The Shining Source

Well I went and did myself in.  A public holiday gone and lost that I'll never get back.

I did however, please myself with my effort.
I learnt about worlds, cameras, entities,.. Even had a little play.



You can't do much, just walk around and pan/zoom the camera and notice there are collisions with the bad guys(red) and not with your teammates(blue)

I have made the underpinnings of quite a few other things but I ended up spending most of the day mucking around with the camera.

if you really want to see what i did, it is here (740kb)
http://www.bad.net.nz/blitz3d/lucidus.rar

will have another bash next weekend and see how much further I get.

==edit== just tried this on my normal PC rather than my laptop only to find it runs 10 times too fast!  the guy zooms around.  will have to make some sort of frame limiter. ==end edit==

Yeah yeah I know, about the response I suspected.  Anyway I plan to spend this saturday making a battle.

Just popped in to mention this:  browser statistics.

Display Resolution stats I've captured off my websites recently.

800x600 or lower: 16%
1024x768: 59%
Higher: 20%

Unknown: 5%

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I think this means I should be looking at doing anything in 1024?  
To be honest, I don't think I can stand the scrutiny, I'll stick to 800x600 and default to a windowed mode so people can msn,icq etc while playing.

Just didn't feel like making another thread just to discuss resolutions tbh.

Resolutions for games are always a difficult topic. For pixel-based 2D work, I'd stick to 640x480. 800 x 600 is probably OK for rendered 2D stuff. For 3D, the sky is the limit although the higher the resolution the higher the system requirements. The best way to deal with it is to make the interface scalable, so the player can choose their resolution. It's not always easy to do, but it makes things a little easier in the long run.

I'm not sure how frame limiting works in the 3D version. I'm not that advanced

I would have replied sooner, but some of us have completely unrealistic challenges to complete

The last couple sundays I kind of renegged on my promise to myself to spend the whole day on it.  However I did manage to spend an hour or so each time and achieve a couple of things.

Firstly I figured out the frame limiter.
This line outside of the main loop.
FrameTime = CreateTimer(60)

And then this line just before Flip
WaitTimer(FrameTime)

That's all there is to it.

Secondly, I made edges and fixed the movement so that it would start to work how I had planned it in my mind for future AI expansion.

Now that there are boundaries that aren't made just with obstructions, instead made by a simple check on position limits - I can use the same loop to assure your character isn't leaving their movement area.  
Next up will be to create the graphic for the movement zone to show you where you are allowed to go on your turn, and port across my movement algorithm from shining ajax.

Last of all I cut out some leftover bugs from my initial mucking around by allowing you to cycle through your players using the A key.

This looks pretty cool! I'm not familiar with Blitz3D but, i'll have to check it out. Would you compare it to an engine such as torque? Or is a more complete language where you create your own engine?

It's a complete language, so you have to do quite a lot of the nuts and bolts yourself. It comes with a pretty solid 3D engine, and it takes care of a lot of the lower-level tasks that can slow down programmers. It's quite neat

I'm sorry, I don't know torque.  However it is coming fairly easy to me so far, and I'm a few gold short of a heataxe.

The graphic for the movement zone has been created, along with functions to position it correctly around the player in focus.
The function allows me to pass the movement value from the character to it - once I get to that point.  At the moment it hands a default value of 4.

I experimented with sound effects, and created a character swap sound effect that lets you change between your party members when you press A a couple of times.

ps: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1306447

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Here's my movement range(shining force diamond shape) creation mechanism in case anyone is interested, I thought it was quite compact.  I suppose it could be made slightly better again, but it will work for now.


Each square within the movement area now has an array value (w) - so it can check easily against obstructions, or teammates(who you can walk through but not stand on etc).

Nice work, Elv.

I remember how pleased I was when I first got the diamond on screen. Those were the good old days...

Personally I'd stick with 800 x 600 for 3D graphics, but look into making the user interface scalable to different resolutions. The problem with high resolutions is the need for higher quality textures and models, and for a one-man project it's a lot to ask.