Hey guys,
Steve here.
I’m very sorry to say this, but I was unable to record podcast episode 34 this Sunday. This is because Lightstar had a rough encounter with Viper, a mean old battle ship that was piloted by a fellow player of Death Match, Kenny to be exact. Well old Kenny challenged me to a space battle, and I’d have been a fool not to agree, well, maybe I was a fool to agree. Because though I was able to vanquish him in 10 minutes, he significantly damaged my hull, and it took nearly 12 hours to repair.
On Monday, when I found my ship repaired, I thought I’d go ahead and record that podcast. However, Danny was away from his computer, and I found myself getting bored. The result, was me going on my first actual true bounty mission, one that I profitted from. This time, I had a crew of three to four people with me, and two of them manning the warhead launchers. Even still, my ship took significant damage, though not nearly enough to call it a critical fight. This, along with the fact that I never managed to get Danny online to record the podcast, completely put pod casting out of the question. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll try again tonight.
In other news, I’ve made quite a bit of progress on S Quad Racing. First of all, I’m glad to say that the track parser that took a good deal of time and frustration to get working has been successfully implemented. And, because I was in such a good mood after finally getting it working yesterday, I even added error checking that will prevent the track from loading and tell you where corrections are needed. This shouldn’t really be needed, since I’m about 93% sure that most people are going to use the in-game track builder anyway, but I figured I’d add it just in case since I myself made some mistakes in the beginner track. Meanwhile, in my free time I will be looking for rain sounds, particularly sounds of rain falling upon a car, and I’d prefer to have such sounds in varying degrees of intensity, though I’m sure I could produce this affect with a bit of audio editing. In addition, if at all possible, I want to implement random hailstorms that could damage your car, as this is indeed something that could happen in the real world. At the time of this writing, hail storms are more of a possibility than anything, as I’ve not even yet programmed a propper vehicle structuring system, and it’s more than obvious that you can’t damage something that’s not really there.
To that end, implementing rain storms should take less than 20 minutes, if all goes well. Unlike most other track and weather features, I don’t need these to affect either the player or AI much, although I might make it necessary to slow down below a certain speed lest a player would like to experience the affects of a sticky mud obstacle, and that goes for the opponent as well.
Another thing that might enspire game entities to want to slow down, is that I plan to make these storms move across the track as well, at roughly the same speed as a car, give or take some. And if you continue to move at a fast speed, you’ll be moving at nearly the same speed as a storm, so you’ll be under it longer.
Overall, I plan for the main affect of these storms to be to impair a player’s ability to hear obstacles and opponents, to give the affect that heavy rain causes to sighted people. And since some storms could be farely large, you can rest assured that none will be included on the small beginner track. And if I decide that I want to put a few on the second track, they will occur rarely, and will not likely contain very heavy rain.
Moving on, today is April 21, which marks yet another year I’ve been blogging. As most of you know, I started this blog in 2011, and some times go back and laugh at my posts from back then. In case you don’t know, I used to do the following things which I no longer do now:
1. post like three or four times a day some times. lol
2. Post nearly every day.
3. not write very good at all.
4. write blog posts that were sometimes frivolous, unnecessary, and boring. 😀
More importantly, though, having a blog has improved my writing skills, and given me a place to talk tech when the people around me were too confused to listen.
Well, I’ve certainly enjoyed these past few years I’ve been able to do this, and look forward to producing more posts as I get closer to becoming a programmer, and perhaps even a writer! Have a good week, everyone.
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.
Category: updates
Coding Frustrations and Space Battles
Hey guys,
Steve here.
Coding can be an extraordinarily painful, irritating thorn in ones side sometimes. Tonight it feels as though my only consolation is that experienced coders go through the same thing, and my unfailing passion for technology.
I say this because the track parser I’ve been implementing into S Quad Racing is not turning out the way I want it to. Basically, the procedure I want the program to initiate when a player selects a track is as follows:
- Open the file that corresponds to the track that was selected. For example, if the player chose Beginner, the game would load tracks\Beginner.track into memory.
- Read through the text of the file. It would then:
-set the track size as determined in the file.
-set spawning of obstacles properties such as how fast they would appear, and the maximum number that was allowed.
-Finally, the turns and straight sections would be generated, laying out the track structure. - After all of this, the idea is that players would start the game, and be placed on the track that they selected, exactly as it was structured.
However, as is the main focus of my frustration, I’m encountering some major mishaps. On the first three or four compilation trials, I couldn’t even get the game to load the track file. Rather, it would create a file called “0” with no file extension inside the tracks directory, and attempt to read from that instead. The result was a barren, completely straight track that, if raced upon, would likely last forever, as there were no defined finish line boundaries set. And though the player could move forward, the enemy could not. Instead, he would just sit there at the beginning of the lap, winning first and second place, thus eliminating the player’s chance of winning. 😛
After tweaking the code, and by that I mean changing two characters of it, I resolved this issue. However, I still cannot, get turns working, no matter what I try, and ever since I implemented this system, obstacles refuse to spawn.
Though it might seem almost hopeless, there is some good news. As has already been mentioned, God has given me the blessing of having a best friend who is quite efficient when it comes to audio game coding. In the coming days, I will be examining the code for his snowboard racing game. Hopefully, this will help me come up with a working solution to this issue.
Once this blows over, I will look into adding more environmental features such as rain pockets, road hazards, power ups, wall sections, and perhaps some more turn types. Stay tuned!
In other news, I’ve had a rather active week on Death Match a New Beginning, engaging in some intents battles with pirate ships of various hull strengths, one of which rendered my ship useless for 35 hours. Since I spawned all of the enemies I fought this week, I was able to give them creative names. Vladdiator, Chad Dungie, and Virwag14 were just some of the names I came up with, the latter being the most recent battle I was involved in.
In fact, after Virwag14 was destroyed, I founded a colony in its honor. But the twisted thing is, I docked the very ship that was used to kill Virwag14 the ship, on the barren grasslands of Virwag14 the planet. 🙂
That concludes the posting for tonight. The next time you will be hearing from me is on Podcast Episode 34, when I will be performing a bounty mission on Death Match. and once again, Danny will most certainly be there!
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.
A Great Week of Bringing Poems to Life and Other Things
Hey guys,
Steve here.
You’re not going to believe this! It turns out that “Flamity Flame the Lame Audio Game,” the poem I wrote and published on last Wednesday’s blog post, has become…exactly what it talks about–an audio game!
Though I’ve indeed brought this game to reality, it is a twisted one; the audio game is not exactly as it was depicted in the poem. Nonetheless, I tried to structure it around most of the rules outlined therein, so that the result was mostly as expected: You are placed on a game board, James is there as well, he does not make a sound, and you must kill him.
However, I strayed a bit from the main idea. James is able to shoot back, if you give him time to anyway. When you square up with him, he is raising up his gun, and you’d better fire like crazy before he has time to. However, if you’re too slow to fire enough shots to take him down, as is likely to be the case, it will be necessary to step to the left or right one time to get out of the line of fire, and take a small 5 second break or so, before moving back to where James is and proceeding to blast him to oblivion. This system helps to test one’s quick thinking and reflexive skills, while also laying the foundations for an action packed, quick paced arcade style shooter game, something that was definitely not described in the poem.
Secondly, rather than killing James once, there are five levels; James has five lives; four less than your average cat, four greater than your average James. In each of these unfortunate, short lives, James’s is more angry than in previous ones. Proceeding the burning out of one of James’s lives, you will advance a level, and hear a threat. As you achieve higher levels, you will notice that these comments grow more angry and bloodthirsty. This is only the precursor to a level filled with faster shots from James that could easily slice off a significant chunk of health, and result in your quick and almost, and I emphasize almost, painless death.
There is some good news for you, though. Unlike poor old, slow, angry James who cannot actually walk, You can move away from him safely and confide in the fact that he won’t follow. Also, though your health does not reset following the start of a new level, you’ll notice that it takes less shots to kill James in the higher levels; though the main goal in those levels is still to kill James, the underlying goal is to time your attacks so that James doesn’t have time to shoot back, a task that can be quite daunting.
Another perk is that unlike James, the firing time limit on your gun is not directly set in the game; this means that you will be able to fire as fast as you can press the space bar. So while the game gets increasingly challenging, there are several constant factors that place the game mostly in your favor.
For the first time, I actually have a reward for those of you who just read that–a download link! Since Flamity Flame was such a small project, it is already released, and can be Downloaded from this link.
In the package, I’ve included both a documentation, and an audio strategy demo, and I recommend that you have a look at both.
Moving away from Flamity flame, I suppose I’ll include a short update on my life, by that I mean a quick summary, since the previous part of this post went a lot longer than I intended it to.
My birthday went exactly as I thought it would. I overloaded on some great food, relaxed, and went to school, that list of events being in order from most to least important. The only unexpected occurrence, was that I bought a space upgrade for the blog, meaning that instead of having to upload pod casts and such to Drop Box, I can now upload those files to my blog, and have been in the process of doing so. Since I transferred pod casts first, both the feed and page work, though for those of you who are subscribed to the feed you might be asked to download all episodes again.
As for the weekend, there’s not much to say there. My sister and dad were out of town, so it was just me and my mom. I basically spent the weekend relaxing, eating junk food, and then Sunday we were at church all day. Also, I recorded a podcast on Death Match A New Beginning, and had the privilege of having Danny on the podcast over Skype. You should seriously listen to it.
That concludes this quite lengthy post. Enjoy the new little game, and Happy Flaming!
Thanks for reading,
Type you later,
Steve.
An Exciting Steve Day Celebration Post!
Hey guys,
Steve here.
Yes, I posted yesterday, and I know that I had decided upon a four to ten day blogging routine at the beginning of the year. However, it has become an unofficial tradition to post a little something on the night of my birthday. I don’t know why, but it’s happened every year. And don’t worry, you’re gonna love this one!
a little poem
I’ve been wanting to share this with you since I first came up with it on Saturday, but didn’t have enough time Yesterday morning to do so. So here it is. Notice the rhythm I use.
I remember the day,
when I dared to play,
an audio game,
that was very lame.
The audio game,
that was very lame,
that I dared to play,
had a stupid name.
The name of the game,
was Flamity Flame,
and Flamity Flame,
was such a horrible game.
Because in Flamity Flame,
The goal of the game,
was to attempt to kill,
a man known as James.
Now what made this game,
so very lame,
Is the fact that James,
had no sound at which to Aim.
And what kind of game,
that is audio by claim,
has a guy named James,
at whom you cannot Aim?
So to this day,
I don’t know who to blame,
but all I can say,
they made a terrible game!
a declaration of independence rendition for the blind
Note: this is a project my sister had to do for English class.
Also note: source of the end of it: the actual declaration. I put this so we don’t run into copyright issues. Again, the end of this declaration was copied from the origional.
There comes a time in every person’s life when one realizes that they
were not in fact made “perfect”; As we age we learn that we have to
figure this world out on our own. This is not to say that God is not
there to guide us, but we are limited by our fears and lack of
knowledge. And the situation is exacerbated when one has a disability.
One is forced to shape their life around their disability. They are
forced to live by different standards than the “normal” ones. And
while we learn to manage, there are still the harsh realities that
those with disabilities must face, that those without a disability do
not. To narrow it down, the blind are forced to learn to cope, and
navigate the world.
In reality, the blind are, at times, viewed as less than the
sighted. And because of this, certain rights are taken from us. The
right to be seen and not immediately judged, the right to be
considered “normal”, and the right to be treated with respect are only
a few of the rights taken away from us. On top of the rights denied to
us, we also face many struggles that could be easily resolved if only
the sighted tried.
Firstly, architects do not take the needs of the blind into
consideration. We are forced to navigate around poles and columns,
that not only confuse us, but are a serious hazard.
Secondly, Any sighted person with a knack for decorating, that seems
to believe that fake plants and glass vases and figurines make nice
decor, have no respect or consideration for the people who are not
able to see and therefor find these needless decorations as dangerous
and as an irritant.
And thirdly, manufacturers who do not braille their products, as most
manufacturers fail to do, have absolutely no respect for the blind,
and are only losing customers. If a blind person cannot read the
labels on a product, we will not buy it.
There is room for improvement in all of these matters. For centuries
we have fought for the rights and accommodations that we deserve, and
that the sighted have. And for centuries, these pleas have been
ignored, or viewed as unimportant. And, here, we are once again asking
the sighted community to simply take a step back and take us into
consideration. We have made compromises, and we have relented to
letting them get away with ignoring our natural rights as humans. Yet,
they have been deaf to our struggles and needs. We must, therefor,
continue to fight for what should already be ours. We will be heard.
We will not let this world turn against the blind community. We,
therefore, the Representatives of the blind community, Assembled,
appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our
intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of
the blind populace, solemnly publish and declare, us, as, human
beings, are, and of Right ought to be respected and taken into
consideration; that we are Absolved from all unjust acts committed by
the sighted; and that as a respected and valued people, we are granted
the same rights and luxuries as the sighted; And for the support of
this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine
Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes
and our sacred Honor.
Finally, a good old set of updates!
My birthday was definitely great, despite it being a school day. I had plenty to eat, and an overall good day. There were even a few funny incidents:
So I was eating M&MS in Spanish class, because I was like “it’s my birthday so I’m gonna eat these, because the teacher won’t get on to me for it.” Anyways, someone saw me eating them, and asked for one.
“What do you say?” I asked them.
“May I please, have some M&MS?”
“no… that’s not right. Happy…”
“Happy birthday!”
Of course I gave her some, and then I guess more people in the class saw and heard that because the whole class started singing to me! Lol! And the bad thing is,
Oh yes the bad bad thing,
I only gave them to like 4 people. 😀
In all seriousness, though, I did have a wonderful blessed day. I hope you all did as well! Also, I got a space upgrade for the website, meaning no more Drop Box imposed space limits–We won’t have to deal with them for a long time! Currently, I’m in the process of transfering all files from dropbox to wordpress. I will let you know when I finish that.
a few notes
- just in case you wanted to know, the last person I talked to before I turned 16 (3:01 PM) was god. The first people I talked to as a 16 year old were those on my facebook friends list!
- My birthday falls on National Make Up Your Own Holiday Day! No, that’s not why I came up with Steve Eve and Steve Day, that was purely coincidental, which is why I’m telling you this in the first place.
I hope you enjoyed this post. I hope you all have a wonderful blessed day, and weekend. Come on, it’s my birthday! Just grant this wish for me!
Oh yes, and also, just this once, I ask that if you like this post, please follow my blog and share this to your social media. Also please hit the like button on this post. And be sure to tell all your friends and family about Steve Eve and Steve Day so they will be ready for it next year!
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve, the man who made the awesome Steve Day and Steve Eve holidays happen!
A Week of Progress
Hey guys,
Steve here.
I had a wonderful spring break. As my last post was published on Monday, most of you already know that I went to Winter Jam 2015 in Fort Worth, Texas. But that aside, the rest of my week, though not nearly as exciting, was still good. Besides coding on my proverbial racing game, I worked out mostly every day, Spent time with my friends, chilled a little, and did a bit of gaming.
Due to the situation with reality software that I wrote briefly about in a post a few weeks back, I’ve played little to no Death Match: A New Beginning since then. Recently, though, things have calmed down considerably, thus I started to play it again. Last week, Danny took me on a bounty mission which took a good chunk of time to complete but was worth it. I myself do not possess any ship(s) required to do such missions, but am gradually working my way up.
Off the topic of Death Match, more work has been done on my racing project. As per the programming aspect, I’ve slowed down a bit, but progress is still being made and, that being the case, I have some stuff to report.
First of all, as suggested by someone on my forum thread, I’ve added the ability to drive backwards. I will demonstrate this on Wednesday night’s demo.
Also, I’ve put in some more work on the stats system, fixing some nasty bugs and having to rework it a couple times. I designed it so that all player stats are stored in the character folder which is located in the s quad racing program directory, as it currently stands. However, before this is over, I’d like the data to be stored on a remote server, to prevent cheaters and other such pests from having access to easily changeable content.
Anyways, I’ve not yet added anything in the way of upgrades. For that matter, there’s still only one track in the game, but that is soon to be changed. I had quite a busy weekend, so didn’t have much of a chance to code, and I really didn’t code much today as I’ve been taking a little break.
Besides that, there’s not much else to report. I’ll blog you all later.
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.
An Update On Game Development and Other Things
Hey guys,
Steve here.
Over the last few days, I’ve done quite a bit of coding on the Racing project I’ve been working on. Now that I completed the basics such as driving and such, I was able to begin on some things that should make the game much more interesting. One such implementation is the opponents’ rather comical ability to “rage” at you while in the midst of a race. As it currently stands, opponents driving by you can: glare at you, yell at you, or honk. I plan to add more amusing possibilities, but the aforementioned were just tests to insure that the system was working.
Similarly, opponents can now crash into obstacles, but at the time of this writing there are still some major bugs to fix: instead of Enemies always dodging obstacles, they now crash into nearly every single one. The most probable cause for this issue is that I coded it so there was a 1 out of 6 chance that the opponent would hit an obstacle, which averages just over 8 obstacles per lap. Considering that an average player only hits 1 to 3 obstacles per lap, I’ve come to the conclusion that this must be reworked.
More importantly, I’m currently in the process of coding in a stat management system. It is now possible to earn money at the end of the race, and level up as well. A detailed summary of this can be found here.
At some point this week, I’ll begin to work on some more built in tracks. In these next tracks, I’ll be adding more items: walled navigation sections, and perhaps power ups. I already have a good idea of how I want to build track two, and very much look forward to playing it.
Aside from the racing game, my weekend was awesome! Yesterday, I took a break from my coding and relaxing to attend the 2015 Winter Jam concert with my church. It was a total blast, and I wish I’d gotten pictures or something. It was a whole bunch of worship, rock and roll, Gospel singers, and… Skillet! :))
Well, I guess that wraps up tonight’s post. Expect another one later this week, along with an audio progress demo of my Racing game. Also, though I might need some assistance, I need to come up with a name for the game, because “My Racing Game” just isn’t gonna cut it!
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.
Spring Break?
Hey guys,
Steve here.
I’m really confused. Here I am, a citizen of Texas, on the Thursday before spring break, out of school for a snow day. A quite large winter storm blasted us with around 5 inches of snow and ice last night, making this the 4th episode of winter weather in northern Texas since last Monday.
This time, however, I was not so unlucky as to be trapped in the house all day. In fact, despite the cancelation of school, my day started at 6 this morning, with a trip into the back yard to check out the left overs from last night’s storm. Against the common unwritten rules of being a teenager, I was neither tired or grumpy even though I went to bed just after two in the morning: these days, oh the few rare days when snow blankets the ground, are when “getting efficient rest” is the last thing on my to-do list. However, as I type this post, I reap the outcome of such a fun filled day of snow ball fights, sledding attempts, and no sleep.
Since the sun was out pretty much all day, most of that snow melted away, tipical for Texas. So, we’ll be going back to school tomorrow, but thankfully it’s only one day; next week is spring break, if you can call it that in light of recent weather patterns. 🙂
Moving on, I’ve officially entered week three of audio game development. Though it was very late last night, around midnight I think, I posted the audio demo for this week on the S Quad Racing Page. This reflects most of the changes I’ve talked about in the change log and blog post from the last week; the sound of the player’s car is noticeably quieter, the turning system far less flawed, and there are now opponents that can drive on the track as well, though that’s about all they can do.
As of yet I’ve not completed a fully functioning opponent intelligence. This is still being worked on, though, one step at a time. As I said in my last post, I began working on opponents on Sunday, and have only been making minor changes and additions since.
Moving on, my week has been relatively pieceful for the most part save the winter weather and asociated impacts. On a more negative note, amidst my normal routine of school, relaxing, gaming, programming, and reading, I was involved in a pressing matter that had to do with Reality Software, Danny’s game development company, for the first half of the week. Thankfully, it was finally resolved yesterday evening.
Aside from all of what’s been said, there’s not much to report, except that I’m really looking forward to this Spring break, regardless of what season and/or weather it happens to proceed.
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.
PS. The following are pictures from the snow day.
An Update
Hey guys,
Steve here.
I found this really cool, blind accessible Solitaire game for the IPhone. It’s $2.99 for the full version, but you will definitely get what you paid for. Here’s a very well done review of the game that I listened to, and if what I’ve already said about it won’t convince you to buy it, this surely will: http://applevis.com/podcast/episodes/blindfold-solitaire-audio-version-classic-card-game.
Speaking of games, I’m happy to say that I’m making a lot of progress on the racing game that I’ve been developing. It’s only been 10 days, and the player interface is complete. I performed several rounds of testing earlier to day and can’t seem to detect any bugs so far, so if any do exist they’ll likely be found once I create some opponents to race against.
Speaking of which, I’ve coded the structure for the opponents thus far, but as of yet haven’t done anything with it, and don’t think I will until tomorrow. The reason for this is that coding them will be far more complex than it was to program the player interface. The reasons for this are as follows:
- Unlike the player, the opponent can’t think about what decision it will make; if an obstacle appears in its path, it can’t decide it wants to move out of the way. While I could easily program it to automatically turn to avoid the obstacle, this would give it an unfair advantage over the player: one would be hard-pressed to win if the opponents that they raced against avoided every single obstacle while they hit at least one.
Fortunately, I have an idea of how I could code the opponents’ intelligence in such a way that it’s not always perfect, though I’ll not say what it is until I’ve proven that it works. - Player Interaction.
In this game, I’d like it to be possible to slow ones opponents down temporarily by coming up behind them and bumping them. Of course, if an opponent were to intentionally bump into the player, I’d like it to have the same affect on him. In theory, coding this should be a piece of cake, but previous attempts to do similar things proved this to be falsehood. Nonetheless, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this can be accomplished. - It will likely take a good chunk of time to program all necessary opponent actions. Despite the fact that I knew what I was doing and had very little trouble when coding the player interface, it still took a significant amount of experimentation and testing to get it fully operational. And now that I’m coding players that are out of my control during game play, it will be harder to notice smaller less significant bugs that occur.
Despite the challenges outlined above, I’m optimistic about this game. As I stated on the audiogames.net forum, I’m programming it because that is something I love to do, and I enjoy playing audio games very much.
For those of you who want to stay informed of how the development process is going, I recommend that you visit the S Quad Racing Game Page. It is where I post the daily change log, and weekly audio progress demos.
Off the topic of game creation, I had a great rest of my week. The snow storm that came in early Wednesday morning didn’t give us another day off of school, though I hardly expected it to. In fact, all of what actually fell as snow melted right after the event was finished; much of the precipitation was sleet and rain anyway.
Yesterday, though, was a completely different story. Temperatures, as they did on Monday, didn’t rise above freezing, and it snowed all day. I still had to go to school because the snow didn’t even start to fall until around 9 in the morning though. Today, while I’m sure the roads were quite treacherous, it didn’t affect me at all, that is to say, none of my plans were affected. I don’t think we’re done with winter weather yet; we could get some sleet on Wednesday. I wonder, will it actually happen?
Aside from what’s already been written here, there hasn’t been much else to talk about, though I got my 6-weeks report card and discovered that I made all A’s except for algebra, but I still made a B in that class.
Well, I’m signing off now. Have a good rest of your weekend, I’ll blog again some time next week.
Thanks for reading,
Type you later,
Steve.
Programming and Winter Storms
Hey guys,
Steve here.
Wow. A lot has happened in the last 4 days, as you can tell by reading the title of this post.
Yes, we got a direct hit from an ice storm. I’d known about this possible storm since about Thursday, but didn’t think it worth posting about as all other winter events that were possible this season missed us. This one, however, did the exact opposite.
As a result of the 1 and a half inch sleet accumulations we received this morning and a sustained temperature in the middle 20s, school was canceled today and will be tomorrow as well.
Though temperatures are expected to rise above freezing tomorrow afternoon, a second winter storm is possible tomorrow night, which could bring up to 3 inches of snow to the area. This one depends on some key factors, however, unlike the ice storm that just hit. for 1, the storm system that will be the catalyst for this second bout of precipitation must move directly over us in order for the precipitation to fall as wet snow. If it doesn’t, we could end up with just rain, or no precipitation at all. Secondly, the high temperatures on Wednesday will exceed 40, turning what accumulates in the morning into slush by the afternoon. Knowing Texas and it’s erratic weather patterns, though, this could very well change for better or worse.
In other news, I’ve once again had an active programming week. For now, I’ve set aside the word pad application that I was working on, as it is very low priority and has most of the features I was planning to implement. However, I have an actual audio game in the works now, something I’ve only attempted once before and discontinued due to lack of new ideas.
The current game I’m working on is a racing game. There’s nothing too special about it: turns, obstacles to make the game more challenging… that’s basically it. I’ve been building it for about 4 days now, and was only able to compile a half-working version tonight. Even still, this has a significant number of bugs, and lacks several features that are to be included in the actual release.
Since I’ve never worked on such a project before, the hardest part has been fine-tuning it: the opponents have to have just the right amount of speed, because we don’t want them to fall too far behind, but then again we don’t want them to go as fast as the player, as that could cause some problems, especially if obstacles are present on the map. In addition, I’m still experimenting with other things such as sound (panning, volume), initial placement of opponents, and track size.
At any rate, I’m making considerable progress on this game. It will definitely be addicting once I finish coding it.
That concludes this post. I’ll blog some time this weekend.
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.
An Exciting and Busy Week
Hey Guys,
Steve here.
Last week went by so fast, despite the fact that I was counting down the days until I could go to D Now. This year, D Now was very exciting, mostly like it’s been the last 3 years I’ve gone. However, there were some differences: we stayed at a camp this time, and there was not a game in the afternoon, and there were two mission projects. Still, I had a lot of fun.
First of all, we got a hilarious, speaker! For those of you who ever get bored in church, I promise you that if you were at D Now last weekend, that wouldn’t have happened. He had the croud busting out laughing every minute it seemed. Despite that fact, I got a lot out of the messages he preached.
I also enjoyed the worship services. The combination of a loud band and the fact that everyone around me was singing eliminated all hesitation I had to sing.
Besides the messages, which there were 4 of, I spent the weekend making friends and enjoying myself. I definitely look forward to D Now next year.
I was pretty tired after D Now ended on Sunday, and spent a few hours relaxing, before I returned to my home church for a Valentines dinner. Since it was a 3 day weekend, my friend came home with us, and spent the night. So as you can imagine, I had quite a busy weekend.
Moving on, I’ve done a lot of programming over the last week, except for the weekend of course. I’ve downloaded inform7, a language speciffically meant for coding interactive fiction games. This language is unlike PB, because the sintax is very close to that of human english. Check out this example of inform sintax:
[this is a comment. the end of comment is marked by the right bracket. But here we’re going to create a hallway.]
A coridor is a kind of room.
[we want to create a hallway. and saying that a hallway is a room is just a bit weird…]
the Hallway is a coridor. “you stand at the end of a lengthy coridor. It is relatively dark here, only a small percentage of the numerous lightbulbs dotting the cieling actually in working condition. Several unmarked doors line the carpeted walls, a card reader on each one. Save the occasional mysterious sound coming from one of the rooms, the coridor is completely scilent. At the far end of the coridor is a heavy looking shiny metal door. On the wall beside the door looks to be a key pad, but it’s too far away for you to clearly tell what it is.”
The first sentence, as said in the comment, defined a kind of room. The second one created that room, and the text in quotation marks represented the description that the player would read upon entering it, that being why I had to be so descriptive.
So even for a non-technical person, learning inform wouldn’t be all that hard. It’s harder for me, however, because it resembles no language I’ve ever worked with.
In other news, I downloaded BGT (Blastbay Game toolkit) a couple days ago. I’m not exactly sure why I did that (I was just a bit bored), but going back and looking at the manual from a semi-experienced coder point of view, I discovered that it actually makes some sence now. So who knows, I might learn that just so I have something else to use for coding games.
Of course, I did some coding in good old purebasic. I started to rewrite sQuad word, as the previous version is so buggy that there’s literally no way to fix it without dissecting all the code and reworking countless procedures and such; it would take much less time just to redo the thing. After coding on it for about 45 minutes I was able to create a fully functional file and edit menu, with all of the most basic of the basic features of a notepad. I added an autosaving feature as well, and got it up and working, bug free, on the first try.
That’s all for this post. I’ll blog again later. Also, since I was unable to do it this weekend, I’ll record the podcast for this week soon.
Thanks for reading,
Type you later,
Steve.