I took a small break from the menus to work on the fonts problem. Specifically, each browser renders the fonts in canvas differently. I attempted to solve the problem by using a pixel font (I grabbed 04b08Regular and made it into a font kit with FontSquirrel) but… apparently no dice.
It really looks like I’m going to have to do spritesheet font blitting. It’s a shame that the “HTML is awesome for UI!!!” solution doesn’t actually work for me in this case (it works when you can embed a single browser as a downloadable, not when you have to support them all ;( )
The menu work goes slowly but surely. I’m poking functions around and playing with their structure. Hopefully I stop pushing the peas around my plate sometime soon.
I met Kildorf in the flesh today. He had some excuse about a flooded house for not working on his cool mapeditor. Whatever, my Gruedorf win ratio is now 50.0%. Climbing my way back into the majority a fractional percentage point at a time.
Committed more menu system refactoring for spriteright to the repo. Things are going very slow. Been hella busy between being sick, going to GDC, getting ready for SXSWi etc.
The important thing is that work, albeit slow, continues. I look forward to kicking some ass on plane rides soon.
I’m in the process of converting from the silly non-functional menu (summoned and dismissed with ‘M’ on http://spriteright.com) to a fully formed RPG menu that actually “shows data” and “does stuff”. It’s relatively slow going this week, mainly refactoring and a minimum of actual time put in, sadly. I think I’ve only squeezed 2 hours into gruedorf this week. Sickness and work and life, etc… :(
At any rate, I’m looking forward to getting the bare bones of a party menu, status screen, and inventory screen in. I’ll probably be working on this aspect of the game for a few weeks at least. With luck, next week’s update will have more screenshotty goodness.
Today’s gruedorf updat brings a full, completed mapswitch. You can leave the island and go to the undersea cavern (and back) once you complete your conversation with Crystal.
Progress is slow lately, but I’m hoping to have time over the weekend to do some impressive stuff. Map Parallax and single-layer lucency is next on my list. And finishing all of the undersea cavern scripting.
Currently visible progress on www.spriteright.com: the first full cutscene is in place, fades and chats and art and all.
Currently readable progress in github only demonstrable if you check it out and run it locally: mapswitching. Still working a few bugs out there.
Today’s gruedorf entry brings us one step closer to finishing the first map of Sully. Now the crustal sprite can be removed fromthe scene “disappearing butler style”.
Next up is to add fading, and then mapswitching…
Not much new this week (been busy with family in town) but that will not cease my gruedorfian obligations!
For this week’s hourly minimum sacrifice, I present: entities that obstruct!
Next up is firing events/executing code conditionally upon that (onBump?) and maybe getting to some z-ordering with entities. Right now the player walks all over the entities. Literally.
There was a lot of failure earlier in this gruedorf-week attempting to import verge3′s obstruction and player movement system into spriteright. That failed a lot. The transliteration of C into javascript largely was mechanical, but the truth of the matter was there was far too much for me to convert at one time before I saw a physical return,so the bugs were legion.
I was impressed how easily I could convert C into javascript, though. And I learned that javascript had bitshifting operators!
I really didn’t expect that for some reason. Most likely because ints aren’t supported natively in the language.
At any rate I threw out most of the code and started again anew, and worked towards an obstruction system that I couldn’t walk through the walls of. And I got there tonight!
Then I started implementing an obstruction system that’d let me slide around on the diagonals. And I got there tonight!
But the hack I used to get the diagonals-sliding lets you get embedded in and/or walk through walls again. So that’s got some bugfixing in it’s future.
The important part is: it feels fun again, and I made visible progress.
I also implemented an autoexec script for maps upon load (mapinit) and shoved a few setObstructionTile calls in there to make the map easier to navigate (specifically, to make it easier to get into and out of the hut).
So that’s neat.
Press ‘O’ to see the obstructions while you play!
Go see SpriteRight in action!
Or maybe check out it’s source at github.
1. Find an error message.
2. google that error message in quotes.
If 2 fails, google substrings of the error message.
Only after several failed iterations of this process should you bug your cool programmer friends. You’ll be glad you did. They’ll be glad you did.
And, if you actually needed to ask your cool programmer friends for help (or discovered the answer yourself in spite of failed searches) you should make a public blog post with the error message itself in the title and the entire problem you experienced (with solution) in the body.
In this way, you are improving the internet and making the next guy’s life easier. Also, writing about the solution will help you remember it yourself next time, so it’s a double-win.
