Hello Guest, please login or register.
Did you miss your activation email?
Login with username, password and session length.

Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.

Topics - FarFromHomeFish

Pages: [1]
1
Other Discussion / Curious: can GM access custom data files?
« on: April 08, 2007, 08:24:36 am »
I've never been very good at creating game art, so when I want to make a game, I try to find a game whose 'look' matches what I'm after, find out the format of that game's files, and then rip that game's art out to my own custom file format that I can easily access.

Accessing these files in most languages would be easy as long as you knew the layout of the format. But could a program written in GM6/GM7 access these files?

For example, let's say I've encoded all the paladin animations from D2 in a file. To read out a frame of animation, you would need to:

1. Read in a global 256-color palette.
2. Read in the frame header, which includes information like 'size of compressed frame data' and 'offset to compressed frame data'.
3. Read in the compressed frame data from the correct place in the file.
4. The frame data is compressed in LLE format (similar to RLE), so you would need to uncompress the data using a simple algorithm.
5. The frame uncompresses as an 8bit/pixel image, so if you're not in 8bit graphics mode, you would need to generate the frame by iterating through the uncompressed frame data and drawing the frame, pixel by pixel, using the palette look-up data.

Is all of this possible in GM?

2
Other Discussion / Garageband-alike for Windows?
« on: August 03, 2006, 11:32:06 pm »
Dilema! I'd desperately like to fool around with Garageband, but I don't want to buy a mac (my life is already cluttered as it is). Is there a similar product for Windows? I'm looking for ease of use, a variety of included loops, and the ability to insert midi and recorded audio.

Thanks fer yer help. =)

3
Entertainment / Browser-based space empires game?
« on: July 27, 2006, 02:37:02 am »
I've been looking for a browser space empires-type game for a while, and nothing has really struck my fancy. The interfaces all seem clunky and counter-intuitive, there aren't nearly enough options for building up defenses and customizing warships, and the entire experience, in general, seems very limited.

Can anyone reccomend a decent space empires browser-based game?

4
Discussion / Procedurally generated worlds in ~32kb (attached exe).
« on: July 21, 2006, 02:53:04 am »
Imagine a heavily detailed game world... but instead of creating every single aspect of a world by hand, laying down every tile and programming every NPC's dialogue until maps and lines of code skittered up your eyelids while you slept... how about creating the entire world on the fly? Instead of creating every shop, town, monster spawn point, and npc by hand, why not set down a basic class of rules (npc's can be innkeepers, or shopkeepers, and if they're shopkeepers, they might sell weapons or they might sell armor), and then let the engine generate all the npc's for you. Randomly determine which town should be the starting point, and then make the monster spawns tougher as distance increases from that point. Perhaps set down rules to generate nation states that war against each other, whether or not you participate. Randomly generate dungeons that sprawl deep under the earth, abandoned dwarf kingdoms, and generate npc's that complain about the monsters from those dungeons, giving the player quests to clear out that dungeon and then pointing them in the direction of the next town.

This latest version includes the ability to zoom in and out at will, better panning support, a total of three different projections you can use, the ability to create heightmaps, a new color scheme, the ability to color land based on altitude (creates polar caps!), and so on. Try it out!

5
Discussion / Mouse Input in a 2D MMORPG
« on: May 15, 2006, 06:46:09 pm »
Not that I'm working on a MMORPG, but I have been thinking about something similar lately...

Imagine World of Warcraft with a Diablo-esque perspective. How would you control it?

Questions to answer:
Consider standard 3D MMORPG control. Is the WASD combination out of the question, since a fixed perspective doesn't really lend itself well to simple directions?
Or would WASD still be a legitimate method of control?

Now, imagine that the keyboard can't be used for movement at all - perhaps it is completely occupied with other tasks, like managing communication...

How would you use the mouse? Imagine you have only two mouse buttons. Would you left-click to move, right-click to select things and talk to npcs?
Or would you prefer something like an RTS's context-sensitive right-clicks: right-click to move, left-click to target, right-click to attack/talk?

AoDC, would you like to chime in? What is your control scheme for OoL?

I'd love to hear what everyone has to say. I'm not here to debate, I'm here to listen. All ideas are welcome. =)

6
Other Discussion / How do I un-watch a topic?
« on: April 28, 2006, 04:16:16 am »
So, I've made a couple of silly posts in this forum, and now they pop up in my 'View Unread Replies' window. Rather than waiting for the topics to die on their own, I'd rather just ignore them altogether; is there any way to un-watch a topic?

Thanks. =)

Off-topic: I bought a rubik's cube; I've been toying with it for four days now, and I have everything but one last side solved, and every time I try to fix up any of those blocks, the whole d*mn thing goes to pieces. Anyone ever solved a rubik's cube?

7
Feedback / Potentially merge these two subforums?
« on: April 14, 2006, 03:58:57 am »
General Game Development
Discuss different Aspects of game development here.

General Programming (GM, C++, etc.)
Post help requests, tips, and engines here, or just discuss game development in general!

Based on the descriptions of these two boards, they're almost precisely the same thing. More importantly, however, the content - the kinds of posts that are being made in these two boards - are regarding the exact same topics. I'm unsure how much effort it would take to merge these two subforums, but since the content of these two boards are so similar, it might be a good idea to bring them together. Doing so would aleviate confusion to people looking for help:

"I have a question regarding game developement, but which of these two boards do I post in? They're the same thing as far as I can tell!"

8
Discussion / Why you're best off using GM.
« on: April 14, 2006, 03:53:39 am »
I'm putting the finishing touches on my mapmaker right now, and the entire process has left me embittered. Have you ever read "If you give a mouse a cookie"?

Programming a game is kind of like that. If you decide to program a game, you're going to need to implement a graphics engine. If you only want 2D square tiles with no special effects of any sort, this is easy. If you want the ability to rotate sprites, handle alpha translucency (rather than straight out transparency), and screen-blended particles, you may be in trouble, because you're either going to have to go totally 3D and deal with the preformance hit of transforming all your sprites every frame, or you'll have to come up with some frankenstein 2D/3D hybrid (Direct3D, thank goodness, can actually write to DirectDrawSurfacey7's which will help you out, but it's still tedious).

nce you have that done, you're going to need to write a scripting subsystem that gives you control over how the GUI is displayed and can control the monster AI as well. While we're at it, you're going to need to program an object/actor system that is a representation of every object currently active in your game. And you'll need to design the scripting language and interpretter which reads those scripts in when the program is run. Maybe your script interpretter can also optimize the scripts at runtime, in which case you're writing a compiler, which isn't easy.

And since these objects are going to need a ton of graphics and you can't load *all* your graphics into memory at once (my game currently has 130mb of graphics, including 30mb of tilesets and 90mb of character graphics - those aren't 24bit bitmaps or PNGs, btw: I'm talking about custom compressed, indexed sprites), you'll have to write another subsystem which will only load the graphics you need into memory, and know when it can get rid of graphics that are no longer in use. You'll probably want to write your own graphics format as well, to help compress all your graphics (uncompressed, I have no doubt that I'd be looking at more than half a gig of bitmaps!) and to speed up reading your sprites into memory.

Now, you have objects that can be controlled by AI and can draw themselves using graphics which are loaded only when neccesary. But where are they going to walk around on? Better get to work on designed a map format. Your map format isn't just what tiles are where, by the way, it also contains map scripts, locations, object spawn points, blocking information - and now that you've designed the map format, you had better get to work on designing a mapmaker so that you can display all your graphics. God help you if your graphics engine from the main game isn't reusable, because otherwise you're going to have to write the whole darn thing over again.

What about music and soundeffects? Once again, you can't load all these resources into memory all at once - you'll push up your minimum spec so high it wouldn't be worth the ease of use, so you'll need to design a system for your audio similar to your graphics loading system.

What about drawing text? It doesn't matter if your sprites are pre-rastereized, truetype drawn on the fly, or sprite-based: drawing a 128character spring every frame will absolutely kill your framerate. So you're going to need to write a text renderer object which renders text strings that the engine wants to draw to a seperate backbuffer surface, and then maintains a database of these strings so that the next time that string needs to be drawn, you don't have to redraw the entire thing.

The list goes on and on.

Or, you could have stuck to GM, which might not have given you all the freedom you have when you're writing every last bit of your engine yourself... but it also eliminates all the tedious set-up work which I've described here, and allows you to go straight to programming your game.

The choice is yours to make. =)

<3, Fish.

9
Entertainment / In which Cartier dreams of Sumo Wrestlers.
« on: April 11, 2006, 03:54:50 am »
Cartier is waking up, dude, and it is a beautiful morning to be alive. Walking to my window, my makeshift curtain constructed of greasy towels and knotted garbage bag ties, letting the sun in man - the sun is sitting on the horizon, my window is permeable to only the loveliest rays. My face is tanning man, in a couple of minutes now and I'll be Cartier bronzed and beautiful women will flock to me, and I can feel the skin cancer already spreading across my cheeks, dude, eating away at my skin. No man, I had better close the curtain, don't want to kill yourself dude. I've heard that Lukemia is a terrible way to go.

The clock by my bed is blinking to get my attention, telling me that it is noon, over and over, letting me know that I slept in, dude. I don't worry man, the day is patient, the sun is beautiful and sinking beneath the Earth as the afternoon wakes up. There are a couple of clouds in the sky, it should rain today man, I can feel it in my feet. I should make sure that my shirts get clean today, dude, and rather than taking them down to the laudromat and spending my afternoon watching them spin, spin, spin, I will open the window and hang them outside, watch the cuffs flip to and fro in the breeze, waving goodbye as I head outside. It's getting dark outside man, so I should quickly grab my bag and head for the door at a hundred miles an hour to make up for lost time, picking my way through piles of broken tape records and VCRs and televisions and musical instruments and rags and dirty clothes and paper plates that I might need to use again when I have company over. All of these objects are essentials, I need them, most I can take apart and combine to make new things entirely, others are there just to give me peace of mind.

Outside it's nice and crisp, I feel like I'm floating, dude, Cartier's feet aren't touching the ground and I fly from my building to the park three blocks down the street, with my bag and my sandals which are woven from chinese thatch, honest-to-god thatch taken from the roof of a hut in the heartland of China while the owner was out worshiping his thousand buddhist gods. The park is beautiful, dude, and oh so dark, just like mid-afternoon in the middle of an eclipse. The street-lights have all turned on, they're confused as hell by the eclipse, the moon overhead is drawing electricity out of the ground and into the street lamps like high tide on an ocean shore. The street-lights are all confused, dude, and so am I.

The park is full of life, it's only an hour past noon and everyone is out enjoying the nice day. This girl walks by me with her dog and her fancy white earbuds, I smile at her and she smiles back at me, wants me, I can tell she does man, but her dog is hurrying her home. The dog wants to be fed, dude, doesn't want to wait outside the door while I screw his owner man, one more selfish canine that reinforces my hatred of dogs. These dogs all stifle my free spirit man, and Cartier is an artist, an artist who must be FREE.

Cartier stops at the base of a big tree, dude, sits down, opens my bag. What am I looking for man? The fluted recorder painted with chinese characters goes on the ground, followed by the sunglasses, the hat, a magic umbrella the size of a billy club, the buddha box that chants at me in 20 second segments at a time, summoning beautiful mind-bending chants from within its corroded batteries. I switch on the buddha box, it cost me four dollars, worth every penny. One day I'm going to buy a hundred buddha boxes and turn them all on at once, and charge admission. Ten cents a head, dogs will cost their owners a quarter becuase I can't stand them man.

I take out my spy disguise kit, a big nose and a moustach and glasses with glued-on eyebrows which I set upon my face, rendering me unrecognizable to even my closest friends. My mother wouldn't recognize me man. Cartier reaches back into his bag, dude, a big leather satchel with bronze buckles, and AT LAST I've found what I'm looking for. Carefully pull out the tin containing the japanese leaf, ground into budbits, which I have now stashed in my english pipe, dude, which was stolen off the set of Mary Poppins. I can smell it, god, its wonderful, and my Buddha machine is chanting at me find a match, find a match, find a match...

There's a lighter from mount everest in my bag, it takes forever to get a flame going but its worth it, its a blow-torch, a laser that can slice through anything, and it doesn't need any oxygen to produce a flame, which is important when you're high up in the mountains and can't count on your Sherpa to share his breath with you. Tonight, I must have left the flame back home, because I can't get the thing to turn on, dude. PROBLEM, dude, if there is no flame then there is no smoke, and without smoke signals man, I will lose my way.

The corner of my eye sees something that Cartier's brain registers a moment later, its Hans man, Hans who says hello and asks me what I'm doing, eyeing the pipe dangerously, dude, you have to be careful about Hans, he's always looking about with his shifty Danish eyes.

And I say, "Ho, Hans, glad you could make it in this weather."

Hans laughs and remarks that it's is dark. Yes, it is dark, dude, its the rainclouds that I felt in my feet, those clouds which have now covered the sky and shut out the sun. Soon they'll wet down everything, but its a good thing you're here Hans, my Everest lighter can't alight because there's too much oxygen down here, its choking the flame, and there's sumo wrestlers from Japan that need to be cashed before they push me out of the ring or get too wet to breathe. They're not fish, Hans, so maybe you brought some fire to keep them warm?

And Hans, who knows me so well that he recognized me even though I had my spy disguise kit on, proves his worth by producing a BIC lighter and we smoke the good japanese weed man. Neither Hans nor Cartier is Japanese, but today, this afternoon we're both sumo stars with hundreds of hamburgers in our bellies.

Which REMINDS me, by all the buddhist gods, I'm hungry. So hungry I could eat a chinese farmer who might be wondering why his roof has two sandal-shaped holes that let in the rain. Hans reminds me that nothing is open at this time of day, but of course nothing is open, dude, all the storeclerks are probably out watching the eclipse, and besides, it's a Budhist holiday for one of the one thousand buddhist gods man, and to be open on such a holy day would be sacrilige. But there's a convenience store tha's owned by heathens just on the other side of the park, dude, and I know they'll be open, they're always open, dude, so I return my essential belongings to the sack and take off my disguise kit, leave Hans sitting there under my tree under my cloudy evening sky. It's getting late now, I can feel it, my Chinese sandals feel heavy but there's a convenient store open nearby and they're ready to stop the knawing in my belly.

Inside I watch hot dogs, beautiful shiney hot dogs roll about in the machine, god would I love a hot dog, so tasty and pure beef, swimming in Ketchup and Mustard, a true american tradition, this greasy hot dog that would plug up my veins and leave Cartier out to die in some hospital bed, a disgusting terrible hot dog that would give me skin cancer, dude.

No, thank you. A roast beast sandwhich, please. Yes, I have the money right here, three crisp bills, but dude would you like to barter instead man? Here I have this lovely buddha machine which I bought for four dollars, and I would give it to you in trade for this sandwhich, dude, losing money on the deal, which is good for my soul, bringing me closer to Buddha in the process. No, thank you, it's a nice gesture but I'll just pay cash, I don't want to rapture myself straight to Nirvana right here. Not if I can't take my spy kit and my buddha box with me.

It's a good thing I removed my Cartier spy disguise kit man, specially designed to make me look like an average nobody, make me invisible for all practicle purposes. If I was wearing this disguise, the clerk wouldn't have been able to wait on me since he couldn't focus on me, and then I wouldn't have been able to enjoy this lovely roast beast sandwich which is filling up my corners oh so nicely.

Oh, it's late now, it's dark, dude, and the sun has gone down, the stars are out, and I'm so satisfied with my full belly, it's been a long day and I've seen so much, I should head back to my apartment, it's getting late. On the way I meet this gorgeous girl without a dog; Cartier smiles at her, and she looks right at me and smiles back, dude. She is lovely. We sit down at a park bench together and give my english pipe some exercise; it's a good thing she has matches from a sushi joint, because my everest lighter is afraid of the rainstorm that's been brewing all day long. Hey babe, have you ever seen my photo collection? I ask, and she shakes her head, sees right through my question, dude, knows we're going to sleep together. It's been so long, weeks man, weeks I've spent without and I can't wait to get her home, so we take this shortcut through a fenced-in-yard. There's a 'beware of dog' sign on the gate but the dog suffered a fatal accident a week ago, dude, struck down in its prime, poor thing, and now there's nothing keeping me from using his yard as a shortcut so that Cartier and his girl can beeline straight home to bone.

The key slides into the lock and we enter, she is peering at the ratty old furniture that Cartier has dug off the street when he moved in to this lovely apartment, the nicest apartment he has ever owned. The girl laughs in a tinny voice and tries to flip the light switch which I removed when the bulbs burnt out a week after I moved in. If the landlord was so cheap that his light bulbs only lasted seven days, dude, then there was no use asking him to buy new ones, no, it just wasn't worth the hassle, better to just remove the light switch so there's no need to have the bulb replaced man. Surely she understands that, dude, I don't need to explain it all, there's too much to say and it's getting later. Take her hand and lead her through the collections of essential objects, piles of esssentials each five feet tall, but there's enough space for a path so the going is easy, into the bedroom, where the clock is blinking midnight, midnight, midnight at me, it's so late, we should be getting to bed don't you think?

But she hesitates, doesn't like the look of the bedsheets which are caked with dirt and sweat of weeks of unwashed devilry; I can't be bothered when there's so much to do and so little time. She looks out my westward-facing window, looks at the view of the mountains in the distance, my shirts hanging on the edges and flapping at her, as if shooing her out the door. "I think I should go," she says, and soon she's gone, leaving me alone with my trecherous shirts.

Not that I care, dude. Tomorrow is another day man, and there will be more beautiful girls without dogs to sleep with when I wake up. I drop my bag at the foot of the bed and leap under the covers. Soon, Cartier is sleeping, dude, fast asleep and dreaming of sumo wrestlers.

10
Discussion / Get started with the GBA
« on: April 09, 2006, 04:37:56 pm »
First, you're going to need a compiler. I prefer DevKitAdvance, and while I was programming, I built up a nice compiler kit using DevKitAdvance which is a little more lenient when it comes to optimizations than the default distro. You can download mine here.

Grab the 'devkitadv' folder out of that zip file and drop it directly into your C:\ drive; the base directory of the compiler should be 'C:\devkitadv\bin'.

Next, you're going to need an emulator. I reccomend VBA, which you can get off of zophar.net here.

Finally, you're going to need some test code to make sure that your compiler works! This is a simple program that I whipped up over the course of a day to see if programming for the GBA was feasible for me: click here. Double-click 'make.bat' to compile it. Note that this was my first ever GBA program, so it's more than a little unoptimized; still, it will give you a decent idea of how to draw sprites to the GBA.

You can look to http://gbadev.org/ for all sorts of great tutorials and examples. Good luck! =)

Pages: [1]

Contact Us | Legal | Advertise Here
2013 © ZFGC, All Rights Reserved



Page created in 0.174 seconds with 34 queries.

anything