Worklog for Uber Lieutenant
Worklog 1
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Sadly, I lost all of the work I was doing on BrodyGUI in an unexpected
hard drive wipe and I'm not focusing on doing a 2D GUI library using all
2D commands, with a focus toward using it in a hacking game (a la
Uplink). As for the 3D (sprite-based) GUI lib, I'll figure out how to do
that without using nSprite later. PersistentWorld3D is still in need of a sprite-based GUI and this doesn't help it any, I know. I hope PW3D isn't totally dead, because it's seemed quite still lately. ----------------------------- Battle Forces Worklog | BrodyGUI Worklog |
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These are the commands I've done so far. What these commands do isn't
specified for those who can't guess what they do because I'm lazy. This
will be updated as more commands are added. BASE COMMANDS Brody_Init Brody_Kill Brody_UpdateGUI WINDOW COMMANDS Brody_CreateWindow Brody_UpdateWindows Brody_SetWindowMinimized Brody_SetWindowIcon TASKBAR COMMANDS Brody_SetTaskbar Brody_CreateTask Brody_SetSelectedTask ----------------------------- Battle Forces Worklog | BrodyGUI Worklog |
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I finally found out the best way to render levels made of huge bitmaps.
As John Carmack did on the first generation IBM, he got smooth speeds
by copying portions of the level in for rendering. In this case, I'm
loading in the huge bitmaps BUT instead of rendering them with
DrawImage, I render them by copying what portion of the level needs to
be rendered using the CopyRect command. BlitzMax doesn't have this (why
is beyond me) so I'm prototyping in Blitz3D with nSprite. Once I have it
figured out in Blitz3D, I'll find out how to get it working in
BlitzMax. Other than that, no progress has been made since last update. ----------------------------- Battle Forces Worklog | BrodyGUI Worklog |
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BrodyGUI is a small project I'm working on to create a free
sprite-based GUI library using nSprite Pro. The problem right now is how
I'm going to make it free when it uses a commercial library. Anyways,
I'm building it to be capable of being more like a windows shell for
Blitz applications than just a library that lets you create windows and
gadgets. Already I have a taskbar and support for a desktop wallpaper of
choice drawn for a background (which is totally optional of course).
I'm planning on putting in an optional start menu and right-click menus. I'm partly making this for the sake of PersistentWorld3D, which is in need of a GUI interface. If anyone can contribute a bitmap font library with a Blitz-like commandset that I can use for this, that would be super. ----------------------------- Battle Forces Worklog | BrodyGUI Worklog |
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PARENT GADGETS Windows Taskbar Start Menu Right-Click MenuCHILD GADGETS Labels Buttons Textbox Menus Sub-Menus Listboxes Comboboxes Tabs Tab Pages Radio Buttons CheckboxesOTHER FEATURES  Skin Support "Desktop" Wallpaper GUI Editor----------------------------- Battle Forces Worklog | BrodyGUI Worklog |
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I'll shed more light on the gist of Battle Forces. The theme is taking
stereotypes and cutting them down to the lowest common demoninators.
What most movies and games typically choose to imply are simply made
completely blatent. To be a bit clearer, I just dumb down everything so
they're as dumb as they can possibly be made dumb. The good guys are
good because they're supposed to save the day, the bad guys are bad
because they're supposed to give the good guys something to be good
about. If you want an intelligent story and theme, this is the exact
opposite of what you're looking for. It's the Good Guys against the Bad Guys and they have guns because they want to be badass without any real combat skills. Whether this will end up being a single-player adventure or a multiplayer deathmatch game, I don't know. But either way, I'm going to cut down on the use of language as much as I can so translating the game into French, Japanese, or whatever is a 10 minute job. The Blitz community is mostly European so I'm going to make sure this is at least in English, French, and German on release so everybody can judge how much this game sucks (I'm an ultra newb programmer with not much under his belt except game design concepts and practices down pat). If I get requests for other supported languages after release, I'll get my girlfriend on it - she knows just about any language I can think of, including French, German, Austrian, Polish, Russian, Japanese, and written Chinese. Don't worry, I'm covered :) That's a further taste of what Battle Forces is...well, is NOT considering I only have level collisions implemented, and nothing else. Hell, I don't even have the player walking or running when on the ground. Those sprites I showed above are the Good Guy and Bad Guy sprites as I have them right now. I'm going to have bodies and legs as seperate sprites later on and have animations for both. I'll reiterate that all these sprites and such are being made from scratch with Photoshop CS (8.0). Until now I haven't done a heck of a lot of original work, as I usually found myself doing vector traces like these: 1. Kenzou Tenma from the anime Monster (WATCH IT - Best detective-style show ever) 2. Narusegawa from Love Hina 3. Edward Elric from Fullmetal Alchemist Hopefully I'll get more work done on the BF source code soon. ----------------------------- Battle Forces Worklog | BrodyGUI Worklog |
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My work in BF has been at snail speed the past couple weeks because
I've been keeping myself on the PersistantWorld3D interface with still
nothing working. Additionally, I've been toying around in Blitz3D trying
to make a camera system that works much like Splinter Cell, and after
three sleepless nights, no progress has been made whatsoever. It's cool
to be lazy! What I have managed to do in Battle Forces since the last log entry was improving the level collisions so that now the player falls onto the floor rather than through it. As far as walking through walls and "jump-climbing" ledges goes, no progress has been made. But I did manage to get on my ass and upload a screenshot so you have a clue as to what I'm doing. A clue is better than nothing.  If your browser can't view PNG files, then let me quote Mr. T: "I pitty the fool who doesn't use Firefox." That is all for now. Some notes I want to make: 1. This is simple test stuff, so it's not going to always have a tiny player sprite and a one-screen-fits-all level size. 2. The player sprite will be bigger and less decorated. 3. The levels are will a lot larger and there will be a lot of scrolling involved (yes, BlitzMax can do scrolling, jackasses). 4. Mr. T also pitties the fools who think BlitzMax can't do scrolling. ----------------------------- Battle Forces Worklog | BrodyGUI Worklog |
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I haven't actually done anything with Battle Forces for a few days now,
as I've been actively working on PersistantWorld3D with Frank Tayler.
It's a community project, but there's 2 people actually doing anything
with it, and I'm included. Will get back to Battle Forces once I feel I can move off of PW3D for a little bit. ----------------------------- Battle Forces Worklog | BrodyGUI Worklog |
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I've been working on a 2D platformer for a while now in Blitz3D relying
almost entirely on nSprite library commands. That has changed and I'm
now starting to build a simple prototype so I can get the basics rights
before I write it in an organized and efficiant manner. One step at a
time here. The idea is a 2D game (ref:Soldat) with single-player levels comprised of 3 image layers. Each layer is a part of the map; there's the background, the player's collision area, and the foreground. And yes, this means I'm making levels with 3 large bitmaps acting as the environment. How I'm going to make that solid and fast is beyond me for the time being. What's motivating me with this project is how I've always wanted to play this game (well, about 2 years now) and no matter what other ideas I contemplate, this is the one I want to play the most. Game developers anywhere will tell you they do their best work on games they want to play like an over-hyped game with an unannounced release date. This will be under development for a long time (I really don't know if it's months or years). But this is a game that will represent the most committed work I've done, and hopefully it will show through in the final product. I will post a screenshot once I can get the player/level collisions working properly. Having nothing special to present wouldn't do much justice to my reputation. Oh, and FYI I've been using Photoshop for 3+ years and Blitz for about 2+, so I'm doing all the sprites and code myself. ----------------------------- Battle Forces Worklog | BrodyGUI Worklog |