2009 updates
2008 updates

Object type OBJECT_DRINK was added too (why didn't I add it earlier??). Drinks are basically the same as food, except they satisfy thirst instead of hunger. And just like foods, drinks can be set up to give players time-limited buffs too.

Food buffs! It's now possible to boost str/dex/int/vit by eating certain foods which will give you extra power for a limited ammount of time. To eat food, you must first be hungry though. This is to prevent players from eating unlimited food buffs and getting insane powers. And to increase realism too, ofcourse. For this to work, I had to write some code for handling item modifiers (a modifier is, say, +5 strength), but it was relatively painless. Modifiers can now also be applied to weapons and armor.

A new TARGET window was added to the game interface. This comes in handy when targeting players/mobs/NPC's. The target window displays some useful information on the current target, and the options to examine or attack. Clicking "examine" is equal to typing "look at" in a standard MUD, and it displays a short description of the current target. This is something that's new as well! For example, examining Rickey who owns the motorcycle store displays: I love these kind of details in a game, and I think it's great for the purpose of exploration. My goal is to have every mob and object carry a short description or background about itself, so that the player can walk around and just explore things and learn more about the game world.

Here we are on the dance floor inside the nightclub. The disco lights are simple lightmaps moving around in circles. The effect is extremely simply programmed, but looks really good in motion (imho). The dance floor tiles are animated as well, and sort of lights up between frames. The place is grooooooovy!

This is outside the nightclub. The bouncers look a bit weird, because they're both faced north. This is the initial position all mobs are loaded at. It's simple to solve, but I haven't bothered to do it yet. And, yeah, I'm riding a motorcycle with my test character! Cool, huh?

Standing outside The Church of Jesus Christ (yes, I will have to come up with a better name for this). Outside the church is a huge cross with TV screens displaying the message "jesus is here". Those are simply animated tiles but look very cool.

Here we are, spilling blood in the house of God! And cursing too, oh my... More TV-screens, crosses made of neon light (again, animated tiles), an altar which looks a bit weird... I might have to change that. The benches are not the best either. They look more like big wooden planks that have been laid across the floor. The 3D engine doesn't do interiors very good yet... I may have to redo the map format and the way things are rendered if things get worse than this. I'm not entirely satisfied.

This is the park, which is named after a Skinny Puppy album - "Too Dark Park". This is supposed to be the newbie zone, where all new players can level up kill things like dogs and rats without worrying about the difficulty too much. I might make it really big, so that higher level players can have some fun in here as well.

Here I'm on the motorcycle again on my way out of the park. The water under the bridge is animated by blending a "water" tile with the "ground" tile, and then constantly moving the water tile horizontally in a looping manor (hmm... didn't I mention this in an earlier post? :-)). The trees are flat tiles drawn a bit above the ground. It's probably not the most realistic trees ever seen, but that's the only way I can figure out how to do it with the 3D engine's limitations and all.

#slap
You slap yourself in the face.
$n slaps $mself in the face. Weird...
You slap $N in the face. Biotch!
$n slaps you in the face. Biotch!
$n slaps $N in the face. Biotch!
17
~

Here we have the GUI in full effect! In the trainer window, for example, the "+" buttons can be pressed to call the function Train(), telling the game what we want to train. Functions are assigned to buttons by using function pointers, which are just awesome! To add a new button to a window, I just do something like this: GUIAddButtonWidget(WINDOW_ID, xpos, ypos, "Name", Train, parameter); That would call the function void Train(int parameter) automatically when the button is clicked. It's just amazing!

On a killing spree in a dark alley somewhere. The mobs drop items randomly as they're killed. You can also see the nice gunfire effect made from particles. I'm very proud of it. :) The big white thing below the player is a mob respawning. I'd like to change it for some kind of lighting effect later, so that mobs will appear like in the arrival scenes from the Terminator movies. :)

This is just a nice screenshot. My two test-spells are cooling down in the upper left corner of the screen, particle rain is coming down "from the sky" into the screen, and Really Tough Guy (a mob) is hit by a fireball explosion. The spotlights on the sidewalk are not coming from the boxes in the air above, but are instead lightmaps drawn below the boxes, making it look like they're coming from above. I like that effect very much! I think it gives the street a gloomy atmosphere.

I made it possible to walk inside buildings, although I'm gonna have to improve this a little later. It works like this: the map editor can now flag certain tiles as EFFECT_INDOORS, which means the game should handle that tile as being inside something (a building, for example). When the player steps onto a tile that has been flagged as indoors, only that tile and other indoors-flagged tiles are drawn, giving the impression of standing in a room inside somewhere. Did that make any sense? Basically, what happens is that when you walk inside a room, you only "see" that room and everything outdoors is black. Maybe the screenshot on the right explains it better!

(click for bigger)

And here's a screenshot displaying the fireball spell in action! Well, it's not exactly a fireball.... more like a fiery explosion. But it looks awesome! And it's made up of just 90 particles which shoot out in a 360 degrees radius forming a circle of fire.

Here's a screenshot of a shop in action. In this example I'm accessing the shop by right-clicking the floppy disk in my inventory, which I have assigned to the test shop. As I mentioned yesterday, anything can be a shop (both objects and mobs).

I also started experimenting with a simple particle engine and a lightmap after reading about those techniques last night. This is really fun right now, because I'm learning something new everyday! I tried to create a smoke effect using a particle system, but it ended up looking like really intense fire instead. I'll put that on hold for now. But I added lightmaps to the game (which I by the way found here), and I made it possible to place "lights" with the map editor. Looks pretty cool, especially with a futuristic blue tone!

This is the earliest screenshot I could find, and it's from when I had worked on the game for just a few days. The graphics were still entirely 2D and I felt the map looked really "flat" since the view is top-down. The reason why I choosed to go top-down was simply because I can't draw graphics. It's easier to draw everything from the top. For characters, I just have to draw the head and the shoulders. For animation, I just rotate the shoulders a little bit to make it look like they're moving.

This is the same version as in the previous screenshot, only with somewhat improved graphics and a dialogue function added. The mobs didn't say much though, except for "bring it on bitch" and "aaaaaaargh!". I'm toying with idea of making mobs communicate with some kind of AI, to make the world come alive more.

This is from when I added a 3D perspective to the game, and had to make the 2D maps tilemaps use a Z dimension too, and not just X and Y. I borrowed, or *AHERM* stole this idea from the first two GTA games. While this screenshot doesn't look like much, adding 3D to the game improved it a lot. But it also made map-creation a lot more difficult since the editor I've written is still 2D. There's a lot of guessing and trial and error involved in making maps at the moment.

This is from when I added items (objects) to the game. You can also see that GL fog and lighting is available now too, although it doesn't look entirely right. The first item I added was a floppy disc that is flagged as "consumable". Yes, you can eat the floppy disks. Fun, right?? :-) In this screenshot there are 2083 active objects in the game world. I just wanted to test how many I could add before it crashed. As a matter of fact, it didn't crash at all. It can handle an infinite ammount of objects! The only limit is the computer's memory.

This is from the map editor, here in "free float mode" which activates when pressing SPACE. This is just a preview mode though, but when in this mode I can zoom in, out, go up, down, left, right and rotate around all three axises to see what the map looks like from every angle. This helps a lot when I'm trying to make a map, as the editor is limited to just a top-down 2D view for the time being.

And for the final screenshot for today is my attempt at making a small street with buildings using the map editor. Pretty amazing what can be done with just 8 tiles of graphics, no? The tiles are (1)grass, (2)concrete, (3)bricks, (4)window, and (5-8)street lines. The windows are placed and drawn as a second layer upon the "main" layer. I call the second layer the "decorative" layer. It can be used for placing flowers on the ground, hanging a sign on a wall, etc etc.