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Archive for the ‘Code’ Category

So progress in sheepsville has been..well.. slow..
I’ve got another dozen or so sheep painted and ready to go into their cards, but overall, progress has been a fraction of what it needs to be.

The upside, however, is that I’ve gotten a bunch of freelance work (that’s right, I’ll work for money) and that’s pretty much all wrapped up for now.

I’ve started the process of reworking the site theme. Currently I’ve got the new headers and superfish menus in place, and gotten a jquery lightbox up and running, the menu’s need a bit more work though. Also, we now have a gallery.

All that remains is the re-styling of the content and sidebar and drawing a new site background image.

But first up, www.Wenderflonia.com is gearing up for a massive overhaul and that’s #1 in the priority list. Keep an eye out for it, we’ll have art commissions, prints and more goodies coming soon.

And more sheep. I must make more picture of sheep, and get an accurate count of exactly how many I still have left to finish.

That’s it for now. Further updates shortly.

Well ok so I’ve got a valid excuse for not getting a whole lot done over the last week.

However, I did manage to get the whole loading, saving, entry and displaying of high scores implemented.

 So.. that’s a plus.  Still a couple bugs to work out but 90% there.  Next up … hmm.. not exactly sure.. maybe I should iron out some details so I can see what I need to do before calling it Finished.

Just ran across a pretty good article on Game AI and how it’s all smoke and mirrors as opposed to real AI and a brief introduction to some of the basic concepts, such as finite state machines etc etc.
Pretty good introduction to the topic. The full article can be found here:
http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/2009/03/05/how-ai-in-games-works/1

Its been a bit of a slog to make much progress.  Tons of little ‘try this.. er.. hmm well how about that.. ooh that broke it… humm well then how about ….’

BUT the upside. 

The player now triggers doors when he/she walks across em. (yes the collision polygons need some tweaking but basically it works). This causes a recusive floodfill to determine all the tiles that are available inside the room.  There was an issue where it caused the game to stutter while the fill ran but with the use of some scheduling calls I actually wound up with a smooth and more even area determination.  

So.. why does that make me happy?  

Well, glad I asked.

So now I have a nice and easy way to get all the available tiles in a room, with just some minor tweaks the monster spawner (in the inital Alpha) will be able to find an open spot and start spawning critters.

Esentially  I’m just a few minor tweaks from having a playable core base to work off of.   

Then I can start going crazy with different monsters, powerups etc etc.

Got some good progress done.  The online Map editor is coming along nicely with some new additions such as, saving to a database, generating exportable content files for integration into Torque.  Still I need to do a couple things to it, mainly bulletproofing the submitted maps to make sure I don’t forget to add doors, things are sealed properly etc etc. 

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