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[Afinostux]

Lots of structure planning happened this weekend. Mostly focused on entity-entity interactions, and on making sure it'll be relatively painless to add all the behaviors I want later. Today, there's a new test build with some pretty fun visualisation stuff enabled.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/v17svb0bya3txqn/cavex_test3.zip?dl=0

The thick yellow lines show ground interaction, and the teal rectangles show overlap with the little crab robots.

You'll notice a tiny red line at the top left of the screen! This is a little visualisation of the budget for each frame. If the line is touching the right side of the window, the frame budget has been blown and things will run slowly. I might leave this one in for future test builds, until I'm satisfied that it's performing well on everyone's systems. If the red line reaches halfway or farther across your screen, tell me about your computer!

[Afinostux]

productive morning 

[Pixel Noise]

Nice start! I like some of the animations you are coming up with - nice movement. Obviously needs a few tweaks, but everyone seems to be liking the character overall, which is probably a good thing!

[Afinostux]

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/66774144/cavex_test4.zip

new things in this build:
-debug menu
-"hitpoints"
-better camera?

[Zorg]

I guess the character poses are still placeholder but it's funny to see that, while he's jumping, you made him lean forward/backward exactly in the opposite direction i would choose.

[lobstersteve]

Yeah..it seems a little weird in general how he is leaning backwards, even while running.
Normally sprites lean forward, and more forward the faster they go.
http://www.cgmeetup.net/home/how-to-create-run-cycle-animation/

[GameQuester]

I guess the character poses are still placeholder but it's funny to see that, while he's jumping, you made him lean forward/backward exactly in the opposite direction i would choose.

I thought about it for a while and then suddenly it came to my mind...

[Afinostux]

haha yeah, that's exactly what I was going for. I think there are a couple things going on that make it look strange right now: he is leaning back a little too much, and the little chest detail makes it hard to make out the silhouettes of his hands.



Here's a build that fixes both of those things. I might not do much more to the animations until I write an animation editor, editing keyframes with vim is for the birds

https://www.dropbox.com/s/fuhcyju5jqdn56x/cavex_test5.zip?dl=0

[Ruxar]

Yeah, I'd maybe darken the far arm / leg a bit to enhance the walking / running / jump cycles.

[Afinostux]

When the sprite flips, the layers are also flipped around so that the arms and legs stay on the correct side of the sprite. At this point I need to decide whether I want to:
A) break the color palette I've been sticking with and darken back facing limbs programmatically, or
B) flip the joints targeted by keyframes instead of flipping the layer order

B could potentially get more complicated and error prone, but it would allow a really simple way to make moving limbs more distinct. Probably going to go with A, since it makes item attachments much simpler. Also allows me to have asymmetrical characters.

I feel like experimenting with a livestream! Anyone who has questions about the animation system, that might be a perfect time to ask them. I've got a couple pretty major changes to make to that code, and I'll be starting on the editor, so I'll be able to really pull it apart and show how stuff works. 2pm probably?

[Afinostux]

2pm on saturday, today is problem

[Afinostux]

Spent all day making text entry box work the way I wanted.
Then I read this https://wiki.libsdl.org/Tutorials/TextInput


 

Screw it, I'll go back and fix it later

[Afinostux]

Map editor's coming along nicely!



If you're wondering what 'envelopes' are, they're sets of rules for placing tiles. The idea is to take a set of rectangles as input, then let the game automate the bulk of the tile placement. For now, I'll add functionality to the editor to paint rectangles, and place all the tiles in advance. Eventually, I hope to use this to generate levels that still look nice, by reducing the amount of art stuff the generator has to consider at every step of the process. Should be interesting! I've seen similar techniques before, but nothing that works exactly the way that I'm using it.

[ProgramGamer]

I think that's how nes metroid did it too, right? Where it would build levels from rectangle data like what you're making. This is looking cooler and cooler btw!

[Afinostux]

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/66774144/cavex_test6.zip

This build is mostly internal changes, improving the architecture now that I've got some usage code, preparing for random level generation... Not a lot to see! Next build should be a little more visually interesting.

Changes:

• Big level format changes
• Beginnings of random level generation
• Start of a level editor. navigate with vi keys. not super functional yet
• Moving skeleton sprites look a lot more stable
• Tons of internal changes, not a lot to see right now

Known bugs:

• tile grid is extremely janky, i blame fmod

fmod doesn't actually seem to do what I would expect it to... anyone with C experience know exactly what it's trying to do? I'm getting negative numbers and all sorts of bizarre things out of it. Didn't even know that it was possible to get negative numbers as a remainder...

[Afinostux]

Just so there's something to see this update, here's a screenshot with the output of the world generator drawn. greenish lines are walls, brownish lines are doors. Next step is to link screens together into larger rooms, then get to work on platform and wall layout. Then, build a graph of the rooms and start to do the really interesting stuff.

[Afinostux]

First pass on multi-screen rooms. Taste teh raneb0w

[Afinostux]

more debug visualizations. minimap, player position, camera regions, camera constraint bounds.

[Afinostux]

Spent a couple weeks writing gui for editing my skeleton sprites, until I realized that I would be much happier if I could just hot load editor resources whenever the text file changed, and just modify it in my text editor. Sheesh.