Gorbles

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Everything posted by Gorbles

  1. Not to drag this from the ashes too much, but the argument of "economic anxiety" has repeatedly been debunked by the analysis of voter demographics (and the breakdown thereof). And not to turn this into a hierarchy, but I'd imagine it's hard to keep in perspective someone's job when your life is directly at stake. I'm not saying a degree of empathy isn't a factor here, but people will - as you said - vote for their own interests. Why should people who fear for their lives worry about the job safety of people they don't know? More than that, what if they're worried about the job situation, but tend to prefer worrying about their own livelihoods more? Understandable, no? Hypotheticals abound, sorry. Nevermind that "job safety" is being scapegoated out to the (everpresent) daemon of (illegal) immigrants, instead of looking at the poverty line and longstanding reasons as to why the job market might be suffering. Don't get me started on healthcare in the US. I'm from the UK, myself, but what Obamacare put into action seems from everything I've read (regardless of how much Republican attention forced the bill to change before it was passed) an improvement on what came before. If people truly wanted (and were passionate about) good healthcare, I have a hard time believing that Trump would be the answer to their wishes, there. But that is solely my opinion.
  2. I dunno, I preferred Shadow of Oblivion.
  3. I am happy to donate my worn soul to the Cause™. Happy to help mull over any programming Problems that may crop up? Iunno. I can do pixel-based art. I'm great at ideas. So great most people tell me to shut up. If that's not a qualification, I don't know what is!
  4. [DevLog] EverEnding

    The crouch and crouch-turn animation is simply exquisite. I don't have any word that doesn't sound pretentious for it, haha. The movement seems like it's a bit "floaty" right now but I think you've absolutely nailed the crouching bit. Loving the concept art, too. Is the weapon meant to be based on a khopesh or more of a sickle?
  5. Figured I'd pop a thread up for this, then I have the choice between not updated this one and not updating my Celetin thread Been bugging some folks on Slack for ideas so I can't let them down and not follow through with it. But naw, as a bit of a change of pace (and so I don't have to sit through endless annoying physics bugs) I started up a bit of a "fun" project. I don't know how far I'll go with it, and I certainly don't intend to do anything artwise with it for the moment. Bit of experimentation with procedural generation (if you can call this that) and seeing if I can plug enough variables into a self-sustaining simulated environment. Text-based, for those who dislike thread tags. The Pitch You control a tribe of a particular animalistic species and it's your job to nurture them and let them grow into a successful and thriving colony. The Style Quite tongue-in-cheek. I sometimes have a bit of fun worldbuilding so this project will let me indulge in that a bit, but don't expect seriousness (like, at all). The Roadmap Species Blueprints (40%, will be starting with five species) Animal Behaviour (0%, aim is to have an evolving, but simplistic, social structure) Genetics (0%, mainly to simulate reproduction) Narrator Feedback (20%, basic evaluation of species in-place) The Results Pending a successful test run . . .
  6. Dawn of War III

    So, uh, I used the Search function, I manually browsed the subforum . . . and I can't find a thread on this. Does it not tickle anyones' fancies? Are people just burned after DoW II, or CoH 2? Has it flown under the radar? I'm throwing guesses at the wall! I ironically haven't delved that much into the detail surrounding the game, I've read a few blog posts but most of my time is spent volunteering for Relic on their forums, so there's my favouritism right there Looking enjoyable on the whole; that said I vastly preferred DoW II so I'm not sure how many of the returning vDoW aspects are going to be a hit for me. Looks like Relic are having a hard time striking public opinion and interest when juggling mechanics from vDoW / traditional RTS format and DoW II (and its inherent RPG-eseque progression). Main site, and a couple of unit spotlights: Assault Termies. Whirlwind Tank.
  7. [DevLog] Monumental Failure

    I'd send you luck but I have a negative amount, so I'll wish ya luck instead
  8. So I figure I should start chronicling something about this project as slow or as fast as it ends up moving. Hit a bit of a milestone recently, graphics engine up and running with basic physics, so riding the positive wave while it lasts! Shards of Celetin (not entirely happy with the name, but unlike Phantasmagoria it doesn't clash with another game) is a 2D role-playing game based on an alternate timeline for Earth (another one of Those, yup), one where humanity evolved from cavemen with access to the powers of the elements. Fire, Air, Metal and Ice. Not the usual quartet, but there are reasons for that. There will be some combat (or even more than some if you're really motivated to do so) but the primary context will be puzzles, wayfinding and dialogue-driven plot movement. There are a lot of cool things you can do with elemental powers in combat, but I also figure that affords a lot of creativity in solving puzzles, too. I'll be updating this devlog with, well, whatever. It could be sprite art, it could be ingame capture, it could even be worldbuilding if people are interested. It's a world I've spent a lot of time across the years crafting (born as an idea for a novel a lot earlier on in my life) that I'm always revisiting and carving out new details for. The current setting is "modern day", the real challenge will be drawing out the world I've made into the game itself (in an easily-accessible manner). I hate the Skyrim-style of "find random sodding manuscripts everywhere". Current Version: Scrollable viewport, predictive collision detection and fixed-step renderer / physics (for now). Lot of the data-level stuff done behind the scenes. I've even made a start on devtools, to make making all the JSON data so much easier than writing it out by hand. Immediate Goals: Tie renderer to refresh rate (crude v-sync, with double-buffering shouldn't cause any artefacts). Currently fixed at ~60FPS. Update and integrate physics model into game view, and with the controls. Currently inheriting a fixed speed for the player character and nothing else, with no acceleration / deceleration. Not-So Immediate Goals: Sprite art! I've been trying to work on a style, so we'll see where that goes. I want to replace the temporary background and player sprite, as the most-pressing thing. Layered renderer. Will involve designing atlases for my sprites. I want to do some particular magic here because layered puzzles with multiple layers of interaction == goal, and visualising that will be important. Everything else in the game.
  9. [DevLog] Shards of Celetin

    My post above reminds me of why I don't 100% go in for optimism these days. There's always something horrendous lurking round the corner. Other people talked and laughed at me during this time but it's mostly inconsequential So basically stuff got Buggy. I'm still trying to work out why I'm seemingly missing actions being sent from keyboard input to the controller stack (as the same actions control both player movement and map scrolling . . . yet the player moves faster than the map does. And yes I'm taking acceleration into account). Some of my directions do weird things to character position and also I'm reworking the viewport logic so it doesn't crash when you scroll in any one direction. Hope this update makes you laugh as much as it did me. I needed the catharsis
  10. [DevLog] Gravity Wolf / Dino's Side Project Circus

    Odd to see such a large % of downvotes, but I'd imagine that's to be expected? To be fair I don't quite get the concept of downvoting a game unless it's legitimately terrible on some level (political or cultural). Greenlight is such a black box, appreciate you sharing your statistics. At least you made it!
  11. General Technology thread

    General technology thing: Don't write your own game engine. It hurts. Actually, for turn-based enterprises it's probably fine to investigate this kind of thing yourself. But for a realtime game with physics? You'll end up on a rocking chair surrounded by dolls possessed by the souls of the fallen as their mental agony ravages what is left of your catatonic mind. Physics is the devil.
  12. [Release] Life as a Dung Beetle

    What do you use for GIF capture, out of interest? I use a program that works really quite well but the FPS gets hammered during conversion.
  13. [DevLog] Monumental Failure

    I don't have much to offer on the whole, but Monumental Failure seems really good, I'd stick with that at least for now. As for pantheons, either go 100% serious (Apollo, etc) and rip on the serious God / Goddess attitude vs. the uselessness of their mortal peons, or just 100% zany nutcase pantheon. Don't mix it up, leverage the contrast or run with the theme.
  14. [DevLog] Shards of Celetin

    Next time turned into a blog post, which you can find here. I've been messing about with physics, basically. I think I'm almost there, the code is much nicer than it was and it very nearly works. Just the odd game-breaking bug or two impeding my progress! Getting closer and closer to having to start making a lot of artwork to get the basics of the game into shape.
  15. [DevLog] Shards of Celetin

    I kept on panicking that I hadn't updated this in forever, looking at the dates it's only been little over a month, which for me is a very short amount of time! Progress has been made, but mostly of the non-visible sort. Things I've broken: Map scrolling. There's a bit in the active viewport code that needs fixing combined with how I address edge offsets. Collision detection. Hooking up physics broke my simple intersection checks. Things I've fixed: Physics, mainly. Apart from collisions, everything is in and working. The god-awful ice animation I was so briefly proud of in the post above Detailed additions: Constructed an action-based event system to control all actionable events in the game (us English love our redundant wordage). All player input is associated with an action, and various action queues are processed once per frame to drive the ingame simulation (which is then presented by the renderer). Hooked up GameObject physics properties to the movement action queue (and fixed all of the physics calculations. Lots of embarrassing mistakes in there by yours truly). The only defined constant is acceleration (in terms of movement), this gives a gradual speed increase as we multiply it by the time spent accelerating (there is a cap, of course ). Among other things, such as gravity, weight, mass, force, and so on. All sorts of goodies for when I start implementing abilities. Sprites now have facings, so when I get around to doing more spritemap work the action queue for movement also updates their respective facing (left, right, up, down). Four-way movement in this game (engine), at least for now. Keybinds! Got the basics implemented, and a fallback for all unsupported keys. I've got the groundwork for user / custom keybinds too, but that isn't implemented yet. Game engine now properly flows through the game loop, from recognising player input to updating the simulation (and AI actors, if any) through to the renderer. Nothing displayed in the game world at the moment is "hacked in" anymore! As promised, my improved ice shield animation. Animations take a lot of time out of me at the moment and I'm still finding a style I like with regards to the game itself, so progress on this front is very slow. (click for raw, as it's very long) Not final, I have both a detail pass to go through and I'm going to be inserting some frames near the end to smooth out the filling-in effect (it's a bit rushed at the mo). Until next time!
  16. For somebody

    You're all terrible, terrible people.
  17. [DevLog] Shards of Celetin

    Whoops, knew I forgot something important. Java! It's the language I work in, and I don't have time to scope to consider writing something like this in a new language regardless of how easy it is to pick up. Does mean it'll require Java installed to run, but thankfully recent versions have had all the drama-story-malware issues patched out (and they're mainly focused around the web plugin anyhow, which is deprecated now). The benefit to this is that it'll be cross-platform (MacOS, Linux, Windows) by default. Been trying to get a feel for a pixel art style, going to try and work on fire next. I've always had more luck with fire, this is the first ice-based animation I actually like. Not final, WIP, etc.
  18. [DevLog] Tiny Tires

    I have hilarious fun generating various 2D polygons using MATHS, so I'm impressed you've got that kind of setup in 3D. Your indicies might be a mess, but they're working there!
  19. Amateur Game Making Night

    Thanks for that, appreciated! Already familiar with Slack, so I'm glad to hang out on it.
  20. Amateur Game Making Night

    Good to see this topic resurface, I was lurking a lot of it before I realised I was in the wrong year (reading through 2014, hah) - is the Google Hangout still used? I'm looking for help around games programming in Java (though to be fair anyone familiar with writing their own simple games would be able to chip in) and writing up an essay on StackOverflow to justify a) my approach (i.e. writing something from scratch) and without being told to "use LibGDX" or "have a fully working prototype to paste all the code from" seems like a . . . less useful use of my time than sitting on here
  21. [DevLog] Honeycomb

    This started off a bit of a silly project. There wasn't really much "game" to this, it originally started as experimenting with Graphics2D in Java. http://gorbles.itch.io/honeycomb-beta That's the new beta release, with all the updates listed below and on that page. Milestones ALPHA (DONE) :: The initial goal was something simple, get a renderer on its own thread running the game graphics. Add a game state for each render group; pre-game, ingame, end-game, etc. Mess about with KeyListeners and the like, develop a system to delegate them down to the data model. At this point I was just testing it by adding fun spinning 2D shapes that spin. Let's make it so you can click on them too! As the game idea formed in my head, I added a variable lifetime to each shape so they "die" eventually. BETA (IN-PROGRESS) :: Make the UI not terrible. (DONE) Make the ingame art not terrible. (DONE?) Build a graphical font system! (DONE) Add a tiny amount of balance to the gameplay. Clicks give more points than dragging. (DONE) Add bigger shapes that have unique effects (for <good marketing> and <player retention> ). Add a countdown to game start. Add more art, a friend suggested bees. OH GOD THE BEES. RELEASE :: Polish? Performance pass (game is quite CPU-bound, fixed step renderer struggles on low-clocked CPUs) Java Stuff I'm not here to blow any minds, really. My next developer (b)log will probably be more around the art side of things, building interfaces, practising complicated pixel art scenes, and so on. I've got a lot of that I need to do to build a working game with some of the tech I have. The developer intent behind this was to explore the Graphics2D API, and to push my knowledge with that forwards. I'm pretty adept in building data-driven systems (my day job is web services over Tomcat, etc, and many other bits and pieces) and I've done enough work with the javax.Swing library to never make me want to do any more work in Swing (you only need a few hours in this to put you off for life, but I've managed a few years). Will probably add more posts to this with the details of some of my nicer (?!) classes. Art Stuff I mainly do pixel graphics; I don't have a tablet nor do I have the time to justify that kinda purchase. Pixel art I can do on my phone (found a great app for it) and I can practise it well enough when bored at my home PC. I don't always expect it to be great, but it matches up well with simple geometry, so why the hell not?
  22. [DevLog] Honeycomb

    Been a bit slow on this, RL consequences hit with a vengeance sometimes. Haven't had much headspace for personal projects. Done some bits here and there, but need to fold all my experimental code back into the Honeycomb! project.
  23. [DevLog] Honeycomb

    Hahaha, I have that site bookmarked (not that specific page) and I didn't think to check it out beforehand. Then again, as I said, a lot of this came together pretty much overnight. Over-engineering is a problem area I think all programmers go through - I've been guilty of it plenty of times in the past. In fact, I actually started working on these smaller, rapid projects as a way to stop getting bogged-down in overengineering things My problem is also my strength: I work at something til it works. I've done quite a lot of "re-inventing stuff people have already made", but it helps me get a better understanding of both Java and how to use it effectively. Nothing like graphics programming to make it obvious when something is badly-coded!
  24. [DevLog] Honeycomb

    The grid is a bit of a mess. I actually messed around with getting a random edge of a hexagon and spawning a new hexagon against that edge, but something to do with how Java handles rendering borders over a thickness of 1 messed up my maths a bit. I got it working, but it wasn't pixel-perfect at all. So I went the hacky route. An even / odd boolean to control the row I was on. If it was even, the offset was 0, and if it was odd, the offset was relative to the width of the hexagon. This allowed me to layer subsequent rows against each other with no overlap. I then check the length of the row against the maximum panel width dividing against the width of the hexagons I'd added so far. Row end reached? Flip the even / odd boolean, and start again. Keep going until there was no y-axis space to expand into. Pretty sure I hardcoded the height in an ugly manner. One mo, will look up the code. EDIT: Okay, gosh, it was even hackier than that. Lots of boolean checks, haha. Some pixel-fudging of spawn positions, too. Didn't work nicely if I messed with the size of the hexagons too much (though again that was mainly due to border-thickness interaction). int offsetX = 0; int offsetY = 0; int count = 0; int line = 0; boolean even = true; boolean finished = false; Hexagon last = null; while(!finished) { if(even) { BasicHexagon h = new BasicHexagon(); int life = seed.nextInt(h.getLifeSeconds() + 1); h.setLifeSeconds(life); h.setLifeMilliSeconds(life * 1000); if(h.getLifeSeconds() == 0) { h.setLifeSeconds(1); } maxScore = maxScore + h.getLifeSeconds() * CLICK_MULTIPLIER; int boundsWidth = (int) Math.ceil(h.getBase().getBounds2D().getWidth()); int boundsHeight = (int) Math.ceil(h.getBase().getBounds2D().getHeight()); // set the initial offset for the top-left hexagon if(count == 0) { offsetX = (boundsWidth / 2) + 2; offsetY = (boundsHeight / 2) + 2; } h.getBase().translate(offsetX, offsetY); tiles.add(h); count = count + 1; even = false; last = h; } else { // up the offset on the X-axis for next hexagon spawn offsetX = offsetX + ((int) last.getBase().getBounds2D().getWidth() + last.getHexEdgeWidth() + (last.getHexBorderWidth() * 2)); if(offsetX > gameWidth - (last.getHexEdgeWidth() + last.getHexBorderWidth())) { if(offsetY > gameHeight - ((int) last.getBase().getBounds2D().getHeight() + last.getHexBorderWidth())) { finished = true; break; } line = line + 1; offsetY = offsetY + (int) Math.ceil(last.getBase().getBounds2D().getHeight() / 1.5) - (last.getHexBorderWidth() * 3 / 2); int boundsWidth = (int) Math.ceil(last.getBase().getBounds2D().getWidth()); if(line % 2 == 0) { offsetX = (boundsWidth / 2) + 2; } else { offsetX = (boundsWidth / 2) + 2 + ((int) Math.ceil(last.getHexEdgeWidth() * 1.5) + (last.getHexBorderWidth())); } } even = true; } }
  25. [DevLog] Honeycomb

    The hex maths was actually the easiest (bit of a copy-and-paste job), but I took the time to um, re-acquaint myself with the horror that is basic maths to figure out what was going on. I added some comments to remind myself: // x == radius * cosine of angle * iteration in radians // y == radius * sine of angle * iteration in radians int x = (int) (size * Math.cos(Math.toRadians(360 / n * i))); int y = (int) (size * Math.sin(Math.toRadians(360 / n * i))); Where n is the number of sides. This works for any equilateral polygon, you just feed the x and y into a Point of your language's choosing (and then into a Polygon / Shape). The radius of any equilateral hexagon is the same as the length of an edge. Each Hexagon object contains three Polygons (I actually generated three during each iteration of the above loop), one for the base Hexagon and one for each transform I applied. I have a (continual) rotation transform and a (one-off) scalar (for the enlarge-on-mouseover you can see in the screenshots). That way I control the shape and size of the polygon from the quoted code there (across all transforms) and all I need to do is modify the transforms themselves once (as that code is defined elsewhere). The nicest part. The hard work came after, haha. (unless you're referring to the spawn logic which is moderately horrific but I'm quite proud of it)