Updates, thoughts and ramblings on whatever the hell it is that I'm trying to make.
Some of the time I actually make a somewhat useful program.
Most of the time it's about making games.
All of the time I'm talking to myself.
Should've given the boat and tank double their current texture size, they are just way too pixelated when scaled with the rest of the scene elements.
Lack of vibrant colour, was going to do explosion effects with those iconic swirls, but again just ran out of time.
Some grass on small cliff shelfs around the tower would've helped I think as well.
And getting proper rigging for the characters to I could've posed them more dynamically.
Ah well live and learn, it was a fun experience!
I got a lot of assets now, enough to get the ball rolling on a game perhaps?
Yep, so I figured I needed to get back to being productive and that competing in the contest would be good for me to help build up momentum and practice.
My entry is a planned depiction of the fictionalized Normandy Beach Landings in WW2 ( Think Saving Private Ryan, or Medal of Honor, or Call of Duty for video game sources ) remixed with the Legend of Zelda The Wind Waker art style. I'm probably biting off more than I can chew, but it's good to challenge yourself - and plus I should have a pretty good set of art assets to use for further use.
I was honestly surprised that I didn't see any other entry using a military shooter as one of their bases, but perhaps people are tired of it, and other games lend themselves better to colourful stylized interpretations.
Probably the easiest bit of work so far, still have to do the environment textures, characters, vehicles and special effects. 7 more days to go.
Well for the last 5 days or so I've been diligently working on the de zoomify downloading program. Now it is finally working with all the features that I planned it to have : batch downloading, user specified file formats, user specified download folder and renaming mask, and most recently : the ability to find zoomify folder links on any given webpage.
However it doesn't have an updating progress bar, or any sort of visual indicator of download progress because the application is not multithreaded. Just starting to read the documentation on threading is disorienting, let alone implementing it. I would really like to implement threading so that users who aren't running the program as a debug build in visual studio can see the progress of the download and what it is currently doing. But as it stands now, I was extremely busy before starting the project and I don't know if I have the time or resources to continue developing a feature I have no idea how long it will take to implement.
For now I'm calling it done, having served the purpose I created it for - although it's not in the best of shape. Anyways the source code is freely available : https://github.com/RedRogueXIII/DeZoomify_NET I would like to eventually return to it and add threading, but for now I don't know.
Anyways, at the moment I'm looking for a way to batch compress lossless quality pngs, since I now have 2 GBs of high res images that could be much smaller.
As for the story behind why I started this program in the
first place; I'll give you some background, I'm an addict for collecting image
references for rare guns. One of my hobbies is to create 3D models of
guns for use in video games, so it's good to have references on hand for when I want to start a
new project.
A 3D model I made of an M1A1 Thompson, a submachine gun used by allied forces in WW2
Cowan's Auction house is currently selling the Richard L. Wray Collection, a collection of old, extremely rare, antique, machine guns in excellent high resolution
and beautiful photography. Trend being that after the auction is done,
these images will disappear into the void means I couldn't just bookmark it and come back later. So I tried to download them, one by one, finding and figuring out how to use the original web based implementations of Lovasoa's Dezoomify.
Over two hours I got the images for four lots. There is one hundred lots in the auction. So my options are to either take forever to do it manually or actually use my brain and put together something that will save me tons of time now and any other time I would need it later. I'm also on the lookout for a programming job, so having experience and a useful program to show definitely helps.
Anyways for the TL;DR : OM NOM NOM NOM MACHINE GUN REFS.
For the last three days I've been writing a program
to download images that are used in the web service Zoomify. Zoomify
splits high resolution images into tiles and only loads them as needed,
so it's pain to get the whole high resolution image by downloading the
tiles manually.
The program, which I'm calling DeZoomify Downloader is being written in C# using Visual Express and also up on Github: https://github.com/RedRogueXIII/DeZoomify_NET
. I've done a smaller .NET application before, but trying to go all out
on this one, with preference saving, batch handling, file format
options, and a lot of fancy usability options.
At the
moment it probably isn't too stable - I know I haven't been sanitizing
or checking my inputs, so it's not extensively bug tested. Oh well it's
still not close to having all the features I want it to have, but at
least it's basic functionality works at the moment. ( Major credit goes
to Lovasoa and his simpler web based version : https://gist.github.com/lovasoa/770310 who's work helped served as an understanding of how to get the images in the first place.) So still plenty of time to go back and fix and potential crap outs in can have.
Just
today I got batch download working, so there are still two major
features I would like to add still: finding all zoomify image links on a
given webpage, and multithreading the application so the damn progress
bar updates while it's downloading and it doesn't do the "program is not
responding, uh oh better kill the app" business while it's busy
downloading megabytes of information.
I don't know if it's worth going into detail with any of the mechanics of the program so far, seeing as how the dezoomify process isn't something I came up with, and how almost everything else is handled by the extensive .NET libraries. Also the entire source code is free to view, download, modify, and run from Github. Perhaps the process of identifying and pulling of the zoomify links from webpages that are displayed to users may be a nice topic for a blog post. That or a horror story of me trying to learn multithreading with 50 tabs open of different "First Must Read Articles About Multithreading".
Geez, so much headache just to make an updating progress bar.
I was entertaining the idea of a separate blog just for non game development stuff, but eh I wouldn't post frequently in either one so all it goes in one blog.
Well there was another long break in posts, but unusually that was caused by me being too busy to post anything. Quite a nice change from having a long break with very little done.
As the educational game stands, we have the demo level done - all functionality, just a few tweaks and customizations of Unity's poor GUI and it'll be ready to go. Now we can build levels relatively quickly, so the only impediments are actually coming up with the level designs, and making any outstanding art assets ( 3 environments & some misc models).
Aside from that though, I've been putting together my resume. Got to start looking for a stable job, because as fun as game development is, it pays poorly compared to the time invested in it.
Hey finally have a neat, err boring video to show off the game's progress so far. Well it should be nice to gather my thoughts/ self-critique on where to improve.
Some things right off the bat:
- Spelling, grammar errors and in general bad dialogue.
- Tutorial message popups would be nice.
- Have unique asset backgrounds when using unique systems (phone, newspaper, computer, etc)
- effects code is actually a big mess that I need to reorganize
- player/location management is also a mess that needs to be thought out and reorganized
- Awkward victory/end screen, needs something better
- Items are usable from outside the intended perspective (only when zoomed in should they be usable - I could try encapsulating them in a collider that zooms in when clicked, that might work.)
- Interactable objects need some sort of highlighting when mouse over them in the world.
- Clicking on buttons sometimes activates the button and the item underneath it, this shouldn't happen
- I have a event system complete with it's own mission and objective system for parallel mission progress, instead of the singular linear mission system currently used. Would be nice to switch it up.
- Work on more generic and reusable triggers and locking behaviors.
- Test/ Integrate have a plan for eventual localization of all in game text.
- Build a Esc/ pause menu
- Build an options menu
- Ensure that the game's menus work on different resolutions.
- Saving and loading level progress and achievement.
- World is bland and dull.
- The fact that the current environment still needs more polish, but there are still 3 other environments to be done.
- Lighting is fullblown in places and needs to be redone and optimized.
- No sound effects or any audio stimulus aside from repetitive background music.
I'm very sure the list of shit suxs - improve it, can and does go on. At the moment I can't think of any more to elaborate on, but if anyone is actually reading this I'd love to hear anything about what you hate or don't like about this.
Well it's been pretty quiet the last few months, but progress has picked up in the last few weeks. We have a functional demo, although there are numerous graphical bugs that I am currently working on.
I've been writing my own systems documentation - something I should have done months ago. It serves as a good way to communicate how my systems are intended to be used, and forces me to sit down and think hard about my design and execution choices.
With the all the gameplay systems set and the necessary code and functionality ready, designing additional levels for the complete game shouldn't take that long. However there are still three additional 3D environments incomplete, so those will be big time sinks. Oh well, I've always found making art to be more enjoyable than programming.
As for right today, I made a high quality phone asset that will likely be used often:
Creating it's own drawing coordinates and GUI system may be troublesome, but I don't actually know if it'll be a requirement. We could probably get away with leaving it as a static background item while just using the regular GUI commands to make the illusion of icons on the phone's screen.
