Hapax legomena
When I can’t sleep, and don’t code, I go on these Wikipedia safaris. Today something awesome happened and I learned about hapax legomena. I totally have one and you’re staring at it.
Space Fortress wise, I have been getting some boring-to-discuss sloggage into a sprite system done. I now have:
- An entity system (to be discussed later) for loading definitions of in-game entities from XML files, entities being the things in the game world that aren’t dirt.
- A sprite system, which manages those animated little bitmaps drawn onto the screen. The Artist class responsible for drawing entities creates a sprite for each entity. The ‘front end’ of an entity, also xmelly
- Used an ordered list on Terraflubb
These things are very crude at the moment but will eventually be one of the most feature-rich aspects of the game engine. Hopefully, once it’s in place, I will be able to convince myself that it is not a ridiculous introduction of complexity but something useful. My goal is to have a worker-drone and a building entity defined and set up in the game soon. Fun stuff comes after that.
Christmas Break
I’m taking a little no-computer time this Christmas break. I broke some code intentionally and the things I have to do are straightforward and will facilitate the creation of good, recyclable, chunks of game for me. I’m pleased that I can recycle little things now, and that I’m sure these new bits will be very recyclable in the future.
I am not getting distracted, but I know that the old Horror Mansion will be able to use most of the things I’m building now. If I keep on plowing ahead this way, I think I can revisit most of my ideas in the future and at least get to the prototype phase. If they’re not fun at that point, I can be satisfied knowing that I tried.
Meanwhile! I’m so close to finally doing the whole Model - View dichotomy neatly arranged in my brain. I think it is all set at the moment, but until I get it animated, I won’t be pleased.
MVC Obsession Woes: Part One
Due to a wee bit of trouble falling asleep, I started hacking in some better ‘entity’ stuff into Space Fortress. I ran into some issues which resulted in me not finishing what I had hoped for tonight. I find blogging helps make my brain work. This post explains my tragic obsession with MVC, an architectural pattern I might not even understand.
Two Week Vacation? Lame.
So, the last two weeks have been tragically uneventful. The ol’ wisdom teeth became a bigger pain than I thought a few days later, and I didn’t do much of anything. This was followed up by a week of visitors, and we all know how rude it is to code when company is over!
Today was my last day of school for the year, so I expect that I’ll start updating again shortly. The whole point of this blog was to post to it frequently, so that’s what I’ll do!
My next step is to move the old Tinyroidvania sprite-animation system (with XML loader!) into the game so the sprites will no longer be integers for an array of Textures. Once they know how to be animated, then we’ll have more interesting videos.
Space Fortress: Showcase!
Things are now at the point and the GUI stuff seems squared away. It’s not finished or anything, but it’s ready for future expansion. Lots of the older code has been gutted out, it is becoming more manageable.
There was also a great big overhaul of the scene drawing code. Right now there are two drawing sweeps. First the tiles are drawn (the environment) then the entities (the things). Both of these sweeps are very crude at the moment, but their logic is pretty sound. It was a bit harder than I thought to get the entities to wrap around the x-axis. There are a few neat little special cases that had to be resolved.
In fact, I’m so proud of this, I’m going to stick up my first video!
Geek stuff after the break!
Space Fortress: A lot of work
So, the UI is coming along wonderfully now. I’m just realizing that the game below it is incredibly convoluted for what I want it to now become. Thanks to the glory of source-control, I might just spin off a new hunk of it without all the odd legacy stuff. I think I need to get the UI just a bit tighter, so I can pay attention to what’s going on in the world.
It’s always a bit embarrassing to blog this late.
Space Fortress: Input Revamp
Now that I’m using a GUI like Thingle (a conclusive tutorial is coming, but at the moment it would be the blind leading the blind), I’m wresting with a few issues dealing with which widgets are going to consume mouse and keyboard events. In my current implementation, if you (say) highlight some text in a <textarea>, it will select some tiles hiding behind the widget!
This will become a bigger problem when other UI elements will start popping up on the screen. Clicks, sliders, stuff will all go bad. So I had better lick this early. I have always used a non event-driven input technique (I like to poll before my update phase), so I need to reconsider a few things.
Luckily, the Slick forumites are great and all deserve hats.
New Feature: Feature-creep Bucket
As I come up with a creep, I stick it into a file, and it gets chewed up and plopped online to my feature bucket! I had no idea how much I had forgotten about Python! This one’s just for Space Fortress right now.
If you are ever lucky enough to find a feature in square brackets like this: [SVG], it means I narrowly avoided spinning off into a rant when I say “I want to do it like this, but I reserve the right to go off and do this cool thing I’m sure I will forget if I don’t mention right now and ruin whatever flow of discussion I almost had for a feature which will never materialize anyway!”.
Space Fortress: Meat and Potatoes
Okay! So it’s time to shake off the dust and start working on Space Fortress’s core design components. There are some things that are good already, others that need to be scrapped and redone almost completely. Luckily, I’m pleased with how I built the non-changing parts so they’ll survive.
In this little blog I will discuss the core components of the game, and explain what I think has to get done in order for me to ever be happy again.
Space Fortress Redesign
I tried to write up some kind of design document for Space Fortress when I started because I felt like I had too many features I wanted to get off my mind before they started creeping into the code prematurely. The result is kind a of weird looking brain dump. I dumped out my original vision for the game, but also started talking about low-level descisions about how dirt will be arranged after it is excavation.
While I think it was a good thing for me to try thinking before coding (as I’ve grown to appreciate software engineering), I don’t think I properly thought through the design before commiting to that which I’ve coded. Here is what I will do next.