Worklog for Mordax_Praetorian
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| -Thanks go to Grey Alien for making the contents of this entry possible For the sake of having to set a limit, the engine now supports 26 simultanious animations at varying framerates (this includes walking animations) Oh yes.... Walking Animations, that bit of the engine that my testers have wanted for so long, they are currently testing a single walking animation and current feedback looks good, it is smooth and stable on all systems for those of you who didnt see the forum posts, the system works like this: Animation Details are stored in 2 arrays, 1 for numbers and one for text The frames themselves are not stored in the arrays, just instructions identifieing which animation it is and the speed it is going at Animations are set easily with a function that makes sure all the information goes in the right place The play animation function scans through the animations and updates as apropriate, the function is run often and at all times, it is accurate to millisecconds When an animation is finished it will either loop or be deleted (theres a function for that too) I will probably make another function for preparing animations, one that would load the frames up into memory for the specified animation There is also a function for searching the array, it returns a 1 if an animation is currently playing I'm not sure right now of the possible lag effects on some systems, having 26 animations all playing at different framerates could slow things down Due to lack of feedback I'm not going to post any more builds here till things are more finished -Mordax |
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| Build 5 is ready, you can download it in the Showcase forum Ive been thinking recently about Walking Animations, they are in high demand by my Alpha Testers so I think its time I made them a priority, the slowdown produced by them should allow me to remove the press-per-move system and replace it with a hold-to-move system that should be a lot nicer Its time to start experimenting, normaly these would be easily done with Animations however with the colour editing system I have in place they may require a more unique aproch, I'll keep you all informed -Mordax |
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| 2 recent things I got working were the dialouge system and colour substitution The Colour Substitution system allows you to have many copies of the same picture but all with different colors, and all comming from the same file Basicly the engine masks the image for the colour to change, then clears the back buffer to the new colour, draws the picture and grabs it again, thus swapping the old colour for a new one Its current aplication is in the Character Generator, which uses this to allow the player to pick hair, eye, skin and clothes colours The dialouge system is something you can find out about for yourself as I will releasing the current Alpha version to the Blitz community The source code is present, however in order to safeguard my repuation with the fickle minded masses I am holding the rites to it until the final release, I know all too well what can happen if things get out too early If you would like the Alpha Version please provide me with the E-Mail address (by way of the "Seten Myrianon Alpha Release" topic in the Blitz Showcase forum) to send the link too, the link is not to be given to anyone else |
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| Yesterday the engine made the jump from ASCII to proper graphics, there will be screenshots soon As the end product will be Open Source I'll tell you a bit about how these graphics work The engine's graphics center around 32x32 pixel tiles, in order to specify what tiles go where there are 2 things you need to do: The fist is to specify tilesets, tilesets are collections of tiles with 1 specific theme, all tilesets should have the same layout, I.e the top left most tile is always a floor tile, in code you change the tilesets stored in memory by changing the value of 2 globals called TS1$ and TS2$, and running a function called LoadTS(), this may later change to just a function LoadTS(TS1$,TS2$), but I will probably need to have access to TS1$ and TS2$ elsewhere so I will not be changing this till I know for sure, the second tileset is optional and should be set to "None" if your not using it The second thing to do is make an RCode file (.RCode), RCode stands for Room Code, they are in essance just .txt files that have been re-named, so you can open them in notepad, the idea of changing the extention is to throw people off who may want to snoop around your room layouts, I have tested that this idea works by sending an RCode file to an expert Pascal coder who couldnt figure out what it was Your RCode file will specify what tile goes where, each tile in your tileset(s) has a 4 letter code, each room is 15x15 tiles, so you simply type the codes in kinda like this: [Code] XXXX|SW1A|SW1C|SW1D|FW1A|FW1C|FW1A|FF1B|FW1A|FW1D|FW1A|FW1A|XXXX|XXXX|XXXX| XXXX|SF1A|SF1A|SF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|XXXX|XXXX|XXXX| XXXX|SF1C|SF1B|SF1B|FF1B|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1D|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FW1A|XXXX|XXXX| XXXX|SF1A|SF1A|SF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|XXXX|XXXX| XXXX|XXXX|SF1A|SF1A|SF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1D|FF1A|FF1A|FF1D|FF1A|XXXX|XXXX| XXXX|SW1B|SF1C|SF1A|SF1A|SF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1B|FF1A|FF1A|FW1B|XXXX| SW1A|SF1A|SF1A|SF1D|SF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1D|XXXX| SF1A|SF1A|SF1C|SF1B|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1C|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|XXXX| XXXX|SF1A|SF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|XXXX| XXXX|FF1A|SF1B|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1C|FF1A|FF1A|XXXX| XXXX|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|XXXX| XXXX|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1C|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|XXXX| XXXX|FF1C|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|XXXX| XXXX|FF1A|FF1A|FF1D|FF1A|FF1A|FF1B|XXXX|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|FF1A|XXXX| XXXX|XXXX|XXXX|XXXX|XXXX|XXXX|XXXX|XXXX|XXXX|XXXX|XXXX|XXXX|XXXX|XXXX|XXXX| [/Code] every block of 4 represents a tile, the engine will read the codes and store them in an array called M$(16, 16) of which the codes use 1-15 either way, it will then read M$ and place the apropriate tile In the above example, XXXX represents a black tile, anything with F as the first letter comes from the first tileset while anything with S as the first letter comes from the second tileset, for the next letter F represents a floor, while W represents a wall, the other 2 letters specify the exact type, FW1A for example is First-Wall type 1A Why not just go straght from RCode file to screen? Well, M$ has its uses elsewhere as well, collision for example isnt done in a standard style for combat-mode related purposes |
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| As you may have read on my supposedly confusing website I am infact coding an RPG engine The "Myrianon" engine will be not only used in the hopefuly not too distant future to create games by me, but should also be released Open Source to other developers So what eventual goals does this project work to: The first is to create, develop and demonstrate hopefuly the most diverse RPG world in existance, my world "Seten" has quite a long fictional history and a lot more planned for later games spread accross the timeline of Seten, from its stone age to its space age, and while many RPG worlds will boast their diverse mix of terrain types from forests to swamps to deserts, to sowfields, very few indeed add their own terrain types to that list that dont exist on our own world, at the time of writing the world of Seten has been in design for about 4 years The second, and far less likely goal is to bring the graphical "development" of the gaming industry to a halt and to instead force the industry to focus on gameplay development, this enhancement of gameplay is the focus of releasing the engine Open Source, I'm confident that what I have planed is the right way to do things and thus more amature RPG programmers will use the engine The third and final ultimate goal of the engine is to provide me with a nice happy retirement, the fact that I'm 17 doesnt mean that I cant plan ahead, the money from any games I make with my engine will all go straght into a high interest bank account for use when I retire So, how are things currently with the engine: Well I currently have quite a lot of it to convert from other languages to Blitz, I'm finding that there are so many more efficiant options in Blitz that most of it is being re-written in the process, I'm also pixeling the graphics to be used in the sample game to be included in the engines code |