The Binary Zoo Bog

[fog]

Awesome, i'm impressed by the amount ofcoding you've done recently aswell! Pusts me to shame to say the least

Heh well TBH I haven't spent a huge amount of time on the new game engine, I'm just very organised and sticking to my pre-planned task list has helped a hell of a lot.

When I get to coding the game specific bits though I expect progress to slow as I never plan much of that in advance.  Gameplay develops over time as you add and remove features and I think it would suffer if I planned all that in advance.


Anyway next up I was intending to do the high score an trials screens, but I can't do those without doing my text/font system so that's what I'll tackle now.  So much for all that planning!

[fog]

Just finished those font/text routines.  AGK has a stack of commands for creating and manipulating text objects (it renders them to images for extra speed) and yet it doesn't do the basics like let you pick how the text is justified.  It always uses the top edge of the text for vertical justification which is next to useless. 

Anyway now to replace the text I already have in my menu code with this new text class and then I can finally add that highscore and zoo trial screens.

[fog]

New text system now integrated into the existing menu code.  I've also got my text effects in and tested so I can easily assign an effect to any piece of text and have some old school colour cycling, wavey text, ripple effects etc.

And now to add some vector text routines. 

[fog]

And now to add some vector text routines. 

After starting on the vector text routines I've had a change of plan.  Each line used in creating the text is effectively a new sprite which doesn't sound too mobile friendly to me...so until I have some hardware to test performance on I'll stick with just using my existing bitmap text routines.

[fog]

Blame a dodgy curry for a lack of progress over the weekend.  I wont go into details 

Time to start on some entity work so we can finally see something happening on screen.  It's going to be very similar to my old XNA engine code so we'll see how quickly I can port that and make the few changes I have planned.

[fog]

Done a little work on the master entity code.  All the data structures are in place as is the code to read new entity definitions.

Next up the lengthier process of being able to create in-game entities based on these masters (enemies, bullets, powerups etc) and have them behave accordingly.  Then I finally get to see something on screen. 

[JDog053]

Sounds like yet more good progress!

[Prime_8]

wow great stuff man ..

[fog]

Thanks   Slow and steady.

I deviated from my plan yesterday as I had a bit of a dabble with getting shaders working in AGK and found this eeePC only seems to have OpenGL 1.1 which doesn't support them.  It might be possible to use a higher version, but I'm using that as an excuse to stop wasting time on them and getting back to my original plan. 

[fog]

I've temporarily moved over from doing entity coding to do a little of my player routines.  There's obviously some interaction between the player and other entities so I need certain player things in place before I can code and test all the entity routines.

I also tweaked the menu code a touch so that I can make them a bit more dynamic and have the buttons fly in etc.  Nothing too fancy, it just makes them a bit more interesting.....if that's possible with a menu. 

[fog]

Now mixing in a bit of Emitter code as that's needed to generate the entities in game.

My emitters aren't just used for creating entities though and can also trigger particles, music, sound fx, screen fx or camera fx, or any combination of them.  ( It's rare that any event in a game doesn't consist of two or more from that list so it makes sense to combine them to me.)

[fog]

Just done a little testing of the previously mentioned Emitters with the existing elements that they can trigger and it's all working as expected.

I created a quick explosion emitter which triggers an appropriate sound, a shake and zoom camera effect, and a blurring screen effect....now I just need to plumb in the entity code so the emitter can create those too.

Then..... we can start writing games. 

[fog]

Bounds collisions are in so objects all act correctly when they hit the edge of the game screen.  This covers all the types I can thing of from simply stopping the object to wrapping around Asteroids style plus Invaders and Centipede styles where the enemies move down the screen on hitting the edge.

The same routines will handle proper level collision too when I add my tile map routines 

[fog]

Still working on Entity and Emitter code.  By far the most complicated part of the game engine and as I'm controlling it all from scripts I'm taking it very slow making sure I add and test one feature and script command at a time. 

[fog]

Been doing some pre Crimbo chores so not made a huge amount of progress dev wise.

Currently trying to get all the entity parent/child routines in and tested.  These are the routines used to get one entity to interact with another whether that be in the form of a snake like enemy, a flock of enemies or a rigid formation of enemies stuck together that could form a boss.

It's a surprisingly lengthy task and a huge amount of code considering how little I've used the routines in games so far.    I have tweaked the engine slightly this time around though so the entities can now be parts of the players ship meaning I have the option of bolting extra bits on when you pick up a weapon powerup etc.

Someone remind me later when I'm stuck into actually developing a game that I have all these options available because I tend to forget.