The Binary Zoo Bog

[fog]

So....to encrypt data output from my editors or not?  In early games everything was hard coded....never again!

I think I'll use the Echoes system. For that all game scripts were stored externally and encrypted in the final release.  That's not great for bug hunting if there's a problem with the data in those encrypted files though, so if running in Debug mode the files created aren't encrypted.

Looks like I need a slight tweak to my file read/write code then. 

[T_M_C]

Wouldn't that be something you'd want to do when the game is finished.

I don't think it's something i'd bother with until the game was complete.

During dev for my last game, my file formats were changing constantly as things were added or removed.

Adding file and or media encryption is what i would consider low priority during dev.  But thats just me.  

TMC

[fog]

Wouldn't that be something you'd want to do when the game is finished.

I don't think it's something i'd bother with until the game was complete.

During dev for my last game, my file formats were changing constantly as things were added or removed.

Adding file and or media encryption is what i would consider low priority during dev.  But thats just me.   

No, I agree with you completely.

What I do, or at least did with Echoes, was just have a flag that governed whether all files were encrypted or not.  No code changes required apart from setting that one flag.  If in debug mode, which I always am during development, then files are not encrypted by default. 

The encryption itself is pretty basic, but enough to stop idle tampering.

[fog]

Well I've kind of bitten the bullet editor wise, or at least taken a step towards adding them.  I'm starting to add Load & Save routines to all my various game bits as I'll obviously need those for any editors I write.

And even if I don't write all the editors immediately I've still got all my game scripts in external files for easy manual editing in good old Notepad.

Last night I got Music, Sound, World & Font routines finished.  The only sizeable ones are my Entity & Emitter ones but I'm going to try and get those done this week.

[fog]

Well I got the Camera FX (zoom, shake etc) and Screen FX(flashing, motion blur etc) scripts saving and loading routines done.

It's taken slightly longer than anticipated (but doesn't it always) mainly because I rewrote some of my file routines and had a bit of an argument with strcpy.

I expected a command that compares strings to return True or at least 1 if they matched, certainly not 0.

That's what happens when you never read the manual anything. 

[fog]

Looks like we've lost a months worth of posts as this is the latest backup the webhost has.

Funnily enough I have a backup from that exact day too as I made one when the forum went down and a few random php files had been deleted.  Coincidence?

[fog]

No game project progress to report, but the latest host problems have kicked my arse into gear so I've been working on updating the website while watching the Olympics.

I've done test to see how easy it is to move the forum to a new host an it seems doable, but if not I'll warn everyone in case there's anything here they want to save first.

[fog]

Well after a break for the Olympics I suppose we best get back to development.

New super minimalist site is all but finished.

Visually it is done, but I made the mistake of taking an existing theme and butchering it thinking that was a good way to learn CSS & PHP.  Now that I've leant a little I realise the existing template that I used was a horrible mess so I'll tidy it a bit and then it will have to make do for now. 

[T_M_C]

That sounds neat.

Are you integrating the forum and website together ?

Staying with the same web host or moving to a new one ?

TMC

[fog]

Are you integrating the forum and website together ?

Staying with the same web host or moving to a new one ?

New host.  I can put up with the odd downtime, but just having 2 month old backups is pretty unforgivable. (yes I know I should make more regular backups myself too )

The new site will have a forum and hopefully this one.  I plan on copying it across which seems straightforward enough, but as I'm doing it expect the worst.   I'll warn everyone in advance

[T_M_C]

Okey Dokey.   

TMC

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So a few days off work for the first time in months so what better than a bit of Android testing.  

Installing all the necessary IDE's, SDK's, compilers and bits an pieces for AGK was a seriously frustrating chore.  There are a bunch of different guides floating about and all tell you slightly different things and the official one doesn't seem to work at all.  A total mess TBH.  Overly complicated and no clear instructions.  TGC really need to sort this out.

Anyway environment all set up, time to compile some code.  Yup that seems to work fine.  

Right, next to unpack the Nexus7 and finally get some code running on it.  WTF!  the screen is almost totally white, no contrast, washed out colours.  Don't panic, just do a reboot. ....nope that didn't help.  Time for a Google....yup it's a common problem and apparently there are loads of other problems with the Nexus7 screens too.  

So phoned Google as I bought direct from them, wait half-an-hour only to be told they might replace it and I have to wait for them to call back.  


And I was really looking forward to getting it running on a touch screen device.  Oh well, back to the PC version.  

[T_M_C]

What a nightmare.

Those sorts of problems can really kill any enthusiasm you had for coding on the system.

Hope you get it sorted soon. 

TMC

[fog]

What a nightmare.

Those sorts of problems can really kill any enthusiasm you had for coding on the system.

Yeah just a bit.  In this case though I was determined to use my last day off constructively so decided to rewrite my Skin routines.

This allows me to switch all in game graphics and sounds....so I can have things like different graphics sets for each level/world or simply to give the user the option of playing with a graphics skin or set of sound fx they like.

Previously this was done by simply deleting all in memory graphics & sounds and loading new ones to minimise memory usage on some platforms.  Because I pretty much fit all my game graphics into a single texture this happens really fast, but not quite fast enough to be done in-game.

Anyway while working on a demo I thought it would be cool to switch graphics in-game when triggered by certain events so I now have the option to load all skin graphics and sounds into memory on start-up and switch between them super fast.

Hey, it's another option. 

[fog]

So last night I got to wondering just how much work it would be to port my existing scripts for 1982 from my XNA engine to my new AGK one.

I knew the engines are very similar, as are the scripts they use, but I still figured it would be a time consuming job.

Well a bit of cut, paste, find and replace later and just about all of them were working within a couple of hours.  A pleasant surprise for a change.

Right now all I need to do is code the routines to create the enemy attack waves and then turn those into levels and we will have a version of 1982 up and running.

If this turns out to be as simple as it appears so far, then I see no reason not to port Echoes+ too as that uses the same scripting system.

Still a bit of work to do then lol