Post the results here! I'm really curious to see what the actual difference is....

Furthermore, if you want to appeal to consumers, realize the truth about their payment.  Paying customers DO NOT buy your game.  Your game was an effort created once by you, it has already happened, it's TOO LATE TO PAY for your game.

I like a lot of what you have to say but this part isn't really sensible. Of course something can be purchased after it's created! Almost everything is.

Of course it's nice to think that customers want you to create more, but for instance I saw a movie today because I wanted the experience of seeing it and I was curious about it. Not because I particularly care if they make a sequel! I imagine most people buying games feel the same way: they just want the game.

You are correct though, the supply and demand equation has to do with the effort required to copy the bits, so to speak. That's a really sensible way to look at it, I think.

Evan I think what you're saying makes a lot of sense.

What? Quaternions are quite well known and used all over the place. 4x4 matrices are a related but different transformation tool. When you're just working with rotations, quaternions are far more convenient, particularly if you need to interpolate them. I'm curious how you've come to the conclusion that matrices are more of a "de-facto standard" than quaternions.

One way of looking at this is: quaternions are quite useful and convenient when you're dealing with rotations, particularly doing sophisticated things. They are very efficient and generally have simpler math for performing operations on the rotations themselves (such as interpolating between them.)

However, when you're done, you convert your quaternion describing the rotation to a matrix, so you can transform points by it. Remember, it's actually more expensive to transform (rotate) a point by a quaternion, than it is to transform it by a matrix.

I don't know if this is what the original meaning of "de-facto standard" was, I'm just guessing!

I was going to say, I also like the idea of using custom scaling when generating your lower-res textures, regardless of whether or not you use mipmapping per se.

But rather than use photoshop, what I would recommend is this-- do it in your own code, in-engine. Create your own algorithm to scale them down, maybe giving higher weight to certain colors that you deem more important, or whatnot. Bilinear interpolation is not hard, at all! But if you do it in your own code, maybe you can get a result that is tailored to your game.

More importantly, this saves you having to process things beforehand. Imagine when you get to the stage of producing a lot of graphics, if you have to run a script everytime you edit something!

We're also using mipmaps, so I guess it's trilinear.

Try turning this off, and just using linear.

Remember that mipmaps add an extra layer of interpolation, depending on distance-to-camera. For a 2D game, you definitely don't want trilinear interpolation. Here's why:

Here's image 1, full resolution:

Code:

+----------+
|          |
|          |
|          |
|          |
+----------+

Here's image 2, half res:

Code:

+-----+
|     |
|     |
+-----+

What you want, based on screen resolution (or size of the polygon in pixels, let's say) is to use image 1, or use image 2, let's say.

The trouble with trilinear filtering, is that it will use something blended between image 1 and image 2. In 3D, this has the effect of avoiding a "pop" when objects change their texture mipmap as they move in and out of the camera range. However in 2D, since things never change their position in the camera range, you don't really want this.

The question remains whether or not you actually want to use mipmapping, at all. I suppose it depends on how your game works. If you for instance have a 1024x1024 explosion sprite, but sometimes that is scaled down very small, mipmapping may be worthwhile especially on slower hardware, if you have a lot of sprites. But really, you probably do not want to interpolate the mipmaps themselves.

Just my thoughts! I'm curious though, do you have any screenshots you can show the effect?

now the blocks can only be rotated over its height axle by 90 degrees step only.
for all the environment stuff that works nicely but the characters need more juice.

Hi nikki. It's a big jump to go from rotating around one axis, to rotating freely. I'm not saying you shouldn't do it, but here are some things to think about:

- You might be able to use free rotation for animation only, and keep the height-axis-only rotation as the only one that affects gameplay. Something to think about!

- It's a good idea to learn how to visualize rotations in 3D, before worrying about quaternions. In truth, the advantage of quaternions over matrices are mostly when you're combining many rotations together.

Either way, the most important thing I think is to learn how to visualize rotations in 3D, and understand what the different ways are to describe them.

Best wishes! There are lots of tutorials about quaternions but they are still just a tool for managing the math, they may or may not help you.

Just lost a half hour of progress, be wary when saving + quitting.

Edit: Happened again, game needs a dedicated save function so I'm sure that it saves, or I can't play for now.

Yougiedeggs there is a known bug with the autosave (patch forthcoming) near after where you are, it sounds like you might have been affected. If so I am really sorry. =(

Can you please contact me [email protected] and I'll check your save file for you. Again I'm really sorry about this!

The second one, for sure.

I second this. Second one was also my first instinct. I doubt I am only the second person to realize that after only one second, too!

O-M-G can you do a chess game with these?

thing i'm working on now:

Slimes with curly-cue hair is my awesome thing given to me by this thread for today!!

Also: "Wot's WIZORB?" ... OR ... "I can't believe somebody cloned Arkanoid!!</sarc>" =) ... OR ... "Captain ORBious"

Which is to say, I find nothing wrong with this =)

[only]

"In the final analysis, although C is one of the world’s great programming languages, there is a limit to its ability to handle complexity. Once a program exceeds somewhere between 25000 and 100,000 lines of code, it becomes so complex that it is difficult to grasp as a totality. C++ allows this barrier to be broken and helps the programmer comprehend and manage larger programs."

I think you will agree however that this quote doesn't say anything about whether or not using C++ is only worthwhile once a program reaches a certain length.

Anyhow, it's an oversimplification. For one thing though you can definitely do OOP in C, there are just fewer language features supporting it. Lua is definitely "less OOP" than Python but I happily OOP to my heart's content in Lua.

Here is what I think about C and C++:

- C is a language created from the start to be very efficient, or if you prefer as a kind of "high level assembly language" ideal for writing operating systems. Many concepts in C are based primarily around this idea, although we lose sight of this. E.g., typing in C works the way that it does because the compiler needs to always know exactly how much memory to allocate for an object. Typing in other languages that are less "to the metal" can be much less restrictive because the VM takes care of this.

- There are many nice syntactical and other language features in C, which may or may not have actually originated in C but many programmers (myself included) like a great deal. E.g., for loops are very nice because they have an intuitive structure but are also flexible enough that they are useful in other contexts.

- C++ is a rather complex (that's putting it lightly) addition of features to C to make it more like a high level language. However, most other high level languages operate in the context of a VM (see point 1) which means C++ must perform vast contortions to make things happen at compile time that would otherwise happen at run-time (see: template instantiation.) Certain things are also logically impossible, e.g., garbadge collection. For this reason, C++ gets a deservedly bad rap from people because the added complexity can be a nightmare for a new programmer.

(Side Note: remember that high level languages and VMs have existed for a long time, they are nothing new. So this deficiency in C was always apparent to people who had used these languages, just outweighed by it's other virtues.)

... BUT!

This third point does not apply to OOP in general. It applies to the particularly unique creature that is C++. So it's really not fair to paint all OOP languages as difficult or complex if your main experience with OOP is in C++, where it is truly difficult and complex.

C++ is useful, but I tend to use it as a sort of convenient extension to C and only in those contexts where I particularly desire the benefits of C, i.e., efficiency. So for me, most of my programming takes place in my HLL of choice (Lua) while I write that which I must in a kind of "C" that has been extended somewhat. I.e., I do think in some ways that C is better than C++ except that if you know what you are doing you might as well use those features of C++ that make your life easier. (OTOH, if you don't know it then why suffer to learn it?)

Constructing a large program entirely in C++ does not really make sense to me because the added complexity is simply not worth it if you don't need the efficiency, and it seems extremely unlikely that you will need that efficiency throughout your entire program.

This is essentially my position! It's been awhile since I've made a verbose forum post, feels good man...

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=25211.0

Somebody here was needing a voice actor for a trailer, seems like a good place to start maybe?

ya, i think i read somewhere that the advantages of c++ over c don't show up until a program exceeds about 100,000 lines of code -- it's only at that point that the organization of classes and objects and namespaces etc. becomes very important

Source?

I agree w/ you about program length being a factor, but this seems kind of fishy to me. It's also true that you can pick and choose the parts of C++ you want to use, you can code in C += 0.5 so to speak.

But what about a more modern language to start with like Python or Lua? Or did we cover that already...? 

i had links to sprite rips; i guess the site i took them from wont allow me to share them ;___;



these will have to do (its hard to find character art for this game...)... but the animations i linked to really had a lot of character...

Maybe it's just that I spent so much time with them, but the Xg characters really are strong without fitting into obvious stereotypes. Elly's subtly sad expression, Fei's troubled soul, and Citan's sort-of scholarly style all worked so well for me without being overbearing or cookie-cutter.

SIGGGGH... Xenogears...

Looks great without the gradients. Good job! The paper style is underutilized and very reasonable way to get content made for an indie, I think this has a good chance of succeeding. Just don't let yourself get bogged down tweaking artwork (gradient purge was well worth it tho)

=) Keep going!

EDIT: I should say I like the gradients on the last screenshot, i.e., the far background wall and the foreground, it works well.

This is looking stupdendous, what a fantastic idea!

EDIT: As in, 2D sprites on a voxel world, and all phat pixels.

Mockup for an area in Elizabeth Shoots Ghosts.

Dem 'shrooms. Rawr, dem hot.

Amaaazing. That little cloud summon is genius.

Here is a video of me for anyone who is curious:

Whoah. *bows*