I hate being sick. And I hate summer colds, but I did get a tiny bit of coding working.

Figured out how to do better display of the world, so it now has the squarish-look to the world. I also changed it so the blocks are 1 meter high (about half screen). That way, your Acrobatics skill will allow you to jump up. I'm leaning toward 10 points of Acrobatics = 1 meter jump, so a 100 Acrobatics will let you jump up 10 squares (there will be hidden areas in the non-existent dungeons). You'll also automatically jump when you try to get into a square that is too high at this point. Complete with sfxr-generated jumping noise.

For the time being, view range is only 20 meters or so. I'll get the epic view back in once I get more of the game working properly.

I did manage to get the procedural generation of the world into the system. Right now, its taking a 512^2 image and creates a 16384^2 world that changes slightly for every new game. Mostly the beginnings of the trees and grass placement is random per-game and even most of the layout of the terrain is per-game now. It also cuts the install size by 300 MB or so. So, that is a good thing.

Got an entire weekend to blow off on this, and I'm planning on doing that. I should have screenshots later today or tomorrow, depending on progress. Forgot to throw them on the thumb drive for today.

Plans for the weekend are:

* Finish basic world generation
** Placement of plants, grass, and trees.
* Random Encounters
* Death
* Skill Improvement
** Leveling
** Sleeping/Saving
* Sound effects
** Maybe music (going to steal at first)

http://www.mono-project.com/MonoCurses

Also forgot, I got some sound effects done with the awesome sfxr program and toyed with music (didn't get far on that though).

Tao.Sdl works very nice for SDL + C#.

Bah, I hate 3D renderers. In specific, I was really unhappy with the heightmap/terrain of the world, so I'm trying to revamp it to keep up the speed and still give more "square" appearance. Also to let me put in the meshes for the walls when you are close enough. Not to mention, it started giving me a bit of a headache when I tried to put in the first (and only for this contest) dungeon/prison.

I'm going to try something silly and severely cut down on the amount of files needed for the game. Mainly by using some procedural stuff to expand the world. Instead of having a 1024^2 map processed into 32^2 areas of 32^2 tiles (the source of most of the space), I'm going to see if I can get away with a 256^2 map and use functions to expand it out to the full 20 km range. Not to mention, remove most of the "useless" locations that were just there for terrain, which would cut down on the XML file size.

It might let me have a 'different' world for each new game but it won't be that different. I haven't decided on that one, but I'm going back to figuring out how to do rendering and LOD just because I want square walls. It might also cut down on how far you can see away, but I need to get it right before I can make it fancy. I will be keeping the mountain ranges though, it is just cool to climb up the mountains (though my rivers are like 300 feet deep... all of them). And there a few places where you can fall 380 meters still.

Oh, and I got world time and the sun movement in sync. So, as you run across the world, you actually get to see the sun move in time with you. And if you stop, so does the sun. There are also trees in there, but badly (one of the reasons I'm revamping said graphics system).

[bLADE Wiki]

This isn't specifically a developer tool, but it's incredibly useful for organizing notes etc. It's called bLADE Wiki and it's a Personal Wiki, basically, a Wiki that runs on your desktop. No messing around with hosting or setting up a server. You just need .NET 2.0, but most Windows people probably have that nowadays. There's even a version for Windows Mobile devices that syncs with the desktop version.

I've just installed this yesterday and I already have a couple of pages written up, it's great for jotting down game ideas or basically anything you want to take notes on. I just keep it always running in the system tray and bring it up whenever I need it. Oh, and it's free.

There is also Tomboy which is pretty good for notes. The next release is suppose to really polish up the Windows side of things, but its a CLI (.NET) application also.

Paint.net is a great little application, but I still prefer Gimp.

I keep hoping the SVG+Javascript thing would take off. Or there would be at least a good portal library for rendering SVG, but it just keeps sputtering. I'm hoping for OpenVG now, but I want something that runs in C# (i.e. not C++), and on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

As such, I'm hacking things right now, but I keep hoping.

That would depend on your textures. If you use pure vector artwork, then you won't get blurring except for the anti-alised lines. If you are using a non-vector texture, you'll get scaling, blurring, or artifacts, unless it matches exactly with the size of the user's resolution. For GS, I just kept with the pure vector artwork to keep it crisp at all levels.

I think this is easily the most ambitious project of the competition (Although if Kinten and his team can demake Fallout in under a week, I'll be most impressed); 350MB demo?! I'm away from home at the moment, but I'll check it out when I get back, and give you some feedback.

Yeah, its a bit too ambitious, actually. For one person, that is. Unless amazing things happen this week, I won't get everything I hoped for done, but I should get a lot closer than I got to my goals of Running Bomb.

Most of the demo size are the height and texture maps for the world. I'm sure I should have done something different, but at the time, it was just easier to create expanded textures from the image I drew and modify them with perlin noise so it has a smooth texture across the entire world. Step one, make it work. Step two, make it smaller and faster.

Tonight, I think I'm going to finish up the sun movement and problem implement the in-game clock.

Well, I think I actually got something useful enough to show. That and having some Internet connection really helps with producing something more than just words. So, it is starting to look a bit more like a game. I got character creation basically done this week. It isn't pretty, but it works and most of the calculations are in there.

I got the beginning of an atmosphere node. The sun still moves constantly--I still need to sync it to the game state. Loading games works now also. And, you can "die" by moving around and falling too much (your Acrobatics skill reduces falling damage).

Here is a short flash (6 MB) video of the game so far:

http://mfgames.com/games/lethes-yarn/lethes-yarn-0.0.1-001

Oh yeah, commands:

WASD to move around (arrow keys work too)
Q and E are strafe movement.
F1 in game brings up the character sheet.
ESCAPE should escape out of everything.
` Will go into console mode
  "qqq" quit now
  "s" save
  "tgm" toggle god mode
  "tcl" toggle collision logic (turns Z and C for up and down respectively)

I actually have a demo. It's large (60 MB, uncompressed to 350 MB), but you can get it at:

http://mfgames.com/games/lethes-yarn/lethes-yarn-0.0.1.rar

At the moment, I would have to say Ken Perlin is the greatest person on the planet. Last night, I managed to hack a Perlin noise function into my terrain painting (sort of baked, actually) to actually give it enough variance that it almost looks good. Desperately needs grass and trees, but now that I have Internet at home, I'll be able to hopefully add some of that. Looks like I'm going to stick with the 1.2 km visible range for now. There is some texture breaking at the mesh, but not a stopping point. Also using a mesh is slightly off center on the screen, but not critically at this point, so I'm going to just move on.

Actually got gravity working last night. Walking around actually follows the terrain (if you have collisions on, of course) and it keeps track if you fall more than 10 meters (gives a bright red error message). That will tie into athletics since your damage is based on that skill (and since you can't jump, it is only used in one place).

Tonight, my plans are to get the grass scene nodes working so I have some grass to break up the flat grounds, and probably the skydome/atmosphere scene node so I can have at least a day/night cycle. If that works out, I'll finish adding the water node stuff and call that part "done". Trees and rock placement will be put on the "later" phase since I'm running out of time.

On the paper coding side, figured out the basics for random encounters. I'm also going with the Kyntt Story type of save points. Every time you sleep, you save. And you get exactly one save slot per game. You also level when you sleep. I'm not going to keep track of skills improved (like Oblivion). Instead, I'll just give a +5, +3, and +1 attribute increase at each level. It will be more regular, but I hate random improvements.

Though, I am taking the Oblivion Overhaul for the leveling. That way, your opponent isn't exactly 1 level above you. Instead, there will be regions where the level of the encounter is higher and areas where it is lower.

Hopefully, I'll get screenshots, a short movie, and/or a demo up by Sunday.

Slowly moving forward. My Internet is down at work (again), so I can't really do anything that I need to have examples for. Instead, I worked on the editor. I'm keeping the cubic movement, but I'm switching most of the terrain to simple 32^2 meshes and imitation perline noise meshes. It will make it look more like Bard's Tale 2's wilderness area, but keeping with the 3D terrain. Once I get the trees and grass meshes in, things should look like a low-grade Oblivion. At the moment, you can see about 128 locations in front of the player, I'm hoping to get double that for a good machine (and make it user configurable using what I did two days ago).

Interestingly, I can still get the cities into the game. Those will remain the cubes as normal, only the ground terrain will be mesh-based. Sadly, IrrlichtNETCP doesn't have a tree scene node (for something like SpeedTree), so I'll just find tree models and randomly place them. I do have a grass node, which I'm hoping to get into the game tomorrow or by Saturday. Once I get the atmosphere (day/night cycle) in, I'm going to stop working on terrain and work on character creation.

My goal is to have creation and basic wilderness display/navigation done by end of day Sunday. Then crack open Blender and start making something that looks like internal pieces, caves, tombs, walls, and maybe a Vector-man-like 3D figure using my Glorious Saber web comic (or Thing Thing flash games) as inspiration. It won't be fancy, but I can at least figure out how to animate/create that.

Back from GenCon and got a bit of work done on this. Not much, really, but after a day's worth of driving, I was happy I got *anything* done.

I managed to get the basic console working (`) with the tgm (god mode) and tcl (walk through walls). I got worked on getting a proper editor for my settings done, something that I've been meaning to do for a while. So, I can throw most of the game logic into that file and let me tweak things as I go.

I'm planning on working on the default layout and/or character creation tonight. The 32 height didn't really work out, made everything too flat. So, I'm going to 256 heights and working on getting that cleaned up. I just have to work on the editor that does most of that since it is choking badly on the file creation. I also figured out how to do an in-place update of a zip archive which means I might be able to speed things up by throwing things in a zip archive (instead of having 2000+ files hanging around).

Creation is fun and less tedious than the editor. If I do that, I should be able to knock it off in a day. That way, I'll get the birthsigns, race, gender, class, and focus stuff all done and maybe even get a character statistics display. There won't be a redo everything at the end of the prison level though, no time or energy to do that, not to mention I thought it was stupid.

That looks great! Lovely.

going analogic lately



cheers

Soo.. I pretty much had to scrap my platform game. 
It was way too ambitious, and I hit a bunch of technical snags that really put me off it. being swamped with work didn't help either.
On the plus side I learned alot of stuff while working on it.

Anyway, this may or may not be an early character design for a new game. it will involve.. color (or the lack of thereof) in a pretty cool way.

These two are fantastic. Yummy!

I still wouldn't mind a bit of help with the 3D modeling (mainly the figures, I have a list) and music-making (also have a list) for my game, Lethe's Yarn.

So, just wanted to give an update.  I may not end up working more on this project, because unfortunately, this weekend I drove over my laptop.  (I don't have a desktop)  It was an accident that I am still kicking myself over, but as a result, my development has ceased until I can get the machine repaired/replaced.

 

That royally sucks.

And, it isn't done yet, but here is a shot of looking over a valley (and a really bad river).

Internet was out, so I couldn't do my homework. So, after cleaning up the apartment for my convention trip, I was drawn back to the game like a moth and an electrified grid. Managed to get the text rendering done fairly properly (still missing the screen though) so you can see the game displaying things. Even wrote a simplified HTML-like parser that can do bold, italic, and three colors (red, green, blue) so I can put in the damage messages. Oh yeah, and h1 and h2 tags too.

I'm planning on using a MUD-style damage, like "The goblin scratches you." or "The goblin -=- DEVASTATES -=- you!" depending on ratio of damage to your full hit points. Needless to say, annihilate and devastate are both "you are dead" states.

The character status area is also pretty much done (baring status). It looks like you can have up to 4 allies, all computer controlled, including summoned creatures. The status area will give you the number of seconds left on your summon, kind of like the original game.

For me, it is a good music (typically techno, high bpm, or great beat) and just break something down into small pieces. Easier to focus when you can just check things off as "2 minutes, done! 4 minutes, done! 15 minutes, got it!"