The Binary Zoo Bog

[fog]

Wow, you sure do make progress! :O

Have you seen my graphics?  They aren't exactly complicated lol


Well I added another enemy type yesterday so the current count is 14.

One of the reason I decided to use this project as a tester is because the scripts for the enemies couldn't be easier.  They all move like Space Invaders so I just need to set the MovementType flag to Invaders and the game engine already handles the rest.

Now for the weapon scripts.  There are a bunch of these so it will take a little longer. 

[T_M_C]

You can't go far wrong with classic Space Invaders gameplay.

I should be able to play this then, if you release an HTML 5 browser version.

I never got to play 1982 or Echoes +.   

Thats quite a clever choice of game to write actually.

Not too complicated, but requires all the elements that make up a shmup.

How many times have we seen people start projects that are so ambitious we know they'll never get finished.

Start small and build from there.   

I'd still like to see some screenies.   

TMC

[fog]

You can't go far wrong with classic Space Invaders gameplay.

I should be able to play this then, if you release an HTML 5 browser version.

I never got to play 1982 or Echoes +.   

No HTML5 version as AGK doesn't support it yet.  The main release is on PC though so you should be ok with that.

And not many have played 1982.  Only those that did a bit of testing at Binary Zoo HQ got to play that....so far.

I'd still like to see some screenies.   

I'll do better than that and upload a demo after a couple more days work.  Doubt that will happen this week though as it's the anual family Eurovision party this weekend....yes really. 

[T_M_C]

LOL.

No comment on the EURO.  I hear Jedwood got through though.   

Looking forward to playing your demo.

It will be really interesting to see AGK in action.

I havn't played any games written with it yet.

TMC

[fog]

It will be really interesting to see AGK in action.

I havn't played any games written with it yet.

Neither have I lol


Just updated my libraries to the latest version of AGK which I haven't done since launch so was expecting a few errors of one kind or another.  As it happens I just had to change one variable from INT to UINT and it compiled fine.  Quite relieved about that 

So now I have a bunch of new commands available so I plan on adding a few things before continuing with the new game.  Most new features will take seconds to implement (SetWindowTitle()  ) so probably a days detour at most.

[T_M_C]

Sounds cool.

Quite relieved about that

I'll never forget the time i upgraded Blitzmax.

And then spent several days going through thousands of lines of code rewriting the sound commands, as the upgrade had broken them all.   

TMC

[fog]

I'll never forget the time i upgraded Blitzmax.

And then spent several days going through thousands of lines of code rewriting the sound commands, as the upgrade had broken them all.

Well I've wrapped all the AGK commands so at worst I should only ever have to change it in one place.  I was more worried about screwed up C++ links or libraries because then I'm relatively clueless lol

[fog]

Well I've had a bit of a play and got the old mono background distortion routine working after a minor problem.   

If you load an image in AGK that isn't ^2 then it resizes them internally for cross platform compatibility reasons.  Most of the time this is invisible and works fine..... until you start messing with image UV's because they work on the internal resized image and not the image you loaded....so setting UV's to 0 & 1 where you would expect to see your full image shown unaffected, actually shows your image surrounded by a lot a of AGK added padding.

It's easy enough to solve, just not particularly developer friendly.

Anyway, while the distortion routines aren't as cool as the recent ones I did that use shaderzzz (no AGK shader support yet), they look good enough to use while trying out some mono style background colouring routines. 

[fog]

So a couple of days off work because some old woman is celebrating something or other.  Let us see if we can use the time productively and make a little dev progress. 

[fog]

Rewritten a chunk of my screen code to use a unique image for the background.  This is so I can do mono style drawing to that background image.  The original mono style background wasn't developed with just that game in mind and was just intended to be a nice background effect for use in various games so that's the way I'm designing this routine.

Next up is to add my Stencil class which stores all the data for the images that get drawn to that new background image.  While the released mono only ever drew coloured blobs to the screen, later demos used a whole selection of different shapes which created some nice looking effects.

The only sticking point to doing mono right now would be calculating the score.  I need to be able to read the colour of each pixel in the Stencil image to calculate the score and AGK currently doesn't support that.  I can easily get around that by writing a quick routine in another language and just importing the pixel colour values into AGK, but I'll worry about that if/when I need it.

[JDog053]

I know it's probably really slow and stupid, but couldn't you just have a copy of the image array that you can access and read the data from, so when an area gets populated with colour, you add it to both and read the accessible one?

[fog]

I know it's probably really slow and stupid...

That's neither a stupid idea or slow. That's how I did it in DBPro and how I'll try and do it in AGK. (In XNA you can create images directly from arrays and vice-versa so it was much easier.)

In DBPro what I did was load the stencil image and then copy that data into an array.  Then for the background I had both a blank image and a background sized array.  And, as you suggested, when I pasted a stencil image onto the background image I also added the values from the stencil array to the background array.  The background image is displayed and the array used to calc the score (This is quick because you only recalculate the area you changed and not the whole background array.)

Anyway the problem with AGK is just the very first bit of that.  I have no way of loading the stencil images and copying that data into an array.

[fog]

Once you start working on a game it's amazing the obvious things that you find missing from your game engine. 

So I've added "ToScreenPosition", "ToWorldPosition" & "ToMapPosition" to my Turn & Target code. (Turn is used for Entity movement & Target is used for aiming any Emitters for weapons etc.)

[T_M_C]

Nice to hear you're making progress.

TMC

[fog]

Nice to hear you're making progress.

Yup stilll plugging away   Just grabbing 10-15mins when I can rather than having a proper coding session, but I'm crossing another thing off the list every day.

Next up I fancy having long neon trails behind my bullets in the current game project so I might as well add it as a proper option to my game engine so I can use it in future projects too. (effectively it's doing nothing more than simply drawing a line from an entities current position to it's last).