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[Craig Stern]

The game now sorts the players into alliance categories at the start of the battle.

[Craig Stern]

I've posted a new monthly update summarizing the previous month's progress in detail!

Indiecade forced me to focus on useability and polish this past month: this new month is going to be the month of major features (team matches, blitting animation, online multiplayer). Onward!

[Craig Stern]

Team matches now work! Whenever an alliance (team of players) collectively meets a match's win condition, that alliance wins the match. I've tested it, and it seems to be working with all alliance types and with all game types (Last Man Standing, Generals, Capture the Flag).

With this working, it occurs to me that I need to create a Diplomacy Screen feature to lay out each player, show what color they are, show which alliance they're in, show how many characters they have left in their army, and (in Capture the Flag matches, at least) how many points they've scored. This is a different use for the diplomacy screen than I'd first envisioned, but (1) it is important that players are able to reference this information and (2) I'm not sure if I'm going to have the time to make dynamic alliances anymore anyway.

Speaking of which: you may have noticed in the October Update that character movement animations are finally completed! My next big priority is going to be coding blitting for sprite animations. The Diplomacy Screen is going to have to wait.

[Craig Stern]

I took a little while today to add something I'd forgotten to put in for team matches: AI players now target characters on enemy teams while treating their allies as friendlies.

With that now complete, I've begun work on coding character animations! Yay!

[Craig Stern]

Ugh; I just knew this was going to be a pain the butt. Flash doesn't support synchronous reading of external image data into a BitmapData object, which means that either

• (1) the game is going to have to hang for a second every time it accesses a new character animation, or
• (2) I am going to have to find a way to squeeze all animations for every character class into a single sprite sheet, or
• (3) I am going to have to load every sprite sheet for each character class on instantiation, or
• (4) I am going to have to stick all character sprite sheets within the game itself and take them off the table as far as player modding

Option 1 really isn't acceptable. Option 2 would seriously impact my ability to easily add new attack animations to characters of a given class. Option 4 sucks, since I really want all aspects of this game to be open to modders. Which means that I might need to go with option 3, despite the fact that it will be a big freakin' waste of system resources.

Le sigh.

[Moczan]

You mean asynchronous? Can't you load it asynchronously to ByteArray and convert to BitmapData when it finish loading?

[Craig Stern]

From what I've read, I can load it synchronously through byteArray, but there is no method of then synchronously converting the data into BitmapData. (Loader.loadBytes() is asynchronous, and I need synchronous.)

However, with a little more Googling, it looks like someone has created a PNG decoder that might work synchronously:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11171619/as3-load-bitmapdata-from-jpg-png-bytearray-synchronously
I'm going to give this a shot and see if it works!

[Craig Stern]

I...think it worked?

Hard to tell. There are probably other bugs in there causing problems. Will try to sort it out tomorrow.

EDIT: Never mind, it totally worked! Now I just need to get the rest of the animation system working.

[Craig Stern]

Scratch that--I spoke too soon. For some reason, the png decoder has been putting out garbage for BitmapData. This is how it interprets a sprite sheet--a field of white broken up by some occasional, thin bands of colored pixels:



Looks like I'm going to be doing this asynchronously after all.

[Games Inquirer]

This looks incredible, even though I also tend to dislike the full top down view, I don't in this case. But I'm a bad tactician so I probably wouldn't get much enjoyment out of a multiplayer only game like this. Maybe in the future you'll make a single player SRPG with the engine and graphics, something akin to Fire Emblem, Shining Force, or Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre, Vandal Hearts, or whatever. Or maybe something like fantasy X-COM.

Please. Will buy

Edit: I just read that post where you discuss player created custom campaigns. So I take it there's single player as well despite the thread title? Sweet! I should read more carefully next time.

[Gregg Williams]

Whats the problem with Async loading anyways? It should be easy enough to set a flag, and basically pause/busy wait the game until the flag is unset, and thus get the same behavior as a synchronous action more or less.

[Craig Stern]

This looks incredible, even though I also tend to dislike the full top down view, I don't in this case. But I'm a bad tactician so I probably wouldn't get much enjoyment out of a multiplayer only game like this. Maybe in the future you'll make a single player SRPG with the engine and graphics, something akin to Fire Emblem, Shining Force, or Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre, Vandal Hearts, or whatever. Or maybe something like fantasy X-COM.

Please. Will buy

Edit: I just read that post where you discuss player created custom campaigns. So I take it there's single player as well despite the thread title? Sweet! I should read more carefully next time.

Thanks! This game does indeed have a single player campaign, Fire Emblem-style. I suppose I should change the thread title...

Whats the problem with Async loading anyways? It should be easy enough to set a flag, and basically pause/busy wait the game until the flag is unset, and thus get the same behavior as a synchronous action more or less.

I'm a concerned about what's going to happen once I start having a bunch of animations on the screen at once. Am I going to have to check for a flag in every single character on the screen in every frame? (Answer: probably.) Still, this is most likely going to be my next line of attack.

[Gregg Williams]

Id actually probably just load the needed animation data per character at the same time as loading the map.

I mean is this really an issue, or are you just making deals with the devil known as pre-mature optimization? =)

[Craig Stern]

The latter, mostly.


Small update: I spent some time last night writing some more dialog developing Emma and Sabrina.

[Craig Stern]

CHARACTER ANIMATION IS WORKING!

I haven't tested it on my netbook yet, but so far I don't think there are going to be any performance issues: the sprite sheets load near-instantaneously, and the animations themselves run so fast that I had to put an artificial delay into the code to keep them all from looking like those cornball comedies from the 1910s where everyone runs around in double-time!

I've got the animations working smoothly during character movement now, but I have a few more tweaks to make before I'll be ready to upload video showing them off. Stay tuned!

[Craig Stern]

Phew! Spent a few hours fixing bugs; things are looking pretty good here.

I'll be making a new video showing this off as soon as I get a chance. (Hopefully, that'll be as soon as I get home from work tomorrow. If not, it'll be Saturday.)

[Craig Stern]

News!

First, I wrote a piece the other day about the challenges of writing lots of female characters, as I am doing in Telepath Tactics. You can read that here if you're curious.

Second, I woke up early this morning and recorded a teaser video showing off the new character animations! I strongly suggest watching this one at 1080p so you can see the details:

[Gregg Williams]

Looks like copypixels is working out well for you =)

One question, any particular reason yo went with arrows for directional facing, instead of just having the sprite stay facing a given direction?

[Craig Stern]

One question, any particular reason yo went with arrows for directional facing, instead of just having the sprite stay facing a given direction?

Yes: for somewhat boring technical reason, I haven't put the directional rest sprites into the game yet. (If you're really that curious: when Inane created them, he used red team colorations with the understanding that he would then make a variation for each team color. However, we then switched over to using violet colorations with in-engine palette swapping; I'm waiting for Inane to provide an updated, violet set before I stick them in the game.)

[Gregg Williams]

Oh well okay =) Thought there might of been some design reason for that, but I guess not.