February 2012
2 posts
2 tags
Lumberbot (working title)
Here is a list of the features I plan on adding to my little “Lumberbot” game some of you may have seen. (If you follow my wife on G+ that is.)
For those of you who don’t here is a link to it: Lumberbot
Here is the link to the G+ post my wife made about it with her brief write up of how to ‘play’ with it: Lumberbot Discussion on G+
Now that that’s out of the...
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GWT Update
I’ve updated it with a few new features including a help page.
One of the shinier new features is the ability to export and import maps. I have a sample map you can import here.
In case you forgot, the link for this version of GWT is: http://thefool76.com/html5/gwt/
January 2012
1 post
2 tags
September 2011
2 posts
Social Media, where do YOU live?
Just a quick question that I’m spamming across social media sites. Mostly out of curiosity.
How many of you use more than one social media site with any regularity and if so, which ones? For me it’s Facebook, G+, Twitter, and Tumblr.
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A dwarf fortress story fort (Apexwhips II)
So a while ago I started a story fort in Dwarf Fortress but due to moving and other things I never finished it. I liked the premise but I don’t really want to return to the old version of the game I had started it in. So I’ve decided to restart it in the current version. Seven Dwarves, ten axes, and a forbidding landscape. Lets see if they live.
Diary of “Mandy” the...
July 2011
2 posts
1 tag
Texture Mix Machine Ver 0.1.5
New Features Better support for including alt-textures - Pack creators can now include an alt_items.txt and/or alt_terrain.txt file in their pack. These files are just a simple list of alternative files for terrain and item tiles within the zip. Place each file on it’s own line. See the ones in the included simpletech.zip for examples.
Generic Block mode preview for alt-textures - Since I...
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Texmix Version 0.1.4
Three new buttons were added at the top. They are in order:
Save Button - Saves your current mix.
Terrain Button - Switches to editing the terrain.png
Items Button - Switches to editing the gui/items.png
Pressing the ‘z’ key will now toggle zoom mode in which the current selected tile is zoomed to fill the picker. Right clicking in the right hand picker will now preview tiles...
June 2011
13 posts
1 tag
Texture Mix Machine Ver. 0.1.2
New version up.
New Features
alt pack folder and alt terrain folder - Any pack (.zip) placed in the alts folder will be read by the pack regardless of the directory it is looking at. Additionally any .png in the alts/terrain folder will be read by the pack as an alt of terrain.png. Packs in the alts folder will be prefixed with a * in the listing and files in the alts/terrain folder will be...
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Texture Mix Machine
I have a new version up. This one includes the ability to change packs from within the program as well as support for HD textures. It can even mix tiles between different pack resolutions resizing as needed.
Download
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Texmix Alpha 0.1
I have the alpha version up and ready for it’s first public testing! *cheers*
Currently I only have a windows build done but it has been confirmed to run under Wine by my official test ferret. A linux build will be coming.
To use, just download it, unzip wherever and then run texmix.exe. It will default to using the default.zip pack I distributed with it and it will save to test.zip when...
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Model File Rough Draft
Spent some time working on the model file concept and I have an initial rough draft for what it might look like.
http://thefool76.com/yummy/sample_mdl.txt
I’m going with the ‘tag’ based format because that would more easily convert over into a binary format later on. That and not using XML means not having to add an XML parser which I think would be using a sledgehammer to...
2 tags
Model Files
After doing the preview and getting the small spinning block, I did some thinking about exactly how I wanted to define the blocks and other elements. If the game consisted of just blocks it would be easy. Just have a single block class and then put whatever textures on that I need. However the game has more than a few non-block elements so I need a way of drawing those as well.
Additionally, I...
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Tenative Plan for this month
I have this month set aside for working on Minecraft related things. (texture packs, my story, etc.) However, I still want to continue working on my GUI stuff as I think I’m making real progress with that. So I have decided to combine the two.
I’m going to do a stand-alone version of my texture mixer using the GUI elements I’ve written. This should give me a nice test of my...
2 tags
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End of month accounting
Progress was made on the GUI elements this month. I still have a few lingering bugs in the last class I added so I will probably work on trying to get that fixed off and on till I have it sorted to my liking.
Here are the things I got done:
Base Gui Class - base class for all my GUI elements
Event Handler - base class for any object that needs to handle events from the gui.
Font - A simple...
May 2011
8 posts
2 tags
Semi-Daily Update
I was hoping to have buttons working today but I’m currently neck deep in debugging my event handler code so that didn’t happen. Hopefully tomorrow I will be able to squash these bugs and finally get them done.
~sigh~
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Daily Update
So in an attempt to make up for some of the time in which I wasn’t getting coding done at the start of the week, I put in some time this morning working on the event handler setup. (Besides it has been gnawing at my brain so it was either write code or write the ideas down in my notebook.)
What I have done is make a base EventHandler class that can be added to other classes as a parent to...
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Semi-Semi-Daily Update
Been quiet since I have been mostly doing research for the last few days. I was originally considering using a true type font and this is what most of my research was directed at but after running into some library issues and once again confronting the evil beast that is unicode I’ve since reconsidered. That and the person (Swingerzetta) I have asked to make me a font prefers to work with...
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Daily Update
My initial tests for the positioning and resizing code went well. I only had a few fairly minor bugs to clean up before I had them behaving exactly as I wanted. Most of the bugs had to do with problems clipping children to not go outside the area covered by their parent.
I spent most of tonight reading up on texturing and how to deal with loading actual images instead of just dealing with solid...
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Semi-Daily Update
Got a tad distracted by doing the co-op testing in Portal2 yesterday so to make up for that I spent two hours coding today.
My goal for this evening was to get the first gui element (the panel) to a point where I could compile and run the code and have it draw itself on the screen. That doesn’t sound like a whole lot, and it looks like even less, but doing that means that I didn’t...
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Daily Update
This month marks the start of actually doing coding! Woo!
Today I filled out the body of the virtual object that will serve as the base parent for all my GUI elements. Of course since it’s a virtual object, there isn’t anything yet to show as I can’t actually make instances of it. Which brings us to tomorrow’s plan.
Create and implement the first real GUI element,...
April 2011
15 posts
1 tag
Daily Update
I churned through my list of potential GUI elements making stubbed classes for them. I think I’m ready to really start getting down and writing now.
First up: The base GUI object that will have all the main logic for event bubbling as well as all the common positioning and drawing information. Every other visible element in the game will be a child of this object. The ironic bit is that...
1 tag
I have added the dates onto the blog posts now. I also put in a link back to my homepage from the top of the blog.
I’m not going to be cross linking my facebook or twitter stuff here or on my home page any time soon as that would feel way too much like crossing the streams.
I also went ahead and set up the custom domain so now this blog can be reached via http://blog.thefool76.com.
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Daily Update
Yet more class stubs done. This time I’ve stubbed in the base GUI element. I have also set up the init() for the main Engine that sets up the drawing area / window.
I think I finally have enough that tomorrow I should be able to go through and start churning out the stubs for all the specific GUI elements. Then I can do a proper listing of them to make into a schedule with some other...
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Daily Update
Started crudely stubbing out the classes I’m going to need in the actual code. This is both because I just find it easier to think about them that way and to give myself a leg up when I start coding.
I also took some time to set up my working environment to my liking. I want to spend my time next moth writing code, not fiddling with color settings and linker arguments.
While going about...
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Not-Very-Daily Update
Forgot to update Monday and I didn’t even do any design work yesterday so here is my belated report.
I spent Monday doing yet more reading on OpenGL and how to work it’s magic. I have reconsidered my thoughts on Voxel rendering as I really don’t think they would fit with the tone of the game I’m trying to make. So now it’s back to 2D sprites but using OpenGL to...
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Daily Update
I was thinking about some things on the drive home so I decided to do my daily hour of design a bit earlier than usual while it was still fresh in my head.
I am seriously considering implementing a Voxel engine that defines things in terms of 8x8x16 blocks. If I use one byte per ‘pixel’ I can do 64 colors with four levels of transparency. Basically each model would then take up 1k...
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Daily Update
Ok, after much reading and fiddling and such, I think I am going to go with using OpenGL as my main renderer. Course that decision may change as I actually getting into writing code.
I also think I’m going to start with a 3D renderer instead of 2D. Granted I’ll go with a fixed isometric projection, so it will look fairly 2D initially. Doing it that way will make it easier to go to...
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Daily Update
Worked on detailing the login mechanics. The login server will be a separate entity from the game server. The user will login with a username and pwd to the login server which will then pass back an auth token. The client will then use this token to log into the game server.
Making it apart from the game server will help to insulate it from possible security holes in the game. It will also...
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Daily Update
Wound up diving into the network layer in more detail instead of working more on the UI. I think I have a much cleaner design for that this go round. I broke up the network layer into two core objects, a Connection object that handles the low network stuff and a Message object that serves as a wrapper for the actual transmitted data.
I have four core message types currently defined. Data...
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Daily Update
Did some fairly detailed design work on the UI elements. This included defining the structure for formatting text for coloring and other formatting.
Tomorrow I intend to decide just how flexible I really want the UI to be. Should I build in resizing now or should I hold off till later on that? That sort of thing.
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Semi-Daily Update
I was away from home for most of the weekend so I didn’t get a whole lot done.
I have typed up some of my earlier notes now and did some design work for the UI elements I need. I also sketched out the basic flow for input for the client.
Tomorrow I plan on more fully fleshing out the client side of things.
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Semi-Daily Update
I seem to have missed yesterday’s update despite the fact that I got some stuff done.
I did some fleshing out of the Tile class and the ResourceNode class. These took longer than some of the other’s as the details involved making some far reaching design decisions about the structure of resources in the world.
Today… I am nursing a sinus head ache so I really don’t feel...
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Daily Update
I have laid out the basic flow and the layers for the application. This includes both the client side and the server.
That didn’t take very long so I also did some more detailed descriptions of the data objects for the first arc. I have the BaseDataObject, Database, Word, Site, Thing, and Creature objects fleshed out in a bit more detail now.
Tomorrow I will continue fleshing out the data...
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Daily Update
Gonna try doing daily updates on what I’ve done each day. We will see how long this lasts >_>
Tonight I went through my pile of index cards I’ve made that outline the basic program structure and picked out the first ones that need to be done. Based on tonight, it looks like the first development arc is going to focus on describing the core data structures for the server....
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Obligatory First Post
This particular blog is going to serve as my dev blog for my various projects. Posts here may include such things as coding thoughts, artwork, timelines, release notices and various other such things.
My current list of projects includes:
MAGA ( Multiplayer Adventure Game of Awsome ) - A MUD engine in C++ with a web UI in addition to the traditional telnet interface.
Various Minecraft Texture...