Crazy few months
It has been a crazy few months, but I’m back (kind of)! I was pretty sick for a while, I left the Ph.D. program, and then Em and I moved up to Ottawa. Thanks to Ian being awesome, I start my first grown-up job on Monday. The timing could not have been any better here, a week or two sooner and I wouldn’t have thought that I’d be well enough to pull off a 9-5 week, but things are finally sorted out and I’m feeling increasingly better each day. When you’ve been sick for a while, you forget what it’s like to be normal. Normal is incredible!
So, feeling better means more inclination to work on my games. But, brand new job means I have a crazy couple of months ahead trying to learn the ropes. I’m going to break even at “not committing to too much blog” for a little longer. I’ve resurrected another project I had once been kicking around. This one is simpler with more recyclable components, including some skimmed from Space Fortress. I’ll throw up some pictures of that one later.
I got sick
Latest excuse: I got sick again and it’s cramping my style. I’m off to Ottawa on June 1st, and that’s about when the new fancy cure should kick in. So I’m declaring this a sabbatical.
Nothing Yet!
This is another excuse post. I blame the new school year, having good sleeps, and a particularly meaty surge of work on my lack of productivity on the ol’ Space Fortress. It seems like I haven’t had any good coding time all month.
I remember that it was this overcomplicating of the sprite definition that got me into trouble last time. This seems to be my issue. I started working on hardcoding some behaviour, that will do!
I think it’s time to define a milestone where it is okay for me to park this project. I think the first one will be “in game units”, and I’ll break that down into some individual requirements, then knock them off.
Defining Entities: Feedback
I love getting feedback! Thank you!
Jamie kicked things off talking about priority queues. I like the idea of using priority queues for tasks. It makes the most sense. I had something similar set up in the old space fortress, which allowed the player to dig holes in the ground. When the order came in, a job was created (”dig this hole”), the workers would then subscribe to the job and would be fed tasks like “dig this square”, which in turn became “move next to this square”, “now dig this square”. It allowed for interruptions, such as “square is unreachable”, which tragically happened too often as rubble accumulated.
For the lower-level actions*. I think Ian has it with the hierarchically (a word I cannot pronounce) built FSMs. I’m going to take another crack at defining the worker with that in mind. I think I’ll let “falling” be a moving task, it seems counter-intuitive to suggest it is “idling without anything underneath you”. Especially since falling is a proven technique to move from up to down.
Regarding my obsession with those Booleans, I think Jamie has got it right by suggesting putting it into code. I’ll worry about XML expandability later. I figure a handful of hard-coded superclasses alongside some attributes can handle just about every type of entity in the game. That way I can still have my directory full of PNG and XML files for unit definitions.
Thanks again!
* Which are motivated by tasks, which are created by jobs, which are created from orders, which are created by the GUI based on user input (!) untangling that will be a future blog 
Defining Entities
I’m having trouble coming up with a way to define an Entity in the game. I know it’s going to be some kind of finite state machine. I tried to come up with one for my sample unit, a worker unit, the peon, the bread-and-butter of your team, and didn’t conclude much at all. All this and more after the break. There is a figure.
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!