My New Year's Resolutions

It's that time of year, so I'm going to set some goals for the near future. I've been really busy with work lately, but I'd like to post more content here:

Open TK Tutorial 4 Addendum 2: The Sierpinski Tetrahedron, a Basic Fractal

Let's add a more complex shape to the program now. Cubes are nice, but unless we're making a Minecraft clone, they're not much to show off. In this example we'll have a class for making a Sierpinski Tetrahedron.

OpenTK Tutorial 4 Addendum: The ColorCube class

Here's a little class that can show drawing multiple objects better. It's a cube with a solid color (code after the break).

OpenTK Tutorial 4: It's amazing the way you DRAW TWO THINGS

In this tutorial, we'll build on our cube by making a second one. Along the way, we'll be remaking some of the old code to be more object-oriented to fit our future needs.

(I'd like to thank an anonymous commenter on the last tutorial for inspiring this one, since originally I was going to do texturing or a camera first)

Chain Jam Afterthoughts

The Copenhagen Game Collective just started a new style of game jam called the Chain Jam. The gimmick of the jam is that everyone makes a very small game for four players, and after a minute the players are funneled into another game, with the scoring staying between games. It's a fun idea, and easy enough to make a game for.

I made a game for it, called Four v. Horde. It's basically Left 4 Dead, but simpler, top-down and made by me in most of a day (instead of a semi-competitive FPS made by Valve over a year). Players try to kill the most zombies without being killed themselves.

While making it, I realized a few things about the Chain Jam concept:

OpenTK Tutorial 3 - Enter the Third Dimension

Now that we've draw one triangle the right way, let's add some real depth to our image. Here we'll be drawing a cube and rotating it so we can see our work from a different angle.

Unnamed New Game - Gravity Test

This is just a little thing I was working on right now. Eventually this will be part of a real game. Eventually.

It's pretty obviously incomplete (there's no background, or loss condition, or menus, and it doesn't keep spawning things as you move away), but it's almost a start.
You can move the "player" (the one at the center of the screen) with either WASD or the arrow keys, add new bodies to the simulation with the numpad's plus key and reset it with the 'r' key.

OpenTK Tutorial 2 - Drawing a Triangle... the Right Way!

The previous tutorial showed us how we can draw a triangle to the screen. However, it came with a disclaimer. Even though it works, it's not the "correct" way to do things anymore. The way we sent our geometry to the GPU was what's known as "immediate mode", which isn't the newest way to do things, even if it is so very nice and simple.

In this tutorial, we'll be going for the same end goal, but we'll be doing things in a way that is more complex, but at the same time more efficient, faster, and more expandable.

Keldian: The Outbound Campaign

   There's a band I'm a big fan of that I'd like to give a shoutout to here. Keldian is a fantastic melodic sci-fi metal group from Norway. They love to make music (and it shows), but with the high quality they consistently put out, albums are expensive to make. They've been working on a new studio for recording, but that cost money, postponing the newest album to make future albums easier and less expensive to produce. So now they're turning to their fans for help. They're doing a crowdfunding project to help get the drums and mastering for the new tracks done as soon as possible, while also making limited edition copies of the CD for backers. I was able to donate, but I'd like to help even more (so I'm spreading the word). If you have the time, please go check them out.

indiegogo - Keldian: OUTBOUND

The Keldian Blogspot - The Outbound Campaign

OpenTK Tutorial 1 - Opening Windows and Drawing a Triangle

I'm writing this tutorial because the actual OpenTK documentation is sorely lacking. They have a good explanation for how to install it (which I recommend following before this, since it doesn't need to be rewritten), but that's it. There's a "Learn OpenTK in 15'" tutorial, but it's not great. You do make something simple, and it does take under 15 minutes, but they just hand you the code instead of having you create any of it. You don't learn much about what the code does, or why things are done a certain way. I'm going to try to write a better one (using mostly their code).

(As another note, this is technically using a deprecated way to do it, but I'm basing this on their example)

Boxes in OpenTK

I'm just messing around in OpenTK for a while I wait for things to pick up. Random colored boxes was something that was a fad in WAYWO a while back, so I thought it'd be a decent post-hello world thing.

Then I took it further, loading textures into it:

Then I did one last thing, making a basic light that follows the mouse:

Game of the Week, er, Month Club - Freeport

The One Game A Month challenge is going on now. The idea is to make a different game each month. However, I'm a procrastinator, so it quickly turns into me rushing the game in the last week, despite how much I was trying not to.

The game I made in January was Freeport.

A week into the month, I made a prototype:

It wasn't anywhere near what the actual game was going to be, but it let me work out some ideas early on. Unfortunately, it turned out that transferring code from C# to AS3 isn't that easy. AS3 is very similar to JavaScript, and C# is more like Java. It's not quite copy and paste, especially when I wanted to get rid of a few hack-ish things I had done.

Everything eventually made it across, except for one feature: advertising. Originally I had an "advertise" button, where between rounds players could advertise one of the items to increase demand (but for an ever-increasing cost). I dropped it since it would have to either make the interface more cluttered or take the player out of the game between rounds to give them the option. It also wouldn't be easy to use anymore now that you're not all-knowing in the market like you were in the prototype.

Getting it online ended up being the most annoying part. I love the services Mochi provides, but it took them most of a week to get it hosted, although the ads were approved overnight. Fortunately, the One Game a Month people are pretty cool about things (and realize the whole thing is for fun), so they let you upload a month's game a while after the fact.

Dwarfpunch Mapper: 0.6 is out!

Download available on Bitbucket (it's only 0.6, so it's still not perfect, but working way better)

  It's a small update, but it brings about three important changes:

• The most obvious change is that the progress bar has been removed from the main window. Now it has a separate window that both makes it so the user interface doesn't "freeze up" anymore. It also gives users feedback about where the program is in the process, which will help with bug hunting in the future when crashes occur outside the developer environment.

• There's a new forest background layer. It now tiles a lot less obviously. It's really swollen up in size, but that should be fixed soon. We're going to replace it with a smaller tile, with some changes so it's repeating more, but also less obvious about it. Future versions will also let users change the textures without have to replace the files completely and control how the tiling works.

• Rainfall is now working a bit better. It's still not exactly perfect, but changing it made it not add weird bright spots that weren't attractive.

Dwarfpunch Mapper is now at 0.5.5!

Download available on Bitbucket (it's only 0.5.5, so it's not exactly perfect, just working)

   Dwarfpunch Mapper has been progressing nicely. Thanks to the documentation on his process kabookie was able to give me, I had a functional version up and running within a few days. However, it was actually quite lacking in the interface department. It was purely functional for a very basic version of the program. Now we're looking at this:

   Now users can toggle various layers on and off as we add more to the program. Some people on /r/dwarffortress were asking about glacier/tundra areas being visible as ice. 

   Since Dwarf Fortress has this "biome" output option, it's actually really easy to do something like this in a future version. Of course, it's going to be completely optional so you don't need to have ice and deserts if you don't want to.

  This version also started filling in the settings dialog, with some options for color added to the previously lonely image scale setting. This was originally meant to help testing, but it actually can make some kind of interesting fantasy landscapes possible:

   The top priorities now are getting the output more refined (matching the original Photoshop script more), replacing more of the hard-coded values with settings, and finding out what other layers can be added to the map, in that order.