My Adventure Game Engine - Making Way For Adventure Engine 2

[smartazz]

Just saw the video on Youtube, looking pretty good

[RetroMan]

The reason why MIDI is so small, is that it is left to your devices to make the music, which IIRC usually means inferior quality.

Not necessarily.

As Robin points out midi uses hardware to produce sound. But unlike the old SID chip in the C64 which totally synthesized sounds, now most midi applications rely on using soundfonts. If you have a cheezy soundfont, you'll get cheesy sound. The SoundBlaster cards were the first to pioneer the use of soundfonts and now they've become a de facto standard for practically every audio card available.

If you go here: http://www.personalcopy.com/home.htm and download the Unison.sf2.gz soundfont (you'll need 7zip or similar to unarchive it) and install it on your system as the default soundfont, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised... Unison has very good samples and I've used it on numerous occasions in my own compositions.

I'm working on a SECRET PROJECT that relies heavily on sound to set the moods and tempo of the game...

BTW, Jasoco, I really like your retro "Earthbound" motif... very nice.

I wish you continued success on your project and look forward to playing it in the future!

Cheers!

[EDIT] Sorry about the double post...

[matthewburk]

Are you still working on this? I want to see a new demo. I hope you haven't abandoned this because of 3D lust

[Jasoco]

Why wouldn't I be? This project is my baby ever since High School.

The 0.6.x conversion is pretty much done. I haven't seen any old bugs related to 0.5.0 in a while so I think it's all fine.

Actually I started the 3D project because I wanted something to use as my logo display for my Adventure game. It eventually evolved into what you see now. (I made an old DOS QBASIC game in the 90's that had a 3D rotating logo at startup that I wanted to recreate again.)

And I'm working on a download system based on one of the file downloading frameworks that I can use for eventual expansion or whatever. Not sure yet. It works fine so far. I have it downloading an image (One of the JPG's of the iPad from Apple's front page. I needed a large file to use to display the downloading long enough.) and then displaying it on screen when it's done. Works great in a small amount of code. Of course I'll need to figure out a real-world use for it in my game engine.

[Jasoco]

Ugh. This damn bug is bugging the crap out of me.

I'm having a silent crash somewhere in my code with no explanation as to why it's happening. No error on screen. I've narrowed it down to my explosion system. (When a bomb explodes or an enemy dies, or whatever) But I can't find it in there.

I finally forced it to give me an error in the console and an OS X crash report window. It said "Bus Error". Bus error. What? The words "Bus Error" printed to the console.

It's unreliable too. I can't force it to crash every time. Some times it'll crash every time in the same place. Sometimes it refuses to. Or it'll crash elsewhere. What could a bus error be? The Bus Error only happens if I overload stuff. Not during the other crash that happens most of the time.

I am offering my current project to see if the big guys behind the curtain can look at it for a minute. (Audio is disabled and excluded of course for size reasons)

Instructions:
The enemies are on the second screen. Run through the game and past the house until you see the path go into the woods. Press S before switching to the other screen so you can just load it later from there. (It's just easier if you're gonna be doing a lot of troubleshooting.)
Press B to place a bomb.
Press E to create a debug set of enemies surrounding a bomb. (You'll notice I'm having trouble actually making the bombs work. They don't always kill every enemy.)

Sometimes if you press E and the spawn point is off screen, it'll crash. Sometimes not, but the bomb doesn't get created. It's giving me a headache. And I wish I could figure out why it happens, and why it doesn't give me any kind of useful error. I mean come on!!!

Edit: New Demo in newest post... -->

[TechnoCat]

Yeah, I sworded the barrel near spawn and it silent crashed. Super sexy menu though. And the clip scene has a nice transition in.

[bmelts]

Okay, here's request number one from your humble big guy behind the curtain: STOP USING THE DEBUG VARIABLE. Call it something, anything, but "debug". Lua has debug already set as a global variable, and it's one that LÖVE requires to print its errors. The reason it's just crashing on you with no information? THAT'S BECAUSE YOU'RE CHANGING DEBUG. DON'T.

This is "fixed", as it were, in the repository, but regardless, it's just bad practice to change that variable in Lua, unless you're setting it to false because you don't need any debugging facilities. LÖVE does. Don't change it.

As for your mysterious crash, it looks like your game's getting caught up in a race condition with your scripts attempting to access something that's already been deleted. But that's just what I'm getting from the traceback. There's no way I'm delving through all that code right now.

[rhezalouis]

Here are some remarks, sorry for not being helpful with the crash.
===Bug?===

1. game closed at
   • pushing barrel (instead of stabbing it)
   • stepping inn's door
   • stepping shed's door (shed key obtained)
   • pressing 'e' outside the forest
   • turn on debug text (pressing 'd') when there's a dropable on screen
2. On the forest, I moved to the right bottom section so that the spawned bomb+monsters are off screen and pressed 'e'. The application didn't crash but the bomb wasnt spawned (but the bomb counter was decreased).
3. If the game crashed after meeting zoey in the forest, at restart, zoey was somehow standing in town shouting "please help me" and the "save zoey" task in the forest was replayable infinitely.
4. I have tried this 5+times: I killed the monster from the right to the bottom to the left, using only bombs. And the rain won't stop while zoey keeps to be paranoid even there was no monster present in the forest.

===Notes===

1. Wow, Kristen Stewart slipped into the house from the bottom of the house . I think you should move her as soon the sprite's top border reached the house's bottom.
2. The title is not in style with the particle and the font. I think using your bmp font at size 30+ might suffice.
3. You do have a nice menu, I like it since you issued it for the first time. The particle is good looking, it reminds me of the bokeh effect. But, I think it needs adjustment somehow [the position?] because it's quite annoying when player read the menu info.
4. [game.lua]I think you should move the x, y in

   Code: Select all

   p:setPosition(20, screenH - 20)

   to somewhere off the screen on the right bottom (e.g. screenW+20, screenH+20) so that on the first start(), the particle is not drawn on that "holder" position. It's not visible, though.
5. drawHeartGuage? Do you intentionally alter the word "gauge"?

P.S. I tried to printf some text using your bmp font:

Code: Select all

  gr.printf("451.0", 0, 80, 451.0, "right")
  gr.printf("450.7", 0, 100, 450.7, "right")
  gr.printf("450.5", 0, 120, 450.5, "right")
  gr.printf("450.1", 0, 140, 450.1, "right")
  gr.printf("450.0", 0, 160, 450.0, "right")

In case the limit has fraction, if it's greater than 0.5, a bit of the font divider color is draw to the right of every char, and vice versa. Don't tell me it's unique to my PC... . Here's the screen capture:

There's a violet lining on a side of the font if the printf limit parameter is not round

Capture.PNG (1.46 KiB) Viewed 4475 times

[Jasoco]

Okay, here's request number one from your humble big guy behind the curtain: STOP USING THE DEBUG VARIABLE. Call it something, anything, but "debug". Lua has debug already set as a global variable, and it's one that LÖVE requires to print its errors. The reason it's just crashing on you with no information? THAT'S BECAUSE YOU'RE CHANGING DEBUG. DON'T.

I feel like a Grade-A moron! I replaced it with debugVar and now I finally get errors! All along that was my problem! I wish Löve had told me that it was reserved or something but whatever. Now I get an error. It should help me now. Thanks for that. Thanks. I did not know debug was reserved.

As for your mysterious crash, it looks like your game's getting caught up in a race condition with your scripts attempting to access something that's already been deleted. But that's just what I'm getting from the traceback. There's no way I'm delving through all that code right now.

I will look when I get home. But I'd been having bombs not kill all enemies next to it. I need to do some rewriting anyway.

Here are some remarks, sorry for not being helpful with the crash.
===Bug?===

1. game closed at
   • pushing barrel (instead of stabbing it)
   • stepping inn's door
   • stepping shed's door (shed key obtained)
   • pressing 'e' outside the forest
   • turn on debug text (pressing 'd') when there's a dropable on screen
2. On the forest, I moved to the right bottom section so that the spawned bomb+monsters are off screen and pressed 'e'. The application didn't crash but the bomb wasnt spawned (but the bomb counter was decreased).
3. If the game crashed after meeting zoey in the forest, at restart, zoey was somehow standing in town shouting "please help me" and the "save zoey" task in the forest was replayable infinitely.
4. I have tried this 5+times: I killed the monster from the right to the bottom to the left, using only bombs. And the rain won't stop while zoey keeps to be paranoid even there was no monster present in the forest.

The first three are problems with my audio disabling variable. I exclude the audio files to save space and turn music and sound off, but for some reason it still tries to play them when they're played via scripts. (As opposed to ones that play when I swing the sword or shoot an arrow or whatever) They can be ignored. The problem I was having wasn't in the house anyway. (Edit: It was because instead of calling my playSFX() function to play the sound, I call the love.audio.play() function which won't work since in the versions you guys have, audio files are not included nor are they loaded. My bad. Silly oversight. Easy fix for future demos.)

The one with the invisible bombs is something I noticed yesterday. I don't know why it happens. I'm looking into it. LOL

The rain bug is known. Sometimes only 9 enemies show up on screen and a 10th (The number you have to kill) will spawn somewhere else unknown. If you leave and come back you can kill one more to stop it. And yes, the rain is buggy. Weather needs to be redone.

===Notes===

1. Wow, Kristen Stewart slipped into the house from the bottom of the house . I think you should move her as soon the sprite's top border reached the house's bottom.
2. The title is not in style with the particle and the font. I think using your bmp font at size 30+ might suffice.
3. You do have a nice menu, I like it since you issued it for the first time. The particle is good looking, it reminds me of the bokeh effect. But, I think it needs adjustment somehow [the position?] because it's quite annoying when player read the menu info.
4. [game.lua]I think you should move the x, y in

   Code: Select all

   p:setPosition(20, screenH - 20)

   to somewhere off the screen on the right bottom (e.g. screenW+20, screenH+20) so that on the first start(), the particle is not drawn on that "holder" position. It's not visible, though.
5. drawHeartGuage? Do you intentionally alter the word "gauge"?

I know about the z-index problem with characters and doors. I can fix easily.

Graphics are placeholders. Not final. At all.

The menu is a nice thing to have for now while I play around with what I want a final product to look like.

And I can't spell so that's why gauge is spelled wrong. LOL

P.S. I tried to printf some text using your bmp font:

Code: Select all

  gr.printf("451.0", 0, 80, 451.0, "right")
  gr.printf("450.7", 0, 100, 450.7, "right")
  gr.printf("450.5", 0, 120, 450.5, "right")
  gr.printf("450.1", 0, 140, 450.1, "right")
  gr.printf("450.0", 0, 160, 450.0, "right")

In case the limit has fraction, if it's greater than 0.5, a bit of the font divider color is draw to the right of every char, and vice versa. Don't tell me it's unique to my PC... . Here's the screen capture:

Capture.PNG

This is a Löve bug. (Herbie LOL?) The font isn't meant to be scaled anything other than whole numbers because it's a pixel art font. If you make it 1, 2, 3, etc it works fine. The artifacts are common with scaling and rotating graphics in Löve. Don't know why. It's the reason I can't use a camera function to zoom out in my project because I get the lines in a grid between the tiles.

Edit: Here's a new demo:

[Jasoco]

Anyway, while the bugs are being hunted, in my boredom I'm working on some graphics tweaks...



I'm changing from square 16x16 actors to 16x32 actors. (Well slightly shorter than 32 tall) The image above is an example I have so far of a man (The main character I'm envisioning) and a woman. Templates I can start from to create anyone I need to hopefully. The character area for each sprite is 32x32 so I can make wider actors or give them accessories or deaths or whatever. Enough room to play around.

They're not the best thing ever, but they'll do. I kinda like them, because I made them myself instead of using already made "placeholder" sprites from other games.

I still need to do walking animations and for the player, attacking animations and other special animations. I don't know how game artists do it! Drawing people is very hard. I hope this is satisfying.

So obviously if you didn't guess since my actors are now taller, all my graphics will have to be updated. Taller doors and buildings and trees. So don't expect any screenshots for a while. Nor a working prototype.

Storywise, I don't know what it will be, but I do have some ideas in mind. It will take place in modern times, with TV's, cars and electronics, and the player will carry a bo staff, not a sword. The bo is inspired by both Donatello, the turtle and Jade, the awesome main character from Beyond Good and Evil. A game that means a lot to me and my inspiration for good storytelling in a game. In fact, I'm still not sure if my main character will be a male or female yet. The only problem with being modern times is that monsters for enemies don't make sense as much as they do in medieval times. Earthbound got around this by using everyday objects and normal people possessed by an alien presence all bent on stopping you and they never "died". They simply "came to their senses" and stopped being evil. It was clever. So I might steal that idea if I have to. Haha, no. Not really.