Major Update 2c

It's here! Combat!

Well, rough combat at that, but none the less combat. I have been working very hard over the past few weeks, with my primary focus on cleaning up the project and obviously combat. Let me tell you, I was not ready for what I had to do to get it to play decent.

So to start off, I had to COMPLETELY redo the entire movement system. I went from about 16 lines of code, to 200+ with just character movement, but it was not for a redundant cause, the character is now based on a velocity system instead of simply adding 0.1 to his position 60 times a second while a key is pressed. It took me about a week to implement, but the movement feels much better and more suited for combat.

Changes/Features

• Debug Information
• Before I had to manually add a new string to the design to observe behind the scenes stuff, but know it automatically formats it and adds it to the screen in the proper order. Should significantly speed up development.
• Target System
• Overhauled and we went in a new direction, where every attack is AOE, so as long as an entity is within your range, and your weapon uses a swinging motion, it will damage all entities around you. 
• Preparation for AI elements
• Combat System
• When you swing your sword, it now spins around you(in a rather glitchy fashion that I will fix).
• Does damage respective to the item in your characters weapon slot. 
• Combat Text
• When you use a move, or an entity uses a move against you, text will scroll down the screen at a relatively random position on the horizontal x axis, and will fade away before it reaches the end.
• Character Movement
• Switched from point system to velocity system, feels significantly better to control, but still a bit awkward. 

That is pretty mush it on the major changes, obviously there are hundreds of more improvements/changes but I can't keep track of every change I make to code, nor are all of them significant. One problem I still have with the velocity system is that once the play stops moving the velocity rapidly maxes out the capacity of an integer. Like, the debug info says 1.401298 x 10^45. Somethings not right there, but I haven't worked out a solution yet.

On the story side of the game Arcie has been working VERY hard on the plot and its turning out pretty good. he won't be able to make any post about it because no spoilers.

Anyways, I think that's it, I'll edit if I forgot something.

Stay Crazy, Monkey

Update Notification: Combat (and some extra stuff)

So school hit me harder than I expected so I haven't got as much work in as I have wanted, but I assure you I have been working.

I got combat implemented! Well, by implemented, I mean it in its most basic form.  I will trail with a simple diagram of whether an entity is targeted or not. Text in caps is a transition word, anything in parenthesis is an conditional and anything else is an argument.

         
IF  (entity)  IS  (less than)  (equipped weapon's range)  distance from  (player's position) THEN   add  (entity)  to  (players target array)*

FOR EACH  (entity)  IN  (players target array)
IF (entity's DistanceToPlayer)  IS  (less than)  (previously focused entity's DistanceToPlayer)
THEN  (players target) EQUALS (entity)

*The list of possible targets for the player

I don't think that logic I shared was above anyone's head, I tried to simplify it as much as possible. I can assure you the targeting system is longer and more complex than that, but that is essentially how it works.

In addition to the targeting system, targets have health and you can damage them, and you have health, but they can't damage you. In order to damage yourself press B and to heal press N. Obviously this is only for debugging purposes and won't be present in the final game. (But I am considering going back to the classic 'cheat codes' and have something of sorts, for nostalgia's sake)

UI:
Moving to the topic of UI, I converted every thing to a frame system so instead of saying whether a button is visible at this point in the loop, you say whether a frame is visible and its children components will be visible based in its parents visibility. Once I get more stock UI components I will make an options menu, but that's not a priority.

Backend:
For the backend of the game I got pissed off with some camera problems like that I couldn't convert a screen point to a world point and vice versa because I only used a transformation point matrix to calculate the sprite batch's position, and the 3D to Screen point Projector/Unprojector requires a world matrix, view matrix, and a projection matrix, which I couldn't provide obviously. I tried simulation the required matrices but I guess that didn't work because they were created, but never accounted for. So I got rid of ALL matrices and instead of moving a camera, I move the map, which has no noticeable visual/performance affect. So no projecting matrices is required, screen points are on the same definition plane as the world points.

Near Future:

• Usable networking
• Usable combat(currently its walk up to entity, attack, wait a second, attack again. I don't consider it usable)
• Featureful GUI
•  AI for entities(bit longer off than the rest)

I guess that'll be it, I'll edit any information I left out.

Stay Crazy,  Monkey