What?

I fell into an audio hole a few years back where all of a sudden, the sound coming out of my PC became important enough to me that I went and splurged on a nice dedicated sound card for my PC + a nice pair of cans to listen to them through. I also really love surround sound, and while I've got a setup for my TV, I didn't have anything for my PC but the virtualized surround stuff which has never really worked for me. That being the case, I recently studied up on and bought a pair of Surround Headphones that don't just virtualize the surround sound but instead has a bunch of separate drivers in each ear cup pumping out the sound. Figured I'd do a little write up in case anyone was interested in my thoughts =P

The Hardware

These are the pieces of hardware that I currently have hooked up to my PC and that I will be going over in brief detail.

• ASUS Xonar Essence STX $189 at NewEgg
• Astro Gaming Wireless MixAmp 5.8 $219 at Amazon (Discontinued)
• Grado SR 225i Headphones $200 at Amazon
• Razer Tiamat Elite 7.1 $170 at Amazon
• Klipsch Image S4i Headset $52 at Amazon
• Etymotic Research HF3 $149 at Amazon

A dedicated sound card

I don't understand a lot of the jargon that goes into sound quality and whatnot, but I did my research and boiled it down to two cards. I don't remember what the other one was, but this one won out even though it was pretty damn pricey for straight up audio. As soon as I plugged it in, there was a noticeable jump in the quality of the sound coming out of even my default speakers. Though, not a $200 jump -_-;; Still, the hardware came along with a really robust piece of software to control the audio and over the years, I think it was a worthwhile purchase. Especially if I was going to be using better quality speaker components. Supposedly the virtual surround sound that this card puts out is really good, but for whatever reason, those features have never been compatible with my ears. The back of the card has a red/white component output, a fat jack headphone and mic output/input and a single optical out. While it was more than sufficient for the hook ups I was going to use at the time of purchase, not having the standard PC 6 jack sound outputs bit me in the ass once I get the Razer Tiamat since that thing only plugs into multiple jacks instead of a single optical to power its surround.

Bottom Line

The audio quality jump you get with this sound card is only significant if you're using high quality speakers/headphones. If you're not upgrading both, I'd recommend you go with the speakers/headphones but if you've got a nice pair, then the card is worth considering.

Astro Gaming Wireless MixAmp 5.8

These were produced mostly for Console gaming but I picked them up to have a wireless solution to the optical out on my soundcard. They also provide the simulated surround that's all the rage but again, doesn't work for me. The wireless on the other hand is really nice. There is very little static (not noticeable unless there is zero other sound and even then, low) and the battery life is very good. I typically need to charge it only once a week or so. The main draw of this unit though was that they work with any pair of headphones you plug into them and aren't limited to a single headset that's paired with the broadcasting end. The dual benefit of using these is that I can also carry the receiver to the couch when I play PC games on the TV. In these situations, having a volume knob right next to me is also very useful. Unfortunately, this model has been discontinued and the ones you can find seem to be going for higher than the original MSRP.

Bottom Line

If you want wireless sound, these are a great purchase. The static is very low, latency unnoticeable (cept for maybe sound based timing games) and most importantly, they work with ANY pair of headphones. A major plus since most wireless headsets tend to try to bring the price of the overall package down by using less than awesome headset components.

Grado SR 225i Headphones

Those incredibly weird, oldschool looking pair of headphones on the right are the cleanest sounding headphones I've ever used. After lurking around on a bunch of audiophile boards, I settled on picking up a pair of these as they were always talked about with high regard. They are basically the best sound you'll get for your buck prior to jumping into things that are $300+ and while I was very interested in nice sound, I'm not completely insane! The sound produced by these are a jump above every other pair of headphones I've ever used. They are open in the back which means that I can still be aware of my surroundings but also means that the sound pumping into my ears will also bleed out so if you want isolation and to not bother anyone nearby with your games/music then these are prolly not for you. Another factor you'd have to take into account is that the bass on these are nice, but definitely not booming. I feel like they're at the correct levels, but some people just love feeling a deep rumble and this doesn't provide that. Pretty much, these offer a very clean and clinical sound so if that's what you're looking for, look no further. They do have a few faults though. I'd say my ears started to feel a bit sore after having these on for around 5+ hours and the cable is super thick (which I suppose might be a good thing) so you won't be wearing these around the house and especially not out for a jog.

Bottom Line

These are freaking fantastic. Unless you're someone who highly values THUMPIN' BASS, these will not do you wrong. Everything just sounds accurate and I'd guess you can't get better sound for this price.

Razer Tiamat Elite 7.1

So, finally tired of not having surround sound on my PC, I started digging into non simulated surround sound in a headset and decided to try these things out. Now, before I start to tell you about these, I have to explain that my super sound card doesn't support the type of connections this headset requires. That being the case, I'm currently using them plugged into my RealTec HD Onboard sound -_-;;

The first thing I noticed when I put these on, were how goddamn comfortable they were on my head. I've gone through a number of PC headsets over the years and compared to my previous experiences, this felt like jumping into a nice, soft leather couch. My somewhat large ears were incredibly comfortable inside the cups and the padding on my head also felt great. I have yet to experience any discomfort or pain from wearing these, which is a good sign. Another cool little thing is that the mic actually can be pushed into the earpiece in its entirety. I'm fine with headsets where you can angle them vertically but having them entirely out of the way when not in use is nice since they can never get caught on anything and I don't have to see it in my periphery vision. The little control dial is also sleek and easy to use.

Now, onto the most important thing about this thing. The goddamn surround sound. It works, and it works well. I've got a 5.1 set up for my TV and while it's not THAT good, I can easily tell when a sound is behind, to the side or in front of me, which is amazing for a comfortable headset. Years ago, I had another pair of real surround headsets that were put out by a company called Tritton that were equally excellent except that they were heavy as hell and would actually cause my neck to hurt after a few hours. There isn't much else to say about the surround other than it works so moving on.

The sound quality on these are somewhat disappointing. Compared to the Grado, there is an instantly noticeable drop in audio quality. That is a bit of an unfair compassion to make though considering that the Grados cost more and only have to power two drivers instead of the 10 drivers that are packed into the Razor's. And I'm not saying that the sound quality is BAD by any means. Movies and games sound fine, just not great. The bass in these headphones are also much thumpier (legit term) than the Grado which is sorta what you want for gaming. Also, I have to point out that when I plug them into my dedicated sound card, they sound better (though still not in the same league as the grado) so the onboard sound card is also partly to blame.

Bottom Line

These do what they advertise in that you get actual surround sound in a headset. It has nice features, is super comfy and in my opinion, looks pretty damn cool. That being said, the sound quality is average which is actually an impressive feat if you consider that there are 10 drivers packed in. If simulated surround works for you, I'd stick with a headset that produces better sound but if you're like me, these'll get the job done admirably.

S4i and HF3

These two I'm putting in here as a side thing for anyone with an iPhone or an iPod. Both these headsets are made specifically for an iOS device and have the appropriate controller with volume up, down and middle click buttons + a mic. They are both in-ear which is the only way to have great sound for headphones IMO.

I'll start with the S4i. These were my first pair of non stock iOS headphones and they were really awesome. The bass was deep and sound quality very good. The controls are located at the point where the two sides combine into one. The location is perfectly fine and was only bothersome when I was at the gym as they're right where the barbell comes down on my chest so I'd have to move them up over by my shoulder. For the price, pretty freaking awesome though they're not the best -_-;;

Now here are the best goddamn earphones I've ever used, iOS or not. These are like the headphone equivalent of the Grados. The bass isn't as deep and instead they just sound accurate. The sound at every other range is incredibly crisp and you can hear every individual instrument as if they are separate instruments instead of just part of a larger sound. It's hard to explain but if you hear them, you'll understand. One of the nubs that you can use are these foamy tips that you squish then stick into your earhole at which point, they expand back out forming a tight seal. I have sort of strange shaped ear holes so I always had a bit of sound leakage nomatter what size nubs I used to use but these foamy tips lock in all the sound perfectly. These are the pair I recommend to my friends (the ones willing to drop some pretty hefty cast) when they ask what headphones I recommend.

Bottom Line

I fully endorse both pairs. The Klipsch ones are perfectly fine and sound better than the stock iOS white buds and come at a relatively cheap price while the Etymotics deliver better sound that most full size headphones I've tried. They're a tad bit expensive but I've seen sales where they've dropped to right around $100 and they also carry slightly cheaper models though I've never listened to them so I can't say whether or not I like em =P

That's it!

If anyone has anything else to add or other headphones/headsets/soundcards they like, please add em! =)

What's this update about?

Boiled down real short and sweet, the lighting engine.

Light and it's importance

For the type of game I'm making, exploration and indoor environments will play a huge role. When indoors, something that most games don't seem to really get right is lighting (and doors right =P). More specifically, natural lighting. Almost every game I've played, when you're indoors, you seem to always be able to see. I understand that not being able to see would really make most games stupid and unfun but try going into a room with no windows and turning off the lights. . . there is ZERO effing light =P So say you're in a situation where electricity is no longer around, and you're rummaging through a house, light management is going to be something that you want to pay attention to.

This video should show off a little better what I'm talking about. At the end, I'm simulating a bit of what it'd be like to explore by switching everything to undiscovered. Thinking about it, I should prolly have done a second walk through during night time to show the difference since things are really bright during the daytime =P I'll annotate it to clarify a few things when I can.

Natural light specifically

Flashlights and other portable light sources will play an equally important role, but the focus of this update is natural light. I'm no lightologist, but I've been doing some research into how light from the sun and outdoors enters into an area and I think I've got a reasonable grasp on it. The most important thing (I feel) about sunlight is that is scatters everywhere and so it comes in through an opening in all directions. Once it's inside, it also bounces around in all directions allowing it to light around corners and such. There's a word for the type of light that is, but I forget it at the moment -_-;; I wanted to build an engine that takes into account the way that natural light disperses through an area and I think I've gotten fairly close to what I want.

Improvements left to make

The first and foremost is the day night cycle. I've already got one, but specifically, I want the light to enter at different intensities depending on where the sun is located at a specific time of day. So, for instance, during the first half of the day, windows that are facing east should get more light than windows that are facing west, and then swap after mid day. I've got the hooks in place so hopefully I'll be able to knock that out in a couple days. I also need the light to travel up and down to different floor levels. So say a window on the second floor can light down a staircase and into the first floor. That's gonna be a bit more difficult, but I don't think it'll be too hard. Lastly, the dispersion of light is a bit rough, and I'd like to smooth it out a bit more. I'll have to tweak some of the numbers but I think I should be able to get that too.

I'll post up another blog once I get something more worth showing done. I don't think I've put up an update that's specifically about the changes I've made to the way player vision works so maybe next week or so I'll put up something having to do with that. The short version is that the player can now look up and down, and will need to do so to look at things above or below. Please feel free to leave comments, ask questions or just tell me how shitty everything is =D

Update

Still open to any SFX submissions for either Brad or Ryan.

Ver 1.25 05/09/2013

Added a lot more BRAD flavor. Also, the fight is a little harder. Maybe a lot. Depends. . .

Download by Clicking Here. Remember to unistall previous versions before installing =)

Ver 1.24

Ver 1.23

Ver 1.22

Ver 1.21

Original Post

Hey duders, a while back I did a game jam and made a stupid little MegaMan X GiantBomb crossover game. I did a poll afterwards to determine which Bombadeer I should create next. It was Vinny -_-;;

Now, from time to time when I have the time, I've been building him out. I've actually got a couple ridiculous twists to his fight, but they're a bit complicated so they're gonna take a while to actually implement the way I want it to work. . .

In the meanwhile, just last night, I had this stupid thought about what a Safety Brad boss fight should be like. . . and I just whipped something up real quick. He doesn't have his own level, and most importantly, I'm missing sound bytes. So I'm callin out to the duder community.

How can you help!?

If anyone could go through some old podcasts/quicklooks/breaking brads and rip out some wav files of Brad cursing or any other bytes that would be appropriately funny for his jumping, landing, dying sound effects and send them my way, it'd be a huge help. I'll go ahead and throw em in and put up some credit for you somewhere. That's it!

So anyway, here's a link to a version of the game that has Brad soundlessly implemented. Knock yourselves out =)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/qsnlow03pmdljk5/MegamanXGiantBomb%20Ver%201.20.zip

Controls are on the blog linked above =)

Point in Polygon you say!?

A point in polygon check is exactly what it sounds like. It's a check to determine whether or not a point lies inside or outside of a given polygon on a 2D plane. These types of checks are fairly common in video games and especially so when dealing with rectangles and circles. A very easy example would be your mouse cursor over any type of interface. Your mouse pointer has a coordinate, and that coordinate is typically being checked against a bunch of polygons (though usually in interfaces they're just rectangles and circles. . . more on that later) to determine whether the cursor should change shape and what should happen when any buttons are depressed.

What up with Rectangles and Circles?

Checking a point against a rectangle or a circle is super easy peasy. For a circle, all you need is the center point of the circle and its radius. You check if the distance between the center point and the point you're checking is greater than the radius of the circle and if it is, not inside. Otherwise. Inside. Done. For a rectangle it's also pretty damn easy in that you just check if the point is within the left and right sides (x) and also within the top and bottom (y) of the rectangle and you're done.

Non-rectangular polygons?

Once you have to start checking against irregular shapes, things get a bit more complicated but not to worry because there's plenty of resources online. The type of check that would work best for your needs depends highly on your specific needs. A small list of the types of things that could determine which methods might work best for you include things such as:

1. Which is more important, speed or accuracy.

2. Whether you're working with floating point numbers or integers.

3. If all your polygons are concave.

4. Whether your polygons have holes in them.

5. The number of polygons you need to check against.

6. The number of points you need to check.

7. Whether or not you will be breaking your complex polygons down into triangles.

There are plenty more factors which should determine what methods you use in your game/program.

Popular methods include

Hmm. . . I was going to write up a bunch of methods, but really. . . it's mostly just math. In most cases involving non-convex, complicated polygons, you'll probably use some form of ray-casting to determine whether your point is inside or not. That's a method where the point in question has a line drawn through it and the number of borders in the polygon is counted to determine whether it is inside (odd) or outside (even) the polygon. There are some issues with this method with the largest being floating point precision issues.

Floating point what now?

This can get super technical and you can find endless reading material on it just by searching Google for "floating point precision".

The super watered down, I don't give a shit about math version is that programming uses different types of containers for numbers. The higher the accuracy of a number you want, the larger the container needs to be. A bit can be a 1 or a 0. A byte can be between 0 through 255. An int can hold -32,768 ~ 32,768 etc. For the calculations that are required when working with decimals and fractions (which we are for point in poly tests with non-rectangular shapes) you use floats and floats are squirrely bastards. They can hold up to 7 digits with a decimal point within somewhere which gives you a pretty damn good range but when you go over that (as you generally do when working with crazy fractions), the numbers can sorta shift around. So, when you do some math one time, you may get 1.234567 but you do the exact same problem later and you could end up with 1.234568 or 1.234566 or seemingly any damn random number filling that last spot that floats can't go beyond. So even though it's a small as all hell error, that tiny amount could mean the difference between a point being in a polygon and not. Soooo. . . if you need to be uber accurate, it could cause issues.

Why. . . Why all this?

I originally just wanted to post about some progress I made today with my game. I had spent around 2 and a half to 3 months working on the vision portion of my game engine to accurately simulate line of sight in a 2D isometric world and after trying a bunch of things, I found that the best way to do it would be to create polygons for in world objects/walls/floors/etc and then test points to see whether things are seen or not against those polygons. Now, the way I'm doing it is different from other 2D games with line of sight in that I didn't just want horizontal line of sight, but vertical as well because it's isometric with multiple vertical floors. Anyway, basically I went from this

to this

During a vision check, it would take almost half a second to finish because I was running over 3 million point in poly checks against 6,539 polygons. I set up the test to take place in manufactured situation that the player probably wouldn't encounter but they might and I'd rather the game not chug if they do. When I first plugged in the debug methods to check exactly how many times it was running the point in poly check, and more importantly, how many of them were hits rather than misses, I was pretty shocked. Less than 0.01% of the checks were returning as hits meaning that 99.99% of the checks were fails. . . I had already set up the method to cull out any polygons that they were nowhere near but I had to do more. What I ended up doing was increasing the fidelity of the array that was populated by the polygons which increased the number of polygons added to arrays from 11,116 to 92,322 but the trade off was close to 3 million point in poly checks. Also, the time it takes to run the method dropped by around 85%. So barring any memory issues, I think I'm on the right track =)

Oh, and the new hit count is around 21% which isn't bad at all in my opinion. I'm fairly decent at FPS games and my hit rate is rarely that high. I mean, because that's what I should be comparing it to right? -_-;;.

So yea, that's it

My quick status update of "Totally reduced the amount of time it takes to run a function today" into this mess. So I'll pretty much end this blog with a big ol "Fuck floating point precision errors!"

I made a silly program to create a baby!

For my friend's baby shower, they had the idea of getting together a bunch of pictures of themselves and cutting out their features to allow party goers to construct predictions on what their baby would look like. They were having trouble getting the various pictures to print out at a normalized size that'd work so me being the computer/art guy, asked if I could help. After sorting through the pictures, I decided I could resize them, but they'd all look like crazy magazine ransom note cutout constructions.

Wouldn't it be better to just make a program where you could choose which features to use and then print them out on a printer instead? So I made this thing.

The husband's features are on the left, wife's on the right and multiple clicks would cycle through available versions. I also added in a couple for fun thingies because why not? I guess it ended up working out okay at the shower =)

It's stupid I know, but I love that we live in a world where this kind of nonsense can just happen =P

In all, the thing took around 6 or so hours to make. Most of the time was spent sifting through pictures and color correcting so that they'd work with each other. I'd say 4 hours on the "art" side with 2 hours on the coding.

So, I finally got around to getting a third monitor.

It's an Asus PA248Q and after about 4 or so hours of use, I have to say, it's a damn fine monitor. The colors seem right (at least to my colorblind eyes), and the swivel/pivot functions are awesome. Also, it has every kind of input you can think of on the back which allowed me to plug it into the DisplayPort on my video card. This allowed me to continue using my two DVi inputs for my Samsung and Wacom monitors and still have my TV plugged in thru HDMI. I guess technically this means I have 4 monitors hooked up but I leave the TV off unless I want to have some video playing in the BG while I work.

It's actually a 50 inch TV but it looks so small -_-;;

In any case, back when I got a second monitor, I couldn't remember how I ever made due with just one, and already I don't think I could go back to two! Honestly though, I did feel I needed the third because I'd always have 8 or 9 windows that needed my attention at any given time along with handwritten notes and I was spending an extra 10~15 seconds every time I lost track of one trying to find it. It may not sound like much, but as any starcraft player will tell you, over the course of a larger period of time, those seconds really begin to add up. Now I get the feeling it'll only be a few more months before I want to get yet another screen. . . 1st world problems indeed.

1920x1200 VS 1920x1080

I'd also like to point out that it's 1920x1200 instead of the more popular 1920x1080 that fits the 16:9 aspect ratio of most movies and tv shows nowadays. 120 more pixels vertically may not sound like much, but it actually has way more impact than you'd think. This is especially true when you use the thing in portrait instead of landscape. It's also interesting in games because you don't realize you're missing that space up top till you get it back. I have no idea when I switched to 16:9 monitors (maybe 3 or 4 years ago with my left side monitor) but I'm diggin' the extra I'm gettin now.

My Gaaaaame~!!

I'm still crankin away -_-;; I've just rediscovered threading and have been working to make things "thread safe" while improving performance. I'm almost done with setting up the vision stuff meaning I'll shortly be getting into the lighting. Lighting may take a while (possibly a month to get it right) so I'm dragging my feet just a little bit because it's so daunting. Though, dragging my feet means rewriting a bunch of stuff that makes everything run smoother so it's not actually a waste of time or anything. I'll hopefully have something worthwhile to post in the coming weeks. =)

A short small update. Pretty much what I've been up to today -_-;;

You can select things with a mouse!

Something that should be super damn basic right? Well, you'd think so until you try to implement it yourself. Up until now, I was using the mouse's position on the grid to determine which object should be selected, but this wasn't exactly a great way to go about things since in any given grid, you can have a floor, an object on the floor, 4 possible walls in each direction and an opening (door/window/hole) or wall object on any of those four walls. So with only which grid space the mouse is on, it'd be very difficult to determine which of any number of objects the player wants to interact with. That being the case, being able to just point at an object and have it be selected is critical to ease of use.

Per Pixel Sprite Selection

Initially, I was looking into per pixel collision detection to determine which item would be selected. The method of working this way is to create a fresh render target each frame and drawing all relevant sprites onto this render target as a solid color. Each sprite would be drawn a different color and given an index number. Next, the render target would be casted into a texture file at which point, you can grab the specific pixel at the location of the mouse pointer. Then you can check the pixel's color against the indexed colors of every sprite you've drawn and use that to determine which sprite the mouse is over. It worked. . . but not in a couple important ways that I wanted it to. The most important being that selecting objects behind existing ones became impossible. So say if there was a large object in front of a smaller one, the one in the back is impossible to select. . . So scratch that one.

Rectangles. It always comes back to Rectangles

So, back to the drawing board. Lucky for me, all objects that are selectable already have heights and widths and my previous work with the level editor also stores each objects modified positions. Using these things, I'm able to construct collision rectangles that exist in the game world and using those, I can check against the cursor to determine if an object is being hovered over by the mouse. While not pixel perfect, I got it working to a pretty solid state of usability as shown in the video. Next I had to tackle the same problem I had with the Per Pixel selection. To do this, I ordered the collision checks between the objects and the mouse from closest to the camera to furthest and then based on whether or not the object in front was an object that is in front of something else, tested the object behind as well. If there are no objects behind, then the first object is the one to be selected. So far, it's working reasonably well and I do feel there may be some problems that might arise in the future (especially with huge objects that take multiple spaces), I think I've got a pretty solid foundation to work off of. That's about it for now.

The level editor's functions

I've put some more work into fleshing out the level editor. Namely, I've added options to begin adding windows, wall objects (posters, clocks, basically anything that can go on a wall that I want the player to be able to interact with), wall/floor decals (visual things that don't have interaction applied to them like blood splatter, bullet holes, cracks, dirt, etc) and most importantly, a settings menu. The reason why the settings of specific objects is important is because this ability to retrieve an object's settings, and modify them is critical to being able to create proper saved levels. This way, when I save a level, I can save each individual object's state (damage, open status, placement, anything else I want to add) instead of just its location in the game world.

Settings Implementation

If you look at the prior doors video, you will see that when I selected doors as the object to manipulate, a graphical interface of a couple buttons popped up. While this worked fine, it had a major problem in that every door only had the same options available and those options were only toggleable (sp?) on and off rather than any numerical settings. The way I got around this is for every object in the game to be able to have an Interface applied to it that allows the retrieval of a list of settings and also for that same list of settings to be modified and then applied to the object. So when I select doors, the door appropriate settings become available for modification. I can also go so far as to giving different types of doors, different additional options. For instance, if a door is a sliding door instead of a swing open type door, the bulk of the options pertaining to which way a door will swing when opened will be moot so they just won't exist for the sliding door. This type of personalized list of settings can be placed onto any object in the game as long as I decide to apply the Interface to that object.

The importance of settings to the saving/loading of levels

I've been trying to wrap my head around how I was going to save not just the layout and positions of the objects in the game, but also the current health, open or closed, locked or unlocked, position and all that other important information as well and implementing the settings is sort of a two birds with one stone deal. Now when I get around to saving the levels and loading them up, I can just retrieve the settings from each individual object and save that information. When loading up a level, it can then implement the status of every object as it places them into the game world. Yay!

Search Function

Another new little bit that I felt was important to the level editor is the ability to search through the available options. I'm going to assume that later on, I'll have a ton of assets and it'd be painful to have to manually scroll through everything to find what I want. So, I went ahead and implemented a search feature. In the future, I plan to further break down the search results to specific types of the searched item or maybe even display a list of results to choose from rather than just regulating the ones that you can scroll to in the editor. This may seem pretty easy (and if you know what you're doing, it is) but it was a pretty big ordeal for me.

Text Input

XNA does not inherently support keyboard input. It supports the chatpad (yay?) but unless I decide to pull into the game XBL stuff (which I don't want to), there's nothing built in for getting text. The first thing you'd think to do is to just check the keyboard state for every letter and determine if a key was up the previous update cycle, and is now down indicating that a key was pressed. Then you could figure out which key was pressed but the problem with that is that the game will only update 60 times a second and there's a chance that there might be slowdown causing keys to be missed. A bigger problem still is that what if there are multiple keys pressed during one update? Most people can type faster than 1 key per 1/60th a second. Maybe not consistently, but there are times when you're typing and the difference in time between two key presses is smaller than 16ms. I'm already rambling but long story short, I set up a text buffer that would catch every key and then log them in the right order. Shit wasn't easy, but nothing ever is until you learn how to do it.

Windows, Wall Objects and Decals

I've also added the above mentioned types to the editor for placement and settings. Windows is self explanatory but the other two may not be -_-;; Wall Objects are any objects that are placed upon a wall that can be interacted with by the player or other game entities. These are things like paintings, barricades, Shelving, etc. Decals (floor and wall) are art only things that can be placed in the game world. This would be things like bullet holes, scuffs, dirt, blood, whatever else. These things could also be implemented in a way so that the player could initiate an action on them such as cleaning something up or whatnot (and they also add visual obstructions such as if you were to paint a window black) but they are things that can not be picked up or used in any physical manner.

Modify an object already in the world

One of the last things I did was implement object modification. Before, whenever I wanted an object to have different options set, I would have to create that object and have it replace the existing one. Due to the way I've got the whole settings thing (above) implemented, now I can select an object and directly modify its state. Wooo! Of course, it wasn't a big hassle to copy an object's settings, then change what I want, then place it back into the world but this just feels nicer. With the added bonus of it changing on the fly in the game world so I can see what it's going to look like.

Back to Work

Anyway, just a quick update. I'm going to get back into it now. I've also been putting in some work on adding Vinny to that Megaman X GiantBomb thing from a while back but since I'm not doing a jam type thing like before, it's mostly super short sessions where I'll draw a sprite, implement an attack, brainstorm ideas. . . that kind of thing. I haven't dropped it, it's still coming eventually but since most of the work is bits and pieces, there isn't much to show. I did just implement an attack that I think ya'll will enjoy. . . maybe. . . maybe hate. I dunno. This is a boring wall of text for most, but hopefully some of you'll get a bit of enjoyment/insight from this madness.

Doors for days and days

I've been working on doors for the past week and half or so straight whilst also modifying and tweaking other areas like vision. . . Actually, I've completely rehauled the way my vision checks are ordered which make them work better, but slower. In any case, the focus of this update is doors -_-;;

Door Properties?

Something I've sort of noticed in games is that doors aren't really all that involved. In most cases, they are either impenetrable invisible walls to areas that aren't accessible or just a way of blocking progress until an objective is met or a key found. Apart from opening and closing, there doesn't seem to be all that much emphasis placed on their existence. Also, in isometric games, they have even further reduced properties. What I aim to do is have doors function as they would in the real world. First thing I need is for them to be able to operate and function like a real door which includes the following.

1. Have an outside and an inside. The outside is considered to be the side of the door that requires a key to unlock.
2. Optionally be a right handed or left handed door to control which way the door swings when opened.
3. Have proper vision blocking properties. Doors when opened or closed should not be able to be seen through. This is done automatically in First Person and Third Person games but I have yet to see it done in an isometric top down game.
4. Be locked and unlocked from the inside and require either a key or lock picking from the outside.
5. Have the path that the door takes when opened or closed be taken into account. You cannot open a door that swings towards you without taking a step back and you also cannot magically close a door that is swung open away from you whilst standing outside (you can't close a door you can't reach).

As of now, I've tackled 1, 2, 3 and 4 and am currently working on the 5th step. While building out the door class, I've built in a way to take into account the area the door swings through when opened or closed but haven't yet implemented anything there yet because I still need to figure out how I want the player to be able to control which way they move when they are interacting with a door. Another reason why this door swing area is so important is that when you barracade a door by moving furniture in the door's path, the door shouldn't be able to just swing through it willy nilly.

Some Research

There's actually a whole lot of information out there on doors and things like building codes. Some small interesting examples I found are things like how in any commercially used building, exit doors always have to open towards the outside. This is so that if there's ever a situation where people are crowding the door to exit, they'll be able to push it open rather than all be stuck because it can't be pulled open due to people pushing from behind. Also, it turns out when doors are placed, they typically open so that the door is flush against a wall when in the open position for space reasons.

Notice how all the doors when opened are up against a wall. Maybe I'm just thick, but I never noticed this before and ever since I've been focusing on doors, I'm seeing this everywhere I go. Especially in smaller spaces such as bathrooms. Another small tidbit is that front doors to houses tend to almost always open towards the outside as well. Though the reason for this is because it's harder to break down a door in through the frame than it is in the direction that it opens. That's something I'll really have to take into account for door breaking scenarios that don't involve prying it open with a crowbar or some such nonsense =P

Implementation

So, once I decided that I needed to have doors that open in every which way and be shown in those open states as well, I had to figure out how many different states the doors would be in. So I whipped this up.

It's super crude but coupled with the excel file it's attached to, I had all the different properties of the door in it's open and closed states. I basically needed 12 different door states. (I think I'll eventually need to make doors that swing open a full 180 degrees instead of just the 90.) I worked it all out to where I actually only needed a very small amount of art assets to be able to draw a door in all these positions. It actually ended up being just this.

The back end of the frame, the front end of the frame and two door versions. One with the knob on either side. Armed with just these sprites, I could create doors in all 12 positions listed above =) The frame has to be split as shown because of the way the door needs to appear above the back part of the frame yet behind the front part of the frame and also to work properly with the stenciling I've got set up to create holes in the walls that can be seen through when rendering everything together.

Now that I had the damn things represented visually, I needed to figure out a way to get them to block vision properly. Br properly, I also mean that the player should be able to see through doors in the fashion you would in real life. For example, the door above has a window, so the player should be able to see into the room the door is placed on, and also through the window when the door is opened and the player is looking in that door's direction. Well, I won't get technical because I'm not sure I could really explain how I did it without first explaining the way my vision works in game, but I got it working as you can see in the video =P

I'll annotate the video eventually, but for now, you can see the various things I've been talking about at work. Doors that open in multiple directions. That can be locked and unlocked from the inside but not from the outside. Doors that can be seen through to a certain extent (the characters are placeholder and will be taller and proportional to the doors eventually.). Etc. . .

Still to be done

There's still a damn lot of work I need to put into the doors before they're complete but I feel I'm making decent progress. While I mull over how to allow the player to have full control over which direction they move in when opening and closing doors, I will be implementing double doors and sliding doors. The way the class is set up, they can also just straight up be windows so I may try putting one or two of those in to make sure they function properly. In any case, progress! It's been quite some time since I posted anything about what I've been working on, so I thought doors might be an interesting little bit to write up. Comments, questions and suggestions welcome =)

Mouse Look

Just a real quickie, Rastamen asked about mouse look, and it's in the game. Here's a short vid. Very short.

Voting Finished

The voting for the next Boss has been completed. Vinny Wins -_-;; Whenever I have some free time, I'll put together a Vinny Boss fight next =)

Free Game

or at least, free boss fight =P I did a quick and dirty game jam that I sort of posted updates on here.

It's my first time attempting to build a game out for distribution so I'm not entirely sure if it'll work and how it works on other people's comps. If it doesn't work, please let me know along with whatever errors you have. If it does work, drop me a note on what you think =)

Download Ver 1.24

Controls

Keyboard and 360 controller supported

Z(keyboard) or C(keyboard), X or B on controller to shoot.

X(keyboard) or A on controller to jump.

arrow keys or d-pad for movement.

down + jump to slide.

Enter or Start to skip.

I'm not sure if there's a download limit on dropbox, but that's how I'm sharing it for now. Enjoy!

Here is a vid of the game. I highly recommend you just play through it yourself since the entire thing is under 5 min but if you can't for whatever reason, you can still watch it here =P

Version Update Information Below

SPOILER WARNING: Click here to reveal hidden content.

If you've already installed, you must uninstall before installing the new version.

Update V1.4

added respawn on game over screen if you lose.

tweaked ryan's attack so there are no impossible situations.

V1.5

adjusted attack a bit more

V1.07

lowered the low platforms a bit

V1.08

reduced lifetime of ryddok's bullets

V1.09

added start select arrow

V1.10

attempted to be compatible with more video cards by dropping DX10

V1.11

fixed various bugs such as music continuing to play after ending and also being able to fire while READY is flashing

Added a SLIIIIIDEEEE!!!! Down + Jump!

V1.12

C button also fires weapon to allow both left/right combinations of jump/fire

V1.14

Balance changes to keep things more fair.

Ryddok no longer moves before the player can.

Humming birds further spread apart to allow dodging through any combination.

Boundaries changed to prevent extreme travel through walls for Ryddok.

Full collision with all platforms.

V1.15 ~ V1.18

Made a large amount of changes to the structure of the program to support extra bosses and potential levels.

Changed the camera to have movement functions

Begun implementing basics of Vinny as a boss character

Added a select screen in which currently only Ryan is selectable.

V1.19

Quickly added a difficulty selection. You can now play the game on Easy. I'll prolly change the attack patterns a bit based on which difficulty is selected but for now, it just reduces the damage taken by Mega Man when hit.