Change is in the Map…

This week’s changes are mainly to the Crux Map-editor I posted last week. This week brings a bunch of refactorings, culminating in a much cleaner, quicker editing experience. Pending is some meta-data editing and a vsp view, but if you want to add more tiles for the meantime just add 32×32 pngs to the tiles directory in the established naming pattern and you’re all set.

Also along with tonight’s speed-up refactoring comes the possibility of a full v3 multilayer application built on top of this in the future. The slowdown that prevented this from happening was caused by a juvenile mistake that Kael caught after a half hour of me debugging and him playing videogames while aen looked on.

(It’s easier to “pair” program when it’s being projected on a wall and everyone involved is several feet from each other. It’s amazing how much being in comfy chairs and not having your personal space infringed upon helps.)

Anyway, for all of you out there in TV land who care, here’s the updated editor. CTRL-S also saves a .plist of the current map out into the v3.log, although the load doesn’t work yet. So sad.

Smash and Edit

Pushing things around
is fun!
(click image to biggify)

This week’s gruedorf challenge is a day late but at least 19.95 over. First up is a prototype of the reason I put in the entity collision event: A block-pushing demonstration! While it’s not quite “there”, I’m amused by the demo. I expected to have to do a little more work to get non-player entities to interact with each other, but the way I coded it up worked right on the first attempt!

Unfortunately the handling acts in peculiar ways, mainly due to the fact that I’m using playerstep = 16; to fake tile-based movement. I initially thought that playerstep would effect all entities, but ha… look at the name again, sucker! I’m tiring of how verge always handles player-entities as a super-special case from regular entities. They should all be one and the same but for where their marching orders are coming from, maaan.

There will be more developments on this front in the near future. Don’t worry, Glambo. Your two cents have not fallen on deaf piggy banks.

Old dog, new code.

I’ve invented maped1!
(click image to embiggen)

Today’s second verge-based miracle is Maped 1. In verge 3. In VC. Well, not quite fully functional seeing as it can’t load or save maps, and not really maped1 since its tiles are 32×32 and based off of pngs in the ./tile/ directory instead of a real vsp, but… SHUT UP OKAY.

This project came about from a long-standing desire for a mapeditor in-code in vc, a desire to find a use for overkill’s widget library, and a need for a map editor for my iPhone games projects. I don’t have much intent to build this past my needs there, but I have been building it fairly generically, so it could be updated for 16×16 tiles easily… so if anyone wants to come along and write v3 loaders and savers in vc, well, hell, we could surely use’m ;)

Download the Block Pushing Demo here.

Download the Map Editing Demo here.

As far as the mapediting goes, select “New Map”, enter a garbage string as the name, and two positive ints between 1 and 100 for the size. When in the map editing mode, ‘A’ and ‘Z’ scroll the left click button’s selected tile up and down, and ‘S’ and ‘X’ scroll the right click button’s selected tile up and down. Clicking left or right on a tile will paint, and holding ‘CTRL’ while left or right clicking will ‘eyedropper’ the tile you click on into the button’s slot you clicked with.

Jujube, I hardly knew ye!

So many pretty layers!

So, today I finished Station 3 of Jujube, added two layers of waterfall to the entire map, hooked up the installed Esk’s Bridge. This bridge has a long and sordid story, the history of which you’ll need to read Esk’s post for and then my comment at the bottom.

Look at us: Gruedorfers working together towards a common goal. At least, Esk isn’t my arch nemesis, who most assuredly didn’t do anything for sully today, because he’s a wanton jerk and maker of nothing good.

OMG, downloadable file!

And that’s it. Get the update via SVN here. Or, actually, since everything is hella awesome, just download a WIP copy of this build of Sully here. You’ll want to load save 5 and walk to the northeast to see the jujube work!

Mounting piles of Mountain

Darin looking wistfully into the distance

I continued on station three of the ne Mount Jujube for Sully. More tilework, laying down everything but the bridge (which esk will be doing) the waterfall, and the exit plateau. Put in some parallaxing background, because mountain zones need effing paralaxing background, I’m going to modify the bacground so there’s green land around the mountain, and the open sea in the middle of the horizon, and then modify the world map to have some mountains in the corners of that area. It always pissed me off when games didn’t try to make the zone’s interior match up with the zone’s overworld location.

Also fun: I obstructed this station. Obstruction is the most boring bit of map creation for me, mainly because the interface is even worse. It’s such a saving grace that the tile eyedropper functionality extends to obstructions though. Hooray!

And that’s it. Get the update via SVN here.

Dot dot dot (ellipsis!)

I hate everything.
Especially you

I spent 8 hours on Saturday trying to get paypal all working with cakePHP for breadbros.com after zara made an ultimatum to me.

C’est la vie.

The fun news was there was a segfault in php5, so I attempted to update it via apt-get. Long story short, things fucked up, and 12 hours of work later I’m still paying off administrative debt trying to get things on this server back the way they were before. Sorry VERGE community!

So, even though I blew my weekend on this offal when I could’ve been having the sex with women and doing other debaucherizing tasks like gambling or taking The Lord’s name in vain, I decided I should also work on gruedorf. I updated the Mount Jujube map because of the “sorry that the internets is broken” image I used on vrpg to indicate that the forums and screenshot functionality are still broken. Ah, progress.

Get the update here. I don’t hate you. There’s over a 40% chance that that’s not a lie, too!

A view of maped3 showing the obs.
click to biggify

Okay, so in keeping with tradition, as soon as I make a boastful claim of future work, I of course don’t get to complete it. However, since I have many years of experience with this sort of phenomenon, I kept the boastful claim REALLY SMALL and still got work done towards it. However, you’re all going to have to make due with more map maintenence for now.

Today’s precious update is the Ontaran Mines, which is the last zone before you exit Alden Kingdom. The base of this map was first seen by the public in a bunch of public domain tilesets I released a few years ago. I was going to redo the entire cave sequence, but I decided that, although the layout was a bit flat, it was something I could work with…

Doctor TwopointohLove

(or: how I learned to stop worrying and love rounded corners)

TEH WIRLD IZ SKWARE

One of the main problems with this map’s original incarnation was it’s harsh 90-degree corners. If you open up the old version (which isn’t in the svn, and I can’t currently find in the repo (goddamnit)), you’ll notice it’s mainly just twisty 90-degree passages. Visually dull, annoying to navigate, and really kinda flat. BAD!

Enter: the Corner.

The solution to this first visual issue was to use the already-existing diagonal wall pieces gratuitously. with the addition of a very small number of new transition tiles (something like 6 new tiles), I managed to soften the harsh edges, diversify the number of shapes on the screen, and overall improve the boring parts of the map a few hundred percent. Once I was done smoothing out the maze, I created a new obstruction tileset, and made everything utilize v3′s diagonal-slidey abilities (see first screenshot of the post) which is one of the stupidly fun things there is while walking around. Who knew sliding across a wall would be so fun?

This map has a lot to go before it’s done, too, but the initial changes are a good start. I hate it several orders of magnitude less already!

In other news, I’ve been using a debug version of maped3 running from Visual Studio itself, which has been fairly illuminating. I’ve fixed two bugs so far… which is about a hundred less bugs than Andy’s fixed in it lately.

As always: the goods

In full accordance to the grutopian policy of full disclosure, today’s updates can be seen (as always) in the svn. Remember: user and password are both “anonymous”!

http://www.verge-rpg.com/svn/sots/ – the Astradian Repositorium!