Tuesday, March 31, 2009

ugh.. sidetracked

Damn it I keep getting side tracked.... theres so many things I want to get done I can't buckle down and work on one thing. I started working on the AI but then I got bored and spent a lot of time cleaning up my meters class. On the plus side, the meters are being displayed properly now.

I've finally found people who are willing to draw for me! Lets see what they can do and maybe soon I'll drop the Nintendo sprites.

Stuff I'm working on... AI, scrolling background, sprites display order (trying to sort the group so sprites with a greater rect.bottom will be displayed on top), GUI, inventory.

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Better AI

So yea.... one thing I figured out after about 5 min of actually thinking about how the AI system would work, is that it would be much more efficient to just add an extra invisible rect to just the player. Then whatever npc sprite that collides with it will sense the play and start tracking it.

sprite.spritecollide(invis_rect, NPCs, False), check how close the sprites on the returned list are from the player, maybe check LoS, then do whatever.

One drawback I see is that the invisible rect would restrict the max tracking range of the NPCs. Making the invisible rect the size of the screen would allow all NPCs on screen to know where the player is, but then there would be far too many useless collisions. Making the invisible rect too small would allow the player to easily avoid NPCs.

meh... I'll probably just pick an arbitrary value and see how it works

Friday, March 27, 2009

AI

Starting the arduous task of developing an AI.... The general concept is easy. Just need to add an invisible rect to all my NPCs and do a collision check for my player sprite. When it does, it'll know which direction to start running. Whats tricky is to let it know what paths are possible (jump across a ledge, up a ledge, down.. blah blah blah) That should take some time... I mean, I can quickly make one, but probably not one that won't lag the crap out of my game.

Monday, March 23, 2009

being lazy

Meh... I've been getting lazy and have been coding in 20~30 min intervals couple times a day. The actual coding isn't the problem, just certain aspects of the game. I'm still torn between full keyboard and keyboard/mouse. Both have their pros and cons. I'm leaning more towards full keyboard as I had originally decided on, but then theres one major flaw I have to somehow fix. This being that, if you were to press multiple buttons at once, say (W+D+Space+uparrow = foward high jump + spell cast) either pygames or my laptop(probably my laptop) thinks your mashing the keys so it wont register one of the buttons. Same goes with many other button combinations you'd probably use while playing the game.

I know theres people reading this blog (hopefully programmers), so if you know the solution, save me some time and TELL ME! lol

For now I'm putting scrolling backgrounds and controls in the backburner. I'd much rather work more on spell mechanics and such right now.

I'm also looking more into psyco to see if it could speed up my game. Right now I don't lag even with 50 moving sprites on screen (more then what I'd expect to have on screen at one time), but if it speeds up the game, it's for the better

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Scrolling background




Took a good 30 minutes to make the clouds look less shitty (still doesn't look too good)... and after reading more into scrolling backgrounds, I find out my background has to be at least 2 times bigger with the clouds positioned a little differently. bah...

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Ehh.. backed up some files online

If you want to try running it, it'll requires python and pygame to run because it's my source code and not a windows executable. There doesn't seem to be any compatability issues other then with python 3.X which you really shouldn't be using. I'm running pyhon2.6 and whatever the latest version of pygames is.


On a side note, I've decided to make the game controls just keyboard and not keyboard/mouse. The mouse will be used, but most of the time your hands will be glued to the keyboard (wasd + arrows).

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

scrolling

So... my sidescroller finally scrolls sideways... took me 2 weeks to figure it out and I ended up having to fiddle with inheritance and changing a class method from the pygames module. F#'ing A

Monday, March 9, 2009

Meters!


Need to work out a couple kinks but now everything has meters. Um... woohoo!

Sunday, March 8, 2009

Smash Brothers mmorpg??

Well, that screen shot pretty much sums up what I've been doing for the past 3 weeks... No, thats not some retarded looking teddy bear... it's kirby being burned alive by one of the finger bullets. Client wise, I've probably gotten around 60% of the coding done. Now I need to start finding actual graphics artists so I can start using original characters instead of pixelated super smash brothers sprites. Although..... a SSB sidescroller mmorpg has crossed my mind. I think it would be a pretty epic game, but I'm sure Nintendo's lawsuit would bury me alive.

For now, my goal is to make a game similar in style as Maple Story but with better game play and an actual story.