Stu's Rusty Bucket

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Fishguts I : ToDo for 20070530ish

This Weeks ToDo List
====================

[ 50%] Implement npc's showing up on maps
[ 50%] Implement Stat script+screen
[100%] Dialogue box

Saturday, May 26, 2007

Fishguts I : Map Transitions

I can now enter towns from the main map and have transitions working… What I dont have right now is a LOS that doesnt wrap Its too used to wrapping the world map. Now if all towns had a wall around them, problem solved, but not all towns are walled, so I wanted to blank off ‘at the end of the world’…

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Fishguts I : Items

Did a little code refactoring and started on items, and a set of ‘use’ functions (like when you use a lockpick or use a gem to peer at the land etc).

Need to tweak my spreadsheet for items and such and then convert that into script and add 3 or 4 item load functions and I’m set!

Monday, May 21, 2007

Wabbits

Joy and I went out to do some watering of the garden last night and we spotted a pesky brown wabbit suspiciously near my peas.. so I went over to investigate and he took off, straight through my veggie patch!!

Lil bugger..

Speaking of the veggie patch, it looks like only corn and bush beans are doing any good right now. No extra growth on the peppers, only 5 soya beans sprouted, and I still cant tell if any of the leeks or tomatoes sprouted or not…

sigh…

Something has nibbled on the october beans as well… mm.. Might have to get me an air rifle to keep the bunnies away.

Sunday, May 20, 2007

Fishguts I : Menu System Redux and Reloading

Got a nice working menu system, its nothing fancy and looks a bit plain but its working nicely. Just need to script it a little, and I can test the loading + saving.

Saving works… Loading is nearly getting there… hwaa! Looks like loading works. Will need to do some more stringent testing but it reloads to the right map, right co-ords and everything looks good..... and no mem leaks are being reported, just the standard junk X + SDL leave behind.

sweeet!

Friday, May 18, 2007

Fishguts I : Menu System

Started work on the menu system last night. I’m opting for a AGI like menubar at the top when you hit a key so you will get a

Screen will be dimmed and along the top will be a white bar with black text and several main actions (Game, Action, Options, etc)

Game
-> Save
-> Quit
-> Quit & Save
-> About

Action
-> Items
-> Magic
-> Inspect
-> Transact
-> Attack
-> Board/Disembark
-> Yell

Options
-> Toggle Sound
-> Button Config

Button Config will let you re-arrange whats mapped to the main buttons

L1          R1
      X
    A   B
      Y

Select   Start

by default

b - attack + direction
a - transact + direction if more than one transactable player is adjacent to you
y - use item
x - spell + spell quick-combo button + optional direction
L1 - Equip/Unequip item
R1 - Spell List
start - popup menu in game menu
select - popup menu in action menu

Because I’ve gone for larger tilemaps for a handheld (which for the sequel perhaps I’ll go back down to 16x16 size instead of 24x24) I dont want a windowed interface ala Questron II/LoA/LoB.

Ive been playing some Questron II on the vice C64 emu to see how it looks on the small screen, and its interface looks just fine considering its size.

Right now the main map is 9x13 tiles (top row is used for status info) which his 4 vertically either side of the player, and 6 horizontally either side of the player.

Button Config may go away as an option or not…

Ive also go a good idea for implementing the talking…

bottom half of screen will be split in two panes, on left will be a list of ‘known’ keywords (keywords that characters give you in their text) and on the right pane will be a keyobard that you can enter your own words in.

If the keyword implementation works as well as I hope I program it, they keyboard option may go away. Maybe list of most commonly used keywords on the left in a narrow list, and on the right, an expanded alphabetically sorted list of keywords you know.

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Baby is kicking

Ist been funny to see how much the baby is kicking, turning over etc. This big mysterious lump will just bulge out of Joys stomach like an alien and go from one side to the other.

Joy things she has dropped some and I suppose she has, but I cant really tell since Alexander is just getting bigger and bigger. Next week is the final ultrasound which may determine if its going to be a C-section or not, depending if he has dropped and is facing the wrong way or not.

His room is all ready to be moved in and looks awesome. All his little clothes have been washed in dreft or something. Massive piles of teeny tiny wee socks and onesies. We picked out the simple onesy outfit to bring him home in, washed up the blanket my mum brought me home in, which was used to bring my mum home in, etc, so its quite old we didnt want to be rough with it so we hand washed it instead of machined it (our washer is an agitator drum, which can be quite rough on fragile things).

Called the police who came out last night and fitted the baby seat base, they have a service they do where someone comes out, checks through the list of recalled products, installs it for you, shakes the heck out of the carseat to see how much it moves, says looks good, fills out a safety form for us and is done. Apparently a lot of people dont install it correctly. Insurance Companies like this kind of thing too so.

Sunday, May 13, 2007

Fishguts I : Dungeons

Adapted some more code from my roguelike, this creates a cellular automata based dungeon, does a flood fill to remove any disconnected parts and at the same time counts up the number of connected cells, and once its done, draws it on the screen so I can look at it. If I like it, I hit ‘S’ for save and it will create an image file that I can feed into my map segmentation routine, this way I can pre-generate plenty of maps, and just stick them in the data file.

The original idea was that I didnt want to spend memory/cycles on trying to generate maps and do all the error checking on the GP2X or GP32 itself.

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Fishguts I : The GP2x compo

Hmm the 2007 compo has been announced and ends in two months. It would be nice to have fishguts in the compo (and renamed from its codename Fishguts to a real working title name). An artificial deadline might be a good thing to drive me toward finishing it…

Not that I believe I will have it all done in two months, as testing will be the killer hard part, and if you said a month of solid testing, that’s leaves only 1 month of coding, so I pretty much know its not going to happen.

as an aside, I tweaked the dev version with different tvout sizes. As the game engine can already handle different sized screens everything worked fine except the title graphics, which are still in 320x240 size appeared in the upper left corners, well its an easy fix to centre it, and I don’t expect many people to play it on the TV but you never know.

In my lunch hour today I may modify my cellular automata map generator and have it pump out all my maps so I can cross another thing off.

Ive got my minimal skill system in on paper, levelling up and hitpoint algorithms in a spreadsheet. Will probably in the next day or so balance the monster stats into the spreadsheet to level them off against the player stats and weapon stats.

This weeks agenda (if possible)

• Generate a plethora of maps (easy)
• Define complete list of game items (easy)
• Define monster list
• Name all towns and plot towns on map.
• Define magic spell list and think of best way to integrate it into gp2x interface (menu list vs multi button tap)
• Write some menu routines

Ive been thinking more about bring the FOV down to X number of squares in a dungeon when no light source is available and on a GP2X it doesn’t work so well because the screen is so small to start with… so I may forgo light sources and darkness in dungeons… I need to test a couple of ideas before I fully junk it.

Right now I think the GP2X gives me 13x9 in tiles, so working fov of 3 would give me 7x7 circle mm.. 2 would be 5x5 circle. I may just pixelate some light source instead of tiling it.

Monday, May 07, 2007

Vegetables are Up!

The vegies are up! Looks like all my corn is up, lots of the beans are bursting through, potatoes are up. Everything shot up over the last few days, its great.

Still waiting to see on the leeks and tomatoes.

Peppers are surviving, may have lost a couple but I still have maybe 15 or more bell pepper plants alive.

Peas look great, despite several mowings :/ ugh.

Watching the beans grow is pretty cool. One morning there will be a bump in the mud (yeah we dont have grade A horticultural mega pro +++ topsoil here...) and the next day a mini earthquake has happend with a big crack appearing and suddleny this 2 inch bean plant with big leaves is in its place. pretty cool.

I think definatly I would like a bigger garden next year, or to build myself some raised beds. (I would love to make a coldframe this summer)

Sunday, May 06, 2007

Fishguts I : Adding LOS/FOV

When I dropped my FOV code into fishguts I was taking a lot of things for granted. A lot of the easy wins that the roguelike gave me are things I have shunned in fishguts (a lot of memory overhead) and some of the compromises I have made. Segmenting my maps is whats causing the biggest headache right now. I still think it was worth doing that way, I just have to reorient some of my thinking to fit it in in a way I haven’t been doing in the past.

The biggest headache is that player co-ordinates don’t directly map into the segments and the segments are centered around the player, so all references have to pass the player in because the game knows the player is the center of the universe.

Because the map ‘wraps’, the spot to the right of the player could be the other side of the map which throws the co-ordinates right out the window.

I’ve had this post open in my editor for most of the day. Ive got LOS working but its been a bear, far more so than it should have been.  It should have been relatively simple to add. Maybe I went too much in one direction. Segmental map loads are great if I wanted an infinite sized map… but maybe not so worth it for the lack of LOS.

Hmm with a few hours more since the last paragraph, its actually working very nicely to my surprise, some tweaks have also speeded up the map drawing.. refactoring a little code here and there has paid off.

All my memory usage stats are out the window, since the SDL framebuffer was being included, so when running a GP2X sized window I’m actually only pulling 150kb, so sans 75kb for a 320x240 framebuffer, I’m really only using 75kb! Thats bloody sweet.

With that kind of memory usage, I could disregard segmented maps, reduce code size (not by much), reduce complexity.. geeze. Im not trying to fit the game on an Apple IIgs!

I gotta reconsider my segmented map strategy… I’ve whined enough about their pain, I just need to decide once and for all if I will do anything about it and say no more if I dont.

Hacked in som TVOut support even tho I dont have a TV out cable yet.. once the game is 99% done I’ll spring for one then…

Its looking good!

Saturday, May 05, 2007

Netbeans 6

The new netbeans 6.0 is shaping up VERY nicely. I am very impressed with the nb6 milestone releases over netbeans 5.5. I personally HATE eclipse. Its a giant dumptruck of code the size of the QEII ocean liner. Netbeans 6 in comparison is so nicely slim and versatile. Now if they can beef up the support for standard C I’ll be over the moon.

I am very much looking forward to the final release of NB6 and trying to get it into my workplace under the radar. They are trying to figure out which direction to jump right now, so much ancient legacy code around (some vb5 still around...), new java stuff coming on board (some from the ye olde java 1.3 paleolithic period).

There is little to no impetus to go to C# (Ideally that would be my preference but all our new SAP integration code is java, and makes no sense to go C#.). NB6 Looks like a great candidate to push off to the other developers, nice and integrated, no 25 minute startup with a bajillion interdependancies and 10gig space requirements…

The screencast here for the nb6 gui builder demo is a riot. I see the guy likes Trabbies… lol!

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Fishguts I : Caching

A few tweaks and Ive added caching to file system layer, it came at a cost of about 10 lines of code, so its very nice. Cache size can vary by platform or disabled, its enabled only by request so I can specify only to cache the overland tileset + maps, which might save a lot of battery on the GP2X since it wont be hitting the SD card each time you cross a map segment.

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Fishguts I : Water Walking

Spent about 30 minutes last night on tile blocking to not allow walking over large mountains and water.

I need to tweak it and do some conditional checks as well.

Need to do some profiling too as there is a serious slowdown somewhere....