes pretty damn close to putting OSX to shame when it comes to visuals. Overall I’m really happy–and I didn’t think I would be. Have a screenshot of my current setup. I still need to take a picture of my actual rig/desk/monitor/area.
In other news: I’m officially keeping up with my blog at one post every 2-3 days. Yay! Now if only I could remember to tag my posts…
01.13.09Clams
The results of last post’s poll are in, and it looks like our little espionage game will be a SourceMod. The main problem is that the map editor is a lot different from what Son’s used to, which is a big deal I think. As a whole, C4 just isn’t quite mature enough for something like this. Either way, I’ve been looking into Source today and I’ve come to realize that mostly everything is exactly like how it is in Lua. Just ignore all the freaky-looking code for all the complex elements like rendering and internal crap like that, and everything is like Lua. After all, the core gameplay mechanics won’t need changing from HL2. It’s mainly just new weapons, NPCs, a couple fresh looks on ordinary things (new features, I’ll detail them as soon as we’re ready to go public), and just having to pull all the content together into one neat package. Come to think of it, C4 would’ve required a lot more reinventing of the wheel–everything with a SourceMod is already done, you just have to… Well, mod it.
Anyway, Viro’s making a model of an ordinary ballpoint pen that has nothing more to it than meets the eye, and Son’s making a kind of training facility map with lasers and such. We’ve got lots of ideas and concepts, and we’re more than ready to get them out there into something playable. As for myself, I’m just playing around with Source to get a little more of a feel for it so I can jump straight to work once we have some stuff that needs coding. Also a lot of management type stuff, like setting up an SVN for us to use, a ModDB page, a subforum on EXGN, etc… You know the drill.
Right now the biggest thing that needs addressing is the name of the game. What should it be? We were thinking ‘Espionage’, but that seems a bit too… Generic and plain. I don’t know, it’s alright, but it just doesn’t seem like it would do the game justice. I threw ‘Clam Umbra’ out there; latin for “secret shadow”, which kinda fits, but a lot of people don’t really like how it sounds. We are going for the whole psuedo-realism thing, so being cliche` isn’t a bad thing, but still. I don’t know, I got a lot of crap for it being in latin for some reason. Maybe not. Either way, I need your opinion: What do you think? What do you suggest? Your comments are appreciated.
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