Zap! Pow! Biff!

A few things have happened since last time:

• I now have the different firing modes in place. Each of Tad's (Tad, his name is Tad for now) weapons have 3 firing modes: tap for a quick shot, hold and release for a "shotgun" and hold for a while for a berserk blast. The fire gem has all 3 working now.
  
• Added support for a bigger variety of effects. Mean, mean friends were saying it just wasn't pretty enough.
• Built a cave environment.
• Made froggies.

The vid above shows the attack modes. I'll post another soon with the new pretties.

I think I've reached the limits of the built in content pipeline plugins and it's time to branch out. As soon as I hit another wall, I'm off to write my own importers and processors.

I've grown to like mesh animation. It's crude, but appealing to me. Normally you'd rough out an animation by defining key poses along the timeline, then iteratively pass over the whole thing again and again adding overlapping motions and follow through to get a natural looking motion. Animating on a budget generally means animating pose to pose, and leaving it at that, and rightly enough that suits the mesh animation look better. I simply model the poses I require (using skinning in Max, if it's a complex mesh like Tad), then string them along a timeline in Stutter, duplicating appropriate hold frames.

With my own content processors, I could pack all those mesh frames into the minimum amount of data necessary, and the overhead should be pretty reasonable. Especially as I'm going low poly anyway. Certainly the runtime processing cost is laughably small compared to a skeletal animation.

Live scripting language is absolutely the bomb. Almost all of the logic bar collision is written in Stutter now, and the joy of being able to write player control while actually in the game is intoxicating. It would be quite a bit more work to get a professionally robust version going, but I think I'm going to start recommending it anywhere I work. It's just so worth it. I just need to see if there's some easy way to hook up live asset reloading (in this XNA version) as well. As it is, adding/changing assets still requires me to drop out and rebuild in VS.

In case anyone is wondering why bother with the XNA and C# when I'm off traipsing through my own language... how on earth do you think I got it all up and running so quickly? I'm still well inside month one, and I have the whole kit and kaboodle chugging along. In fact, I had a model on screen, being manipulated by Stutter inside the first few days. This is a product of C# and .Net's excellent reflection abilities coupled with the accessible nature of the XNA libs in GSE. All I've done is written a layer of abstraction above these that lets me speak directly to game concepts.

GLH out.

PS Music for the vid is by Cornelius (god please please please someone make him write music for games), the track's name is "2010".

Baby lisp

So the rpg has come on a little bit. I really ought to come up with a name at some point. For now, it stays RPG Zero.

New since the last update:

• Tried to refine the look of the thing. I'm going primary colours, sharp contrasts, simple forms, abstract surfaces and everything easy to put together quickly. Also leaning a lot on vertex colouring for the low frequency shifts.
• Our protagonist can now be hit by badguys, and keeps track of his health.
  
• First blush at a HUD, and UI framework to back it up.
  
• A chest! What's an RPG without a treasure chest, eh?
• Refactored the player control to remove some annoying kinks, like sliding while idling.
• Wrote a *secret* story outline!
  

I mentioned last time that the scripting language in this thing was a bit... odd. Well, here's a look at what a typical dev session is like.


Seem oddly familiar? It's not really lisp, but it does share some characteristics with it. Chiefly: code is data. I can pass it around, chop and change it, store it and call it later. The scripting language is interpreted, which means it inherently has the ability to inject novel code into the currently running session. Godsend that, when working on a game. No compile waits, you're right there, in the game, where you can see what you're doing immediately.

It's called Stutter.

It's implemented as a runtime interpreter that is plugged into a reflection based dispatcher. I have a class that contains all the intrinsic functions. I then have a few intrinsics for dealing with .Net types directly, cnew (new a C# object), cset and cget (set/get properties or fields) and call (invoke a C# function). These are for... well cheating. My character entity for instance, is a C# based PhysicalObject, that gets initialised and bandied about by Stutter, but lives in the Game.Components update loop.

Why not real lisp? Well, I couldn't find a handy implementation, and I've still a lot to learn about building and implementing the support for an embedded language, so it seemed like the right time to learn. And the right time to experiment. I've taken the things I like about lisp, and screwed around with the formula to give me the things I've always wanted for games. Will it work? Will it be fast enough? Will it be expressive enough? Who knows? That's the whole point of trying.

I did mention this whole thing is one big bout of self indulgence, didn't I?

P.S. Today's vid is higher res than the last one, so you might want to click on over to the bigger Google Video player to see it. Today's music is Billy Bragg and Natalie Merchant doing Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key. Totally love that tune.

RPG Zero: Another Start

So Ultrahead, over at Do as I say, not as I do... in a comment conversation reminded me that I've always wanted to make an RPG. Abandoning all the other toys (I have a habit of doing that), I've decided to embark on the adventure.

When I started writing about game programming here last month, I really did want to practice a little altruism and share some stuff with the community. I'm afraid the vanity levels on this project however, make it wholly unsuitable to share as good practice. The sheer self indulgence in the code should warn people away. I really can't in good conscience recommend anyone learn anything from this... the scripting language is an own rolled, interpreted, prefix notated, reflection driven nightmare for pete's sake!

I would like to share though. So if anyone is interested in watching, I'll post the goings on in my RPG land.

I thank you for your patronage,
GLH.