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The Thread of Video Game Making, entropic style
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http://7dfps.com/?action=games&id=128
There's a webplayer linked there that I update every couple of hours as i add stuff
i'm at a bit of a creative block, because it's pretty exhausting trying to constantly work on your project in your spare time while you have a day job. especially by yourself. i wish i had someone to bounce ideas off of who worked on the same team.
hey satan...: thinkgeek amazon My post |
Like I've got damage popup text mostly working when I test my game on the computer, but on my phone, there's just nothing there. And there's nothing to do about it except pick at different things until I get that spark of an idea that leads to what the issue is.
For this kind of problem, I've found its best to go back to the basics and work forward. Can you get text, any kind of text, drawing directly on the phone? The context doesn't matter at first, just get something to draw.
Once you've got the most basic form, start moving it one step at a time towards whatever feature isn't working. Like maybe the first thing you do is change the font to be whatever font you're using for the damage numbers. Then you start to play with the opacity and see if that changes anything. Then start moving the text around so it rises like your damage numbers do. Just go through step by step and eventually you should either have code that does what you want, or you'll have found exactly where it fails, and have a pretty decent idea of how to proceed.
Waiting for a flash of insight works sometimes, but I don't like to rely on it.
Edit: You'll want to figure out what limitations on font rendering your phone has too. I haven't done any iPhone programming too recently, but when I did a game a while back OpenGLES had no working spritefont support. We ended up having to roll our own font functions by taking letters off a sprite sheet and drawing them one character at a time, as well as having functions that figured out all the letter widths and formatting. That sucked.
I'm working on UI stuff right now, and I can tell you it's not a snug fit to use one UI for both platforms. I couldn't play Clash of Clans on my phone earlier this year because UI text was small and unreadable. Even for a universal app, design separate UIs for different devices.
IMO.
The good thing is that most interaction is touch/click based anyway, clicking on actual game elements. I've been trying very hard to avoid UI buttons and controls, but there's always going to be a command menu in an SRPG. The hardest part is making the command buttons large enough to touch easily without obscuring the game field.
Each unit could conceivably have 8 abilities plus Move, Status, and End. I think maybe the command menu just needs its own button style. I just need to find what skill has the longest name. Maybe the action commands need some kind of sub-menu. I wanted to avoid that, but it's probably the most sensible solution.
I'm hoping I can get enough momentum going with the project that there is still work happening once our baby comes at the end of November, because I don't think I'm going to be able to commit too much time towards it for a while after that.
Like, there are tons of options for buying professional 3d game art. The Unity app store and places like Turbosquid let you find pretty much whatever you need, often with animations and textures and whatever else. But there's no similar resource for 2D art that I have found. Everyone just seems to rely on the LostGarden stuff and whatever users post onto OpenGameArt.
Lots of people want to make indie games in 2D, but nobody seems to be filling the art niche, so you have to either commission everything or use freebies. It's very odd.
I'm still not sure what it's going to be like or what to put on my business cards.
super bummed i can't make it. what're you gonna be doing there?
Current challenges involve making a sprite not distort while moving and making a moving object stop when it hits another, before their collision maps overlap
Right now one object goes slightly inside the other and then on the next frame "bounces" back to the edge of what it hit
I think ray casting is the thing I need to use to make that not happen?
http://www.audioentropy.com/
Times new Roman, black text on white on the dead center
"Orikaeshigitae, Video Gamesman"
http://www.audioentropy.com/
no idea. networking. i was hoping to have a walkaround demo of LP5, but honestly it's still in preproduction and it was kind of a waste of time to try and rush a build.
giving out business cards, attending talks, making friends, hopefully getting jobs.
we'll see. i got really excited that Frictional announced SOMA this morning, but then really sad that I'm not making cool games yet. It's the long haul.
@Speed Racer yes.
so, let me check and see if what i'm doing is right here
just for the sake of experimenting, i have two objects aligned in a vertical line, 4 units apart from one another. they both have box colliders
the higher one is a rigidbody
at startup i assign the upper one a velocity of -1 downwards, so it moves down until it hits the lower one and stops on top of it
like i said that makes an issue where it briefly overlaps the lower one before resolving into the correct position
to fix that, I've got a raycast set up with a starting point of the falling object's position, pointing straight down. When the ray hits the lower object, the upper object's velocity is set to 0.
I don't want that raycast to return as true until, essentially, the two objects are directly contacting one another as if they have collided. So i need to set the length of the ray with that goal in mind
setting it to too low of a value will make it basically not do anything at all. setting it to too high of a value will make the effect of the ray kick in too early, and the object kind of wigs out and ends up moving down at a severely reduced rate until it collides with the other object
i've got the ray to a level where the object just sort of jitters when it collides but that's still not ideal, and i'm sloooooowly reducing the jitter just by experimentally tweaking the length of the ray
but i've got to think that there must be some math procedure i could use to determine exactly how long the ray should be
and actually writing this out i'm thinking it should just be the object's velocity divided by the framerate, right? assuming the velocity represents "units per second," then dividing it by the frame rate should get you how far it travels in a single frame, right?
EDIT: clearly there is a flaw in my logic because this doesn't work
http://www.audioentropy.com/
So basically you're not anticipating collisions, but responding to them between draw calls. I think it's probably easier to figure out where to "eject" a collided object than "predict" if there's going to be a collision in the next frame.
I'll have to play with it more when I get home. I haven't found a way yet that would let me do what you're suggesting but it can't be that hard
I guess you could set up a while loop to shift the moving object's position up until it's no long overlapping the other object?
http://www.audioentropy.com/
just to make sure, you're using fixedupdate, right? physx's timing is very precise, so if you're using framerate-dependent updating you're gonna get jitter like that unpredictably.
http://www.audioentropy.com/
All of the rigidbody stuff like movement and collisions happens in the physics frames, so you need to check your collisions, change velocity, etc in FixedUpdate or wonky shit happens.
3DS: 1289-8447-4695
when i was using update i was multiplying the velocity by Time.deltaTime to determine how long it had been since the last frame to approximae the current frame rate
is there a similar function for determining how much time has passed since the last physics step?
or are you talking about using delzhand's method
http://www.audioentropy.com/
so utterly confused right now
i'm trying to made a 2D sprite-based game
at the suggestion of some folks on the unity website i bought 2dtoolkit, and am using its special camera, which as far as i can tell mostly has the benefit of automatically scaling and cropping for different aspect ratios
i've told the camera that i'm using a "native" resolution of 640 by 1152, which is just a hair off from being a 16:9 ratio
I have the orthographic size of the camera set to 5, which according to all of the documentation that i can find, represents half of the height of the viewing area
I'm using 64x64 sprites, which, given the native resolution, should mean that I can fit 10 sprites vertically or 18 sprites horizontally
but then i place a 1x1 square with a 64x64 sprite on it in the bottom left corner
and then try to place a second one right next to it
and it has to be 2 units over, instead of just 1
so that i can only fit half as many sprites as the math tells me i should
i could just halve their scale or double the size of the camera but
i would really love to know what the hell
http://www.audioentropy.com/
Honestly, you shouldn't have to rejigger the collision once you're using FixedUpdate. I never had issues with collision wonkiness there. Just checking for collision and killing the velocity should be enough.
The biggest issue occurs when you have an object moving quite fast in a downward direction, affected by gravity. It will stop above the ground, and then start to accelerate downwards again. Best option probably is to detect the impending collision, and then move it down to touch the other object, within the range of one tick of gravity.
As for Time.deltaTime... it will still work in FixedUpdate(), so there's not really any reason not to use it.
okay tryin' to restate it:
I'm trying to set up a 2D, sprite-based game, with character sprites at a size of 64x64 pixels. I've set the native resolution to 1152x640, which is slightly more than a 16:9 ratio (it just occurred to me that i should just use 1024x540 to get it exact but that's neither here nor there). Since each sprite is 64 pixels tall and 64 pixels wide, i should be able to to stack 10 sprites top-to-bottom, or 18 sprites side-to-side, and it should fit in the viewing area
I have the orthographic size of the camera set to 5, since my understanding is that that represents half of the height of viewing area.
but instead, i only fit a vertical column of 5 sprites, or a horizontal row of 9 sprites, and i don't understand why
with the viewing area's origin and the sprites' origins both set to the bottom left corner, the first sprite goes into position (1,0,0). Logically, I would think the next sprite should go into the position (2,0,0), since the sprite's size is 1x1.
But doing that, the half of the second sprite overlaps half of the first. The only way to make them stand side-by-side is to move the second sprite to (2,0,0)
and I have no idea why it's twice as much as I think it should be, unless
i tried switching it over to pixels per meter and setting that to 64, that superficially looked identical so i just switched it back. But maybe it actually is different and what I should be using to get what I want out of it
Does the size of an object maybe represent the object's "radius" in that direction, as in if you draw a line parallel to the x, y, or z axis from the center of the object to the object's outer edge, then that equal's the object's size in that dimension? That would explain why the objects translate half as far as I think they should.
EDIT: Yeah I just messed with it some more and doing 64 pixels per meter is the exact same as setting the orthographic size 5
I'm thinking i've got to be right about misunderstanding what "Scale" represents because nothing else makes sense
http://www.audioentropy.com/
ohhhh okay i just assumed that it was checking the time since the last game frame, not the last time that the function it's in was called. That makes a lot more sense though
http://www.audioentropy.com/
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give that a shot? http://unikronsoftware.com/2dtoolkit/forum/index.php?topic=409.0
That's a decent place to start. It gets a little uglier when you start having to nest UI controls like text inside of buttons inside of windows inside of... etc
My recommendation is to consider digging for a super basic UI lib compatible with your graphics rendering library
like... i have actually built menu systems from scratch... and it can be done, but really once you reach a certain level of complexity, you'll start weeping
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
As far as I know, the normal way is however you can get it to work reliably when you're coding alone. It gets a little more shifty when you're working with others, but even then.. why worry? Just make the thing
Now sound is going to completely ruin me.
What did you change?
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
If all you need is really basic stuff like buttons, images, text etc., you could knock out a display management interface with SDL2 in a day or three.
If you need the whole nine yards, with stereoscopic rainbows and LSD unicorns and all kinds of magical stuff, then yeah, that's gonna take a while and you aren't getting away with not designing shit.
Also it's a good thing you picked C++ for this, because I really wouldn't want to tackle this stuff in plain old C. That's a level of insanity even I'm not entirely willing to touch.
seek help
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
yeah... fuck sound.