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Messages - Iambian
Pages: 1 ... 14 15 [16] 17 18 ... 52
226
« on: May 15, 2011, 03:40:29 pm »
Got character selection working. There will be up to 8 characters in the game. Some will be unlockable. Short post. Uncomfortable posting while lying on the floor.
EDIT (5-16-2011 11:11 EST) : Wrote in some high score menu logic. Didn't get anything to actually display quite yet.
227
« on: May 15, 2011, 03:36:50 pm »
Night is the only time of the day I can get any code done. I can try other parts of the day, but everything happens at night.
228
« on: May 11, 2011, 09:56:22 pm »
Long as its shoved some where in the depths of the bullet hell it should be ok
* Geekboy1011 hides You mean, some place in the game where it's almost a guarantee that any normal ticalc reviewer would never be able to reach? Like the Extra stage?
229
« on: May 11, 2011, 08:45:22 pm »
With the reboot of CaDan comes a request for characters to star in the official rebuild. A total of eight playable characters is possible in the selection screen, though I'm going to have to slim it down to three if I can't get anyone to provide stuff. I'm also requesting bosses and their information, of which there will be 6 main bosses and 6 mini bosses. Though I don't have the sprites with me, I'm also requesting a 32x32 portrait sprite and mask (I'll fill in the details if you don't want to do that part), and a corresponding 8x8 game play sprite.
So far, I have three player characters. One serious and two jokes.
1. DevBlock - The unfortunate test character in almost every one of my games. First featured in Fishy, and often mistaken for a puzzle piece from another unrelated game, he gets thrown into the CaDan universe, where he's totally clueless, as usual. His script tells him to be annoyed at everyone and fight anyone for any reason, so that there will be conflict, even if unjustified. The first boss tells him this right then and there.
2. Netham45 (pre-lobsterification) - Completely unaware of the new environment. Won't move unless fully focused with the task at hand, and tends to give everything he's got once that focus is there. Strange things are flying at him, so his natural response is to blast 'em out of the sky. Takes the form of a spork.
3. Netham45 (post-lobsterification) - The future of Netham45, his temperament has changed dramatically after becoming a blue lobster and becoming the proud owner of his own FISHTANK CITY. The enemies all claim that he owes them payments on some sort of mortgage that doesn't exist. This Netham wants these guys to "Produce the Note" and prove once and for all that these guys are frauds and they have absolutely no claim to his city / 50-foot-tall-giant-fighting-robot. Lobster-y type attacks ensure the enemy's demise.
So far, I have one boss character:
1. 404 Boss Not Found - The placeholder boss for the series. A repeat occurrence until all boss and miniboss slots are filled. Each time it appears, it'll let the players in on some of the details about the environment all the player characters are trapped in, and discuss the fact that they NEED to fight to please the gods of CaDan. Always have flimsy as hell excuses for fighting, but at least they're more real than any other excuse other bosses can come up with. They ought to be.
------------- So, let's get creative here. I understand that Geekboy has already gathered a bit of information for his own edition of CaDan. I'm not trying to compete with that, but I do have permission from him to copy over some assets. What I want is verification that the appropriate owner of those assets provide that permission as well.
Uh. Wow. That was a little long.
230
« on: May 10, 2011, 12:08:47 pm »
I personally would rather see as much memory as possible given to the game engine and main engine if thats where it fits in. Seems to be that the slowness will not be so slow its unbearable and that by having that extra space we can make the game look better / sqeeze in more content
Ehh. That's not quite what I meant. The point's null anyway. I'm not going to prebuffer the menu frames themselves, but the image files *will* be buffered. To help make the buffering scheme a bit clearer, I'll let some of the source do the talking ;VARIABLE EQUATES FOR ROUTINES LOCATED AT $9D95 ramseg1 = $9D95 ;0107b Common routines for multipage app management ramseg2 = $9E00 ;0256b Common data resource tables ramseg3 = $9F00 ;2048b | Menu data buffer | Stg background buffer | ramseg4 = $A700 ;1024b |Menu system img buffer | Second bullet table | ramseg5 = $AB00 ;0512b |Menu system img buffer | Spellcard background | ramseg6 = $AD00 ;4096b |Menu system img buffer |Script resource buffer | ramsegend = $BD00 ;8043t
The game field and the menu system are exclusive, therefore, can overlap perfectly. The menu data itself shouldn't be more than 2KB and the image data, no more than 4KB. On another note, I got the title screen to work again The banner on the top is a 96x15 .bmp file, and the background is a fullscreen 96x64 image file (shuffled into the gray buffer). Yup. I've gotten how to pull the .bmp files together. It's mostly batch script based, but the script you should be editing is fully documented. At least, I think it's documented well enough...
231
« on: May 06, 2011, 11:19:24 am »
Double: Update (small)
The app now starts up and I've begun working on the large font renderer. This renderer supports variable-width fonts with a slightly variable spacing between letters, which serve to help make the text look more "natural". Example: The 'o' character can be bumped two additional pixels to the left if the previous character was a 'T', or an 'f' can be bumped one pixel to the left if the preceding character is an 'L'. I try to account for every possible combination, even though such combinations won't ever appear in English. Or any other possible language for that matter.
The font routines do not support international characters. The design kept me from adding those in. Perhaps a later version will that be possibly added in.
After that is done (there are still a few bugs left in it), I'll be able to get some graphics going and make a halfway decent menu system that's similar, if not identical, in appearance and functionality to the previous iteration of CaDan. It won't be the same, since the rendering method is far too different.
Of course, actually *using* a font renderer will make the menus appear a bit slower between screens. I can cut out the time by prebuffering every possible menu before trying to display them. The game engine uses a disproportionate amount of memory as opposed to the menu system, so I figure I could use the extra 6 or so kilobytes for *something*...
What do you think of that idea?
232
« on: May 03, 2011, 02:26:17 pm »
rawr ^_^
Also, get IrfanView. Really good software for tasks such as resizing and simple image manipulation.
233
« on: April 30, 2011, 09:54:16 pm »
I don't believe the grayscale problems will be fixed. I want to focus more on the actual gameplay, which I think is a bit more important.
If I can somehow find a way to fix it, though, I'll do just that.
EDIT: Working on the base code. Might have something that won't crash later "tonight" (May 3, 2011)
234
« on: April 27, 2011, 09:14:05 pm »
HTTYDanmaku v1.3 First completed rough draft. Enjoy the revisions. Make any necessary corrections if you feel up to it. Disclaimer: Copyright 2011,20?? Dreamworks, Cressida Cowell. All rights reserved. Copyleft 2011 [myself]. All wrongs reserved.
In the deepest, darkest portions of the urban fortress, where mold grows and the programmers, likewise, there sits one curious, nearly balded, pasty-faced person. Not quite a man, not quite a child, but full of the sort of energy that you'd only find when chatting it up on IRC or some odd obscure chat medium like that. This person is a total IRC junkie and a programmer all rolled into one. A disasterous combination, if you were to ask anyone. Just give the miserable wretch some Mountain Dew, and watch those fingers rap away on the keyboard, spilling forth numbers and non-words onto the white screen ahead. Working away at the next big thing, this graphing calculator game. What makes today, among all the other days which tend to run together, special is the addition of a final bit of code that marks a new echalon in his project. But... there seems to be a slight problem here at the creaky desk of the basement-dweller.
"Compile... compile dammit! Compile!" the programmer screams at the monitor. The black box of a command prompt flicker in and out of the desktop as he repeatedly hits the batch script's icon, hoping for a good, error-free compile. A moment later, and he gives up on the current run. No one has to compile more than once to tell something went wrong, but the programmer's at the end of his rope. Too many sleepless nights and caffeine inebriation contributed to his persisting offset mood, which should not be confused with mere insanity. No word yet on whether or not there's a success, but that red text on the screen screaming "ERROR" ought to be a heads-up on how "well" things are going. He eventually got the hint.
A few more edits into the vast number of lines in the equally vast number of files, a few more sips of that cool elixir known as Mtn Dew and a few more curse words screeched at the computer later, something appeared to go right. And out on the flickery computer monitor flows the beautiful words and numbers of a successful compile job. The sort of words that whispers its own little tale of program flow, numeric conversions, and all the other bits and bytes that pass through its keen, ever-judging eye. The story formed from statistics of the compile job, the little notes dropped here and there to remind the coder of resources remaining, all of which scrolls onto that black screen, just shortly before it disappears into nothingness, leaving only a newly-minted file containing the fruits of all the hard work over the past years.
"YES!" the unnamed programmer yells into the cluttered confines of his room. "It is (almost) complete!" the oddball shouts, making sure to sneak in as a whisper that disclaimer just to remain correct, even though no one other than his chat buddies would ever know the difference.
Our hero... begins the transfer of his newest program to his beloved graphing calculator. No one needs to know what make or model that device is, but there's just one thing that makes it special. One thing that sets it apart from the rest of the world. One thing that gives it that "special" something. He overclocked that sucker by replacing a C9 capacitor with a highly unstable sample of uranium, giving the calculator a nice, healthy green glow. No one needs to know where he got that sample...
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Meanwhile, somewhere, or actually, somewhen, clear across the rock we know as Earth, lies the isle of Berk. It's described as being twelve days north of hopeless, and a few degrees south of freezing to death, located solidly on the Meridian of Misery. It happens to be that time of the year, where the grass starts growing and the temperature, for most of the day, is somewhat above freezing. From an outsider's point of view, one would think of this place as, well, "strange." The problem with using that word, however, is that it's a vast understatement. Nowhere else in the world would one ever dream of people being that muscular, or stubborn. It's just not a common trait, but the real kicker is their pets. While other places have ponies or parrots, they have dragons.
It's already noon, and that black mass of a dragon is still happily snoring away on the rug near Hiccup's bed. For the first time in a long while, the boy drags himself out of his bed, without the "help" of his friend. Normally, he'd either get knocked out bed, or covered in drool, but none of those things happened. 'Strange,' Hiccup thought while looking at his dragon. 'Half past noon and my personal alarm clock didn't bother working.'
At that thought, though, the dragon slowly cracked open one of his eyes and looked right at his master, giving off the "Yeah. Good morning to you too." look. Hiccup rolled right out of bed, slipped on his prosthetic leg, put on a few clothes, then hobbled out his bedroom door and out into the main room of his house. Like a shadow, Toothless followed the scrawny boy.
The duo passed by the table as they were going to leave the place. On that table was some toast, a bit of dried meat, and some goat's milk, while on the other side of it, was some cod. His father must've left it out for the two before he left to do whatever it is the Chief guys do. "Hey Toothless, want some breakfast?" The dragon smacked his lips and gave his trademark gummy smile at that question, then went on to happily nom the fishies at a speed that would startle the laws of physics. Hiccup quietly ate his breakfast, trying to drown out those nagging thoughts that would eventually arise, like "Why didn't I wake up at sunrise?" or "How did Toothless eat the fish without even opening his mouth?" or, his favorite, "Since when did Toothless learn how to put on his tailfin and harness by himself?" Yup. It's a strange day so far, all things considered.
After breakfast was done and over with, Hiccup made his way to the front door, having Toothless by his side in case he tripped. "Hey Bud. Wanna fly?" Damned dragon couldn't even wait to walk outside when he picked up his human by the scruff of his neck and flipped him over and straight onto the saddle before taking right to the air. "Toothless! What's gotten into you?"
The Night Fury dragged his rider high above Berk, and then stopped in mid-air, maintaining his position without doing much more. Hiccup patted the dragon, trying to reassure Toothless that nothing is wrong, but really, he was trying to reassure himself that whatever was bothering his Fury, everything would be alright. When the dragon started growling at something unseen in the air, the boy knew right then and there that everything was NOT alright.
From the ground level, all of Hiccup's friends and a few other Berkians gazed upward to the Heros of Berk, just to find out what went wrong. I mean, the boy's dragon never acted in this manner, and today was just strange in general for everyone involved. At that moment, the sky darkened for reasons unkown, and that's when the people knew. Their sense of normalcy was about to be shattered yet again.
There was a flash of light in the darkened sky surrounding the black dragon, and after the light subsided, fairly small humanoid creatures with butterfly-like wings appeared, floating in place. The human sitting atop the great beast didn't get a chance to blink when the fairies started their attack. Vast quantities of bright colored orbs shot out toward nobody in particular, but the volume threatened to overtake and strike the two. With this impending danger, Toothless, in sync with Hiccup controlling his tailfin, dodged and weaved through the mass of relatively slow-moving projectiles. The Night Fury returned fire with his own swift plasma bolts, striking down one fairy at a time with unerring accuracy, but no matter how many of them went down, two more took their place. The fire was coming in from everywhere, forcing the dragon to perform aerial maneuvers that not even himself was aware he was capable of. At this point, Hiccup was just a bystandard caught in the middle of this horrific firefight.
Vikings started pouring out of their homes to see what the noise and excitement was about. It didn't take them much to find out that there was some sort of fight, and that it was happening in the air, so they looked up and gazed at the most amazing thing ever. This black dot in the sky was weaving up and around carefully placed and constructed patterns of varyingly-shaped and colored orbs of light, proving to all that their heroes are indeed that. No one could ever dream of going up against that and hope to survive. The fight lasted for a few minutes before the lights died down and everything disappeared for just a quick minute, to be replaced by a glowing, floating crate. All eyes remain fixed skyward.
Hiccup, still dazed from the quick motions of his dragon, shook his head and reoriented himself, now that his Night Fury had calmed down. Seeing this lull in the fight, the boy worked up the courage to question the oddly menacing... thing... in front of him.
"Who are you, and why did you attack us?" Hiccup queried the box, unsure of what it wants or what it even is. A few moments passed and a grating, almost mechanical voice emanated from within the hovering object. "I AM THE PLACEHOLDER BOSS FOR THIS GAME. I COME TO POLITELY DO BATTLE WITH YOU TO PLEASE MY MASTER," The box boomed. How it is possible to be both that loud and remain polite at the same time is baffling. "WITH OUR WITHOUT INTERVENTION, WE SHALL DO BATTLE NOW."
Hiccup didn't get another word in edgewise when the enemy surrounded the field in a spinning circle, intent on trapping the dragon within, forcing him to fight the flying object. Toothless obliged, firing plasma bolt after plasma bolt onto the thing, each shot exploding almost harmlessly off the box. The box returned fire by saturating the airspace with glowing projectiles to the point where they seemed to blend into curved lines and weave in and out of each other. Toothless was quickly caught in between and slammed into these glowing ball-lines, resulting in a huge explosion. The dragon and human fell out of the sky, lifeless...
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"Mwahaha! I've done it! I've finally made a game that combines my favorite movie with my favorite type of game! I've finally made a HTTYD Danmaku!"
Shortly after having trasferred his fresh-baked game to the real deal, it begins. Navigate through the menus, select a character, and wait for the stage to start. Swiftly, the pale coder raps the keys on his calculator, trying to get his little pixelized avatar of what was supposed to be Toothless to dodge the ever-increasing patterns of bullets and lines on the screen. Things are going well. I mean, he did create the game, after all. A swift focus-switch strafe here and there, a few movements to the left and to the right, almost pixel perfect weaving through the storm of dots blanketing the monocrhome screen, and then the unthinkable happened. The border of life and death flashes on the screen for a split second, then an explosion, making the dragon disappear off the screen. "Noooooooooo! Toooooooothleeeeeeessssss!" the now distraught geek screams, making the room shake and the calculator tremble. An indistinct feminine voice can be heard from above the basement's rafters.
Geekboy, in half a monitor's refresh cycle, straightens his face, then looks back at the screen. The avatar representing Toothless reappears at the bottom of the screen, blinking, waiting for the player to bring his attention back. "Oh, well. Two lives left," he chirps in a rather sing-song voice. If only he knew what the reality of things were, the reality that's being changed with his magic code and nuclear calculator.
235
« on: April 26, 2011, 12:05:19 pm »
I'm not sure how many people have this problem, but when I try to log on to EFNet using my IRC chat client, I cannot connect. According to the server messages, the proxy that the cellphone service that I have uses is blacklisted, so I am unable to connect to anywhere on the EFNet network.
That being said, I would like to suggest a separate page where one can view a mobile version of OmnomIRC. It needn't be anything fancy, but I'd like to be able to chat without having to scroll several screens to get between the chat and the chatbox. In the mobile version of Opera (I've got an Optimus M, running Android 2.2.1) that separation is due to the names list being in between.
In short, I would like to see a mobile version of OmnomIRC.
Thanks for your time and all the cherries!
236
« on: April 21, 2011, 05:42:41 pm »
I had my PSU go bad on mine not too long ago too.
Got munched on by a vacuum and shorted out, popped something inside it.
Iambian, you must be rough on laptops, you seem to have quite a few problems with them. Or did you just get a lemon?
My laptop's been through hell and high water, so naturally, there's going to be a few problems. I'm surprised that it hasn't completely died on me, given the conditions I've been making it go through. It's been through numerous spills while open, while closed, while inside a backpack, both padded and non-padded. Hell, I've discovered my laptop in the ON position when I removed it from my backpack, it took such a beating. Honestly, I'm quite happy with my laptop. I mean, I've known someone's laptop to have failures after being BUMPED on a kitchen table (from which it's never removed), while I've had my laptop running in extreme conditions. Direct sunlight? Not a problem. On a bus? Gotta keep coding. In the rain? Meh, it's only water. Energy drinks have come into contact with my laptop. The only keys that are showing signs of shorting out are the PGUP/PGDN/HOME/END and the backslash keys, but those were fixed with some serious compressed air treatment. tl;dr: I'm rough on my lappy. But at least nothing important broke yet. You know, stuff like the LCD itself, or the HDD.
237
« on: April 21, 2011, 01:54:55 pm »
I know there are plenty of online resources for detailing exactly how to take apart a laptop. I went online and found a site dedicated pretty much to Toshiba laptops, and step-by-step, picture-by-picture instructions on how to take it fully apart. I found it quite useful, so I would suggest anyone taking apart a laptop to at least try to look online for instructions on their make and model. You'd be surprised what sort of things you need to do in what order.
238
« on: April 21, 2011, 01:01:57 pm »
Double-post. Will be like a week or two more. School and work and all that business.
239
« on: April 21, 2011, 12:58:32 pm »
As some people here know, I've had a few problems with my laptop. This time, it wasn't out of necessity, but out of comfort.
The LCD cable that connects the motherboard to the LCD (and the inverter) was frayed, and I did do a repair on it to make sure that it at least worked. It did, but it left ugly red lines on the screen that sometimes devolved back to what it was before the inverter got severed. But enough on that, what I did was I purchased a whole new wire from eBay for much cheaper than when I last looked (~$25 now), and installed it. The job took an hour, and now, I'm happy to report that the screen's crystal clear.
In short, it's be the best $25 I've spent on my laptop for this year. I'll post pics of what the the uninstalled "ghetto-rigged" cable looked like... whenever I can get around to doing it. No pics on the job itself since I was a little too excited in fixing my laptop.
So... I watched How To Train Your Dragon (Blu-Ray) and I was surprised by the results. Very happy. I'm feeling better about eBay already.
EDIT: I should mention that earlier this year, I ran yet another repair on my laptop charger. Those suckers don't last. But when I dissected the faulty part, I found out exactly why they're so flimsy. The connectors were just (poorly) crimped on. Wth?
240
« on: April 18, 2011, 01:52:23 pm »
Like the story involving the pucrunch decompressor, I had this little idea pop up in my head while I was at work. I know, I suck at writing, but hey. It's what you get when you're bored and trying to go to sleep. So I ended up writing this in at the bottom of my CaDan script spec sheet. Completely random. Enjoy at your own risk.
In the deepest, darkest portions of the house, where mold grows and the programmers, likewise, there sits one curious nearly balded, pasty-faced person. Not quite a man, not quite a child, but full of the sort of energy that you'd only find when chatting it up on IRC or some odd obscure chat medium like that. A total IRC junkie and a programmer all rolled into one. a disasterous combination, if you were to ask anyone. Just give the wretch some Mountain Dew (since we all know they love the stuff), and watch the fingers rap away on the keyboard, working on the next big thing. The next graping calculator game. Except today is different for this person, for today, something gets added into his beautiful, yet incomplete game.
"Compile... compile dammit! Compile!" the programmer screams at the monitor. The black box of a command prompt flicker in and out of the desktop as he repeatedly hits the batch script's icon, hoping for a good, error-free compile. No word yet on whether or not there's a success, but that red text on the screen screaming "ERROR" ought to be a heads-up on how "well" things are going.
A few more edits into the vast number of lines in the file, a few more sips of that cool elixier known as Mtn Dew. A few more curse words screeched at the computer shortly before something appears to go right. And out on the screen flows the beautiful words and numbers of a successful compile job. The sort that tells its own little tale of all the bits and bytes that pass through its scrupulous, ever-gazing eyes. The statistics of the compile job, the little echoes that remind the programmer of those little quirks in the source, all of which are found on that black screen, just shortly after it disappears into nothingness, leaving only a newly-minted file containing the fruits of all the hard work over the past years.
"YES! And now... to test this program out..."
Meanwhile, on another timeline, on another galaxy, far far away from the alien homeworld this coder belonged to, here on Earth at around god-knows-what-year, the Vikings Berk celebrated in full Hiccup and Toothless' victory over the Red Death. There won't be any real description, since we've all seen the movie but as Toothless flew straight up with Hiccup with his friends, something odd, something completely out of the blue happened.
Everywhere around the teens and their dragons, small fairy-like creatures popped out of nowhere. Everyone stopped what they were doing and hovered in mid-air, completely stunned from the sudden appearance of these... things. Time seemed to stand still as they hovered right above Berk, trying to identify these foriegn things. And then, one by one, they started shooting slow-moving glowing orbs at the dragons in an eerily syncrhonized patter, filling the area around them in these energy-filled spheres, floating, if not flying straight at them!
It just wasn't their day, was it? Snotlout and Fishlegs got shot right out of the sky the second the gang was attacked. The twins made a move to try to save the two but they also got shot out. All that's left now is Hiccup riding his Night Fury.
Toothless and Hiccup, working as one, weaved in and out and between the patterns of incoming lights, almost expertly, almost... almost like someone else was watching above them and controlling their exact movements. There was just no way in hell they could know where everything was simultaneously... until they too got hit from the neverending torrent of lights.
The pair fell sharply, like a rock, to ... well. A bigger rock. The Earth. To their doom. "Toothless! Hang on buddy! We're gonna make it!" Hiccup tried to reassure his best bud, but he knows they aren't going to make it. They were all going to die... right about... now? Whoa! Wait a second. They're back up in the clouds...
And now, back on the alien planet, the crazy-mad overlord... erh. Programmer. Has decided to give that game of his a nice run-through.
"Mwahaha! I've done it! I've finally made a game that combines my favorite movie with my favorite type of game! I've finally made a HTTYD Danmaku!"
Swiftly, he raps the keys on his calculator, trying to get his little avatar of what was supposed to be Toothless to dodge the ever-increasing patterns of bullets on the screen. For a moment, things were going well. Side step, side step, back, forward, side step, back, side... aww, crap. He saw his favorite character eat a bullet and die. "Nooooooooo! Toooooothleeeeesss!"
The crazed coder straightens his face and puts on a mask of false seriousness.
"Oh, well. Two lives left."
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