Oh yeah lol, forgot to mention, the machine I'm running the game is kind of a test machine. The "most poo" machine from this household. It's not ANCIENT but a laptop from two years ago or so and it was the "cheapest choice" back then too so... I'll post the specs a bit later.

oh shit, the framerate went from 60 to 1197 

Kinnas is running a proper machine and the framerate increase was, well, noticable 

I can say I'm more than pleased how things ended up going, heh.

[demand]

I demand a wallpaper from all of the doodles 

[I]

Oh wow, after two-three days of full on struggling to implement the most epic datastructure to handle the tiles the way I wanted them I got my arse so badly destroyed and in the end... achieved absolutely nothing.

Last night when I was falling asleep it suddenly hit me, I spent 5 minutes doodling the idea on paper and went back to bed and fell asleep instantly. Looked at the paper in the morning(now), spent 3 minutes changing code and boom it works. Not the most elegant solution BUT we got over double the framerate what it was before (it was barely 60 with the full sized WIP level 1). So, I'm happy to go with this. I might be able to squeeze out few more frames for us when I optimise the idea. Now it's just... works. Oh well, now I'm seriously taking the weekend off, heh. Ah, finally solved that. Lol, took me a week and went completely over the board with my ideas. Lesson learned, I guess.   

Here's a compeltely random screenshot with 'i' jumping to her hearts content after I got it working.



note how annoying I'm being by not showing a full screenshot... I don't want to ruin anything kinnas is working on so hehe

So weekend off, working on it again on monday. Will probably refine the idea to get the few frames more out of it and after that I'll add dashing, slashing and shooting probably. Not sure yet, got so many things open I need to add. But it's making steady and good progress.

It was another week of interesting development. Have a nice weekend guys.


EDIT #3421312:
kinnas, new release in TEH SECRET room.

I'm in a state of complete personal meltdown... Taking two-three days off to recover from mondays and tuesdays damage    Will tell more about this later.

I have to say it's coming along nicely, I usually work on it during monday to friday and keep weekends off. My usual work time is anywhere from 2-7h per day when I'm on it.

The tougher the problem the more time I usually spend with it.

Today I went through the trouble of implementint quadtree to optimize the collision detection checks. Since we got a big map with loads of stuff to check collisions against. The quadtree can be built in several different ways, to make normal rectangles of the nodes or with a bit more "spiffier" stuff. I admit I kind of went over the board with that but heyh, it's there now so it can be used or not, depending is the collision checks going to be the bottle neck or not. After implementing the tree I realised that the collision detections in the current level 1 WIP map were not the problem, it was the actual rendering of tiles.

Several layers, small tile size and huge map are not a good combination. So I'll optimise this on monday. I'll collapse all the static layers together and combine n amount of small tiles to create bigger tiles (like adviced before). So it should be a lot faster after the optimisations, basically dramatically decresing the calls to renderer and drawing a lot bigger tiles in one go and covering all the space that is currently viewed. Yay. Let's see how that goes on monday... or during the weekend if I don't have anything else to work on.

Also for top programmers, any good sites / tutorials for me on streaming content for a game? Has nothing to do with this project but I'm interested in looking into it and studying the idea. So basically tutorials/tips/sites on how to eliminate loading screens completely by streaming the content on the fly. Language does not really matter.

That's it for tonight folks, keep your heads up, play games, make games and have fun 

All test maps are now officially throw into the rubbish bin, the next production state of tilesets has started aaaand the first level is WIP.

I have no idea where kinnas pulls all this creativity, I just do the programming. And thanks for all the comments so far, everythings been taken care of, in a way or another, heh.

So, it's another cup of coffee for me and programming time 

There we go, first test with the double-pixel-ratio-thingie-what-ever-you-want-to-call-it.
Had many bumps on the road but got there. Oh yeah, don't worry guys, I'm still running a test map with a quick draft of the spritesheets so things might look a bit out of place or just generally wacky 

Next on the list are... Adding velocity and stuff for the camera so that it actually follows the player(or given entity) in a believable manner, dashing, shooting and slashing. After that back to work with the animations and different frame looping structures.

 

astrospoon, give me your babies! Great work so far 

Hee, I think he meant beat em up 

Anyway, looking awesome. Gotta love that huge knife.

For some reason I get knytt wibes from the graphics, not a bad thing at all. I like it. 

At the start of next week I should have the animations running and looking really sexy in the game based on the sprite sheets I'm provided by kinnas

Had to do a super crappy pre-alpha quick hack together release for kinnas because I was in middle of insane modifications and I completely forgot that kinnas needs something to test the maps with to see does the map design work ... silly me 
So no kinnas has a release that is just a pile of hacks to tests the maps.. oooh boy lol.

Hopefully he can get the maps tested with that, I really hope so, lol.

But anyway, next on the list: working animations for player (might show you guys a small video of these then, or something, basically just running right and left and showing the animations yahoo~~) and then.... hmm... nailing down the "movement"/"physics" because currently it's totally poo.

Fun times! 
Also might have to look into creating the bigger tiles from the small ones. Purr... but I'm off and will work again on monday so ... hopefully at the end of monday or on tuesday morning something new is happening


EDIT #1:
My unix shell blew up, which means I'm not on IRC anymore... I will not IRC without my irssi LOL. So... that's my explanation to guys who are wondering where I am. (there probably are none). :D

EDIT #2:
Yup, done most of the animations into the game now. i is now animated officially but all of the animations are not in place just yet. Stuff like slashing, dashing and shootting are no there yet. Just for the simple fact that I haven't implemented them and most timing in frames (jumping example) is a bit off since haven't decided on stuff like what is the jump velocity and stuff in the end but heyh... we'll get there Oh.. and video? Oh wow, will produce one in a bit. Probably will try pushing it out tomorrow.

Working on the game, the last week has been a bit slow since I was at assembly 09 for the last week. Aaanyway, back to work with the game and I did few optimisations with the actual tiles and starting to realise that tiles of size 16x16 might be TOO small...

Currently working on optimising the running through ALL the layers of tiles and checking are they in the "view frustum". Already done loads of work on it and been thinking of working on some sort of tile occlusion algorithm because there is just an INSANE amount of tiles even in the test map with the tiles being 16x16 and there being OVER 9000 layers(or atleast pretty close lol) of them.

Nothing too serious, things are starting to look good. Working on the actual movement of the character and "how high he should jump" etc. stuff. Moving on.

Hats of to tool programmers who are generally very under appreciated, I salute you. 

Keep up the interesting work. Hopefully you can maintain a high usability, meaning the learning curve is SMALL and it's easy and quick to use so that it actually is of any use So far looking good.

www.plopbox.net/

This site is awesome beyond words. I started listening to it to test it and now I've been addicted to it for like five days and still going strong, programming also going more or less smoothly 

Here we go!
After spending 12h straight banging my head on the wall yesterday I finally got it to work. The problem was way too simple for me to spot it on the first place and since I didn't spot it right away I started doing silly changes and that sent me straight into a programming hell that I wish nobody wants to go to... But in the end, lesson learned, improvements made and now it works.

We can now run the map files made by kinnas with our game and place tiles, entities and such in the world based on the data in the map file.



Don't worry about the black lines on the left and right, it's just that the test map is really small but contains all the data we wanted to do. That's why there's black showing on the sides Like I said, pretty much WIP since it's just a test map FOR ME, silly old me who got absolutely destroyed yesterday. 

Development continues!

Update goes HERE! First post completely updated with new development team information, game information and all that whazam. Jump in and enjoy.   

I demand to see more butt face cats :3 awesome work so far gents! Unfortunately I cannot do anything.. uhm.. But I will try! I'll whip up my programming art cat in no time!

See my tools in action. paint.net! 

Two secs...

EDIT #1: after firing up paint.net and trying to pixel an outline of cat I realised this is going to be another milestone failure with me and pixel art... I got so absolute frustrated with the fact that I cannot pull off even the most simple pixel art thing so.. this was the result, I had to do something. I present, my pixel art cat:



It's 'C' for really cute cat, lol. If nothing else, atleast it has pixels.

Haha, will try. The problem I have is I know how to work all the features of my camera and do fancy stuff with it but interesting photos only come out when I'm not ready for them at all. Like I just swing the camera around take a picture after taking 500 poo pictures and voila, I've got my winner picture. It really annoys me.

I'm thinking of redoing the sun flower macro shot with my current camera, since the old shot is done like.. what.. 7 years ago on a shitty 2megapixel camera that died after seven shots with flash

LIES.

Sad truth is, most of my "interesting" pieces are captured with insane amount of sheer luck... 

Hello fellow photographers, I really like taking photos but I'm not really that good 

Here we go:


















Hope you guys like some of them.. sorry for the varying sizes and some of them being poo size. Nice pictures in the thread so far, really like the macro ones. Good job guys.