Menu

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.

Show posts Menu

Messages - finnk

#16
I got a developer leap motion controller and wondering if anyone has attempted to inline the libraries at all to see if they can integrate it with GLBasic.
#17
I pledged this one and Spriter and not really sure which I like more, but I just wanted to say that I don't see the joints/skeleton getting in the way of fully frame-by-framed animation. If you want, you can use these tools to manage your sprites in pieces or as one whole. It would simplify sharing animations across characters if you wanted to modify head/armor/weapons/color separately and just redraw/trace individual parts.

I figured out Spline really fast though. Had to screencapture the animation to use the sprite I made since they have it locked down for the demo. It hasn't crashed on me like Spriter has (Mac). Hope they both work better in release.
#18
Thanks for the response, I'm overhauling the whole framework at the moment and right now stuck at some scaling issues.

If I make my game full screen and dealing with different aspect ratios or even smaller viewports where there should just be a black bezel around the screen, what's the best way to keep objects from overlapping this other than drawing a box to conceal it?
#19
I actually ended up running into a lot of trouble with my timing and animation. I think I need to take another look at overhauling everything. Or starting from scratch. By the time I was rushing to finish the game on time, I was inserting code all over the place hahaha. I would have liked for the framework itself to remain untouched. I also had to modify several random functions in ways that affected their intentional purpose. I had to cut features because of the time that I lost due to these issues.

I learned a lot though on the spot and on top of that I've come back with many questions that need to be answered if I ever want to do a solo project like this again. I'm not a very experienced coder though, and I run into similar troubles all over the place where the very system performance affects the gameplay mechanics/math, so I need to really think about it. In general I've had issues with objects with independent behavior.

- How do you properly implement time based animation and make sure it's really tight so that when you tell  an object to animate, it actually animates? I had a major bug that took 7 hours from my dev time involving a character that would randomly not switch to the "dying" animation when killed. Sometimes the game slows down and things don't work right. There's got to be a way around that.

- The proper way to check for inputs. Someone said I was constantly checking literally all keys so they couldn't screenshot my game.

- I had a character who I ended up keeping stationary on the screen, while moving all elements (parallax layers) of the world around him. When I instantiated 45 or more characters, I noticed a lot of slow down. What's the best way to handle the main viewport and moving a character around? I feel like i was updating every entity, and it was a lot of math, when it would be nice to have a panning camera instead... but then that also effects the layers because I can't really move them at different speeds if I'm only moving an orthographic camera/viewport.

- Box2D seems slow on a mac. It caused some inconsistencies in speed, but this was really only a problem because my timing/animation code wasn't working properly. I would be okay with choppiness as long as the game still runs at the right speed. As it was, it speeds up or slows down which tells me I got a lot wrong. I would like to see some working examples and adapt them.

Yeah for texture packer, I'd export the 4x size and then Texturepacker would automatically create 2x and 1x sizes. Another issue I noticed is that GLBasic at some point refused to import any more files. It would just get errors and since I was importing XML files with Genfile, I had to limit myself to a certain number of sprites. I initially used tiles to handle big graphics, but after sprites started disappearing, I had to just turn that cave into a big load image and reclaim the slot for an extra character.

Lots more things to think about.
Anyways here's my entry:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=17759
and also timelapse video

#20
So I hadn't touched that framework in a year and spending time with it recently, I realize I never really got anywhere with it. Kind of embarrassing. It think it was because exported Mac had the font sprites loading out of order or something, but anyways... I looked at it and it was crap. A lot of stuff was broken and I would've been going in without a working framework.

So I updated it, and it's beautiful. I could hand it to a newbie and have them make a game in a day.
- Added basic Box2D physics with the help of info from this forum. Still need to add some more stuff like custom shapes, but it's workable for now.
- File loading/saving
- Import basic orthographic Tiled maps.
- Import Texture Packer-made sprites and manually add animations to the object by frame values
- Tween Towards coords. Fade (except on fonts and objects with physics)
- I noticed I didn't even have sound functions in there, so basic ones are in

Still want to add more stuff, but getting close to the start date now. Also realizing I should add some preloading functions because when I play in higher resolution and it uses the 4x textures, it takes longer to start up.

Anyways, just prepping for this competition has been a good lesson. Oh yeah, I think that when exporting for Mac the font sprites are still loading weird. No idea why, but it's fine on Windows so that'll have to do.
#21
Competitions / Ludum Dare 25
2012-Dec-03
I'm doing the Ludum Dare 25. My first.

I will probably be using my event-driven framework, already announced on the official site.
Phoenix Framework

There are still things I want to add before the competition starts, like file loading, a list and sort function (also one I can use for Z-sort), object-attached listeners, and basic colliders/physics if I have time.