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January 4th, 2012
Posted in Bits and flops
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Lately i have been upgrading and extending my as3 framework. One part of that is improving performance of my tilemap implementation, collision and shadowcasting in particular.
Consider these two screenshots:
 
What you are looking at is a before and after screenshot of the collision layer of a tilemap i made. In the first picture every highlighted tile is a collidable tile, that makes 210 collision checks in total. It also means 210 seperate shadowcast’s! This is not good, not good at all, therefore i wrote a algorithm for logically bunching tiles togheter. As you can see, stretches of tiles are made into one bigger collision entity. After the algorithm we go down to a neat 22 collision checks, that’s almost 10 times fewer checks!
The algoritm isn’t perfect yet (you can see some non-perfect boxes in the picture), but it is close enough. The algo. is also a bit slow, and not usable in real time, but for a pre-load step, it’s just perfect.
I’ll try to write an in-depth technical explination on how it works at some point. Check back later for that.
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December 9th, 2011
Posted in Uncategorized
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Hey guys, thought i should share some more screenshots from the world editor for Erosion.
It doesnt have alot of super cool features, but it gets the job done in a pretty quick fashion.
There are 4 layers for each zone, and much like Knytt layer 2 is the collision layer, layer 1 is background stuff (things that should never be infront of the characters), layer 3 and 4 are in front of the characters. Some times i feel like i need atleast 6 layers, and maybe i’ll add more in the future, but right now it works just fine with 4.
The Entities tab is just that, interactable entities. The system for how i add new entities and how i assign different entity types to them needs to be reworked. But as the server doesnt even parse entity data yet, it isnt prioritized at the moment.
The Zones tab let’s you quickly go from zone to zone, clicking one of the red squares instantly zoom’s in on that specific zone. One zone in the editor isnt nesseceraly one zone in the game, but it helps to divide the level design work in a simple way.
Here are the screenshots:
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November 16th, 2011
Posted in Game Dev
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Some updates on the Erosion development.
I’ve made alot of work on the item backbone systems, aswell as weeded out alot of bugs in the network model. Building a big system like this has the opportunity of alot of small bugs that, because of the size of the system, becomes really hard to track down. That makes it really important to structure the code in a very consistent and straight forward way.
As i promised here are some new screenshots:
The main menu, the stars in the background are animated, i’ll probably change this to be more consistent with the theme of the game.
Login screen, again the background is animated:
Screenshot of the ingame gui, the paperdoll with an equipped sword. It’s all placeholder graphics ofc.
And finally, here is a screenshot of two clients connected to the server at the same time:
I should also talk a bit about sharding, the game world is acctually alot bigger then what you see in the screenshots, but it is divided into different shards. Each shard is either a seperate server or a core on one individual server. This way each core or each server only handles the logic and data of a small part of the world at any time. Right now all network traffic is parsed and allocated to the correct shard from one central request handler, but in the future i will propably try to divide that up to each individual shard and make them completely seperate entities. But there are alot of design problems with that approach that i havent solved yet.
Anyway, i’m still really enjoying working on this game alot, stay tuned for more updates!
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November 2nd, 2011
Posted in Game Dev, W Robots
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Worked a bit on Erosion today, heres what i did:
* Loading item database and parsing the information therein at server startup. This includes parsing item types and stats.
* When a player joins the game, all his or hers equipped items aswell as any item in the backpack are loaded and sent to client.
* The items are parsed on the client and then polls the item assets bundle to get the appropriate animations etc. This will open up for local modding of the game. The stats and logic are ofc still kept on the server, so that cant be altered.
* Fixed a bug where, when two server responses where sent at the same time, the client could some times skip one of them.
After i’ve finished with the items and i can pick up items, equip, use and put them back down or into the backpack, i will move on to working on the server side collision detection.
Stay tuned for more! Oh, and i’ll try to upload some pictures tommorow.
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November 2nd, 2011
Posted in Game Dev
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Hey all!
You may think that i have given up on W Robots as i havent written about it for a while. Well, you would be wrong. However, W Robots is now called Erosion (a temp name) and is now a mmo! So from beeing a Z remake to a new rts game it went to beeing an mmo. Pretty wild journey right there. The story here is that i’ve been working on some ideas for server tech for a while and wanted to try it out with a real game, and as i really liked working on W Robots i decided to take what i had and turn it into an mmo with the new server.
So some of you may think, “Well gee Mstrp, MMO’s are pretty big stuff, dude, how will you manage that?”, well Mr. Guy i will try to release the game in small iterations. The first version containing minimal features, the next a little bit more, and so on. That way i belive that i can keep my motivation and productivity up, and if not, well atleast i like working on it right now, so it’s not a loss.
What’s in the game right now? Simple login and spawning, movement, sharding (more on that in a bit) and items. The game is about building things in colaboration with your friends, getting more resources and more rare forms or resources, you get them by exploring the world and combating foes. Another big point of the game is that i want there to be a democratic voting system in the game, where players can impact the world and the future of the game by electing representatives from within the playerbase. Those elected players can then propose changes to the game systems. I guess that would make me the president with veto powers. The elections are held within the game itself. I can see alot of problems with taking this direction, but i feel like it could add alot of interesting dynamics to the game.
The resources are used to build all kinds of stuff, houses, items and furniture. The way the housing will work is that you can buy a piece of land on which you are allowed to build. Communites of players can then form togheter to form villages or even towns by merging their pieces of land togheter. Im not sure how the selling of land will work yet, i dont want it to turn out like it did in Ultima Online, where every avaliable piece of land was cramped with castles and houses and you couldnt move five meters without running into the wall of someones house. I will have to give that some thought.
There will be some kind of combat in the game, fighting something to get better resources and mayby even other loot in form of equibable items.
Thats basically what i want in the game to begin with, but as i said, it will be made in small steps.
Stay tuned for more info and content!
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