At 7/28/13 10:48 AM, Rad wrote: Hey guys, I want to make a little flash game using sprite graphics made in GraphicsGale, can anyone tell me if this will/will not work?

If it exports to a file of any sort, you can probably use it in just about any way you please.

Yayy, byte arrays!

At 7/28/13 10:48 AM, Rad wrote: Hey guys, I want to make a little flash game using sprite graphics made in GraphicsGale, can anyone tell me if this will/will not work?

You will have to use blitting to get the png files into your game. You can use flixel to do a lot of that for you.

At 7/27/13 06:47 PM, MSGhero wrote: So far 3 textbooks were "required" and I never looked at them. They were required cuz the teacher of that class wrote the book.

Ugh, I think teachers that do that should be publicly humiliated.

This might be of interest, it's the Game Boy Programming Manual. If you're writing a game boy emulator in your class, I imagine it'd come in handy. It was on hacker news this morning.

I'm getting bored of these conversations. Everyone is talking about different languages on a high level with nothing to show for it.

We need more showing off what we've been working on and more luis posts in general which often tickle me.

I'll try and set the trend:

I've been working on the card game I mentioned on here a while back again! I've moved house and stuff lately which has been my excuse for not working on it. Anyway...

I've decided to target mobile for sure now (as well as web). So I went about improving performance by changing the card illustrations from vectors to png's. It worked a treat and ran 100% on mobile, but the file size jumped massively of course. I cried for a while until I accepted it, but then I had an idea...

So now I'm caching the vectors on startup so the filesize isn't any bigger it just created the "spritesheets" on the fly at startup. I get silky smooth performance at a low low file size price :D

I will show more pretty pictures soon I hope

At 7/29/13 07:30 AM, Innermike wrote:

At 7/28/13 06:33 PM, MSGhero wrote: blitting

Always hated this term.

+1

Not saying anyone on here is doing this on purpose, but I always found it to be one of those buzz words which people say to make themselves look clever.

Personally I call it bitmappycopypixelsfromonebittoanotherbitcreatingtheillusiono fmovementing

At 7/29/13 10:42 AM, Rustygames wrote: We need more showing off what we've been working on and more luis posts in general which often tickle me.

Ooh, I get to show off?
Been working on this - just ported it over to MonoGame from XNA. Required a bit of tinkering with XInput to get the 360 controllers working, but everything else wasn't bad.

Here's a generated gave
10 pseudo-random numbers from two similar algorithms:
0.782636925942561
0.131537788143166
0.755604293083588
0.44134794289309
0.734872750814479

0.782636925942561
0.131537788143166
0.755605322195033
0.458650131923449
0.532767237412169

A JSON-serialized controller (wrapper-helper class):
{
"connected":false,
"buttons":{
"a":false,
"b":false,
"y":false,
"x":false,
"start":false,
"back":false,
"main":false,
"leftStick":false,
"rightStick":false,
"leftShoulder":false,
"rightShoulder":false
},
"dPad":{
"up":false,
"down":false,
"left":false,
"right":false
},
"triggers":{
"left":0.0,
"right":0.0
},
"sticks":{
"left":{
"x":0.0,
"y":0.0
},
"right":{
"x":0.0,
"y":0.0
}
},
"deadZones":{
"leftStick":{
"x":0.01,
"y":0.01
},
"rightStick":{
"x":0.01,
"y":0.01
},
"leftTrigger":0.002,
"rightTrigger":0.002
},
"motors":{
"lowRumble":0.0,
"highRumble":0.0
},
"batteryInfo":{
"level":0,
"levelStr":"empty"
}
}

Also includes quad-trees, threading, the ability to temporarily bypass the firewall and external IP getter, misc. Math/rounding utils, state machine (of course), steam API as well as steamworks C++ wrapper (still working on those), papal API, file upload/download supporting various protocols, e-mail sending (coming soon. Receiving if I can manage it as well), HTTP-reader, IP2Loc, misc. input including mic and various game pads, filesystem utils for easier directory walking, various 2D and 3D engines, cryptographic classes and functions (thanks, MS and byte arrays!), various compression including LZW and 7z's LZMA, connection tunneling and finally sleep mode prevention.

More to come as I continue think of things that would be useful.
Seriously, this framework is massive and a lot of work .-.

At 7/29/13 10:42 AM, Rustygames wrote: I'm getting bored of these conversations. Everyone is talking about different languages on a high level with nothing to show for it.

We need more showing off what we've been working on and more luis posts in general which often tickle me.

AT 9/28/06 11:10AM, Rustygames wrote:
get a life

I'll never forget that first post!?!?!

As for showing off stuff, yeah it is the end of the month and it'd be good to see what you goons are doing. I'm currently wrapping up some wireframe shit. It's probably my least favorite phase of a project, but its good in that you get a better sense of the scope of it.

Also, and UNRELATED, i was/am pretty inspired by this chick.
http://blog.jenniferdewalt.com/post/56319597560/im-learning-
to-code-by-building-180-websites-in-180

I think i need to reinject that sort of energy and curiosity back into my workflow. I think as you get older and theoretically more 'busy' it becomes hard to stay naive and inquisitive about trying new things. That is a bad thing and you should avoid it at all costs. The end.

At 7/29/13 11:58 AM, egg82 wrote: List of words

What... what is this???

At 7/29/13 12:11 PM, Luis wrote:

At 7/29/13 10:42 AM, Rustygames wrote: I'm getting bored of these conversations. Everyone is talking about different languages on a high level with nothing to show for it.

We need more showing off what we've been working on and more luis posts in general which often tickle me.

AT 9/28/06 11:10AM, Rustygames wrote:
get a life

I'll never forget that first post!?!?!

Sorry I'm embarrassed, it was 7 years ago and I still feel the shame XD

As for showing off stuff, yeah it is the end of the month and it'd be good to see what you goons are doing. I'm currently wrapping up some wireframe shit. It's probably my least favorite phase of a project, but its good in that you get a better sense of the scope of it.

Is this an app version of newgrounds? Are you under their employ now? (sorry if these are stupid questions)

Also, and UNRELATED, i was/am pretty inspired by this chick.
http://blog.jenniferdewalt.com/post/56319597560/im-learning-
to-code-by-building-180-websites-in-180

That's pretty cool, very interesting way of learning although I think she's obviously doing it for the publicity more than anything. Good on her I say!

I think i need to reinject that sort of energy and curiosity back into my workflow. I think as you get older and theoretically more 'busy' it becomes hard to stay naive and inquisitive about trying new things. That is a bad thing and you should avoid it at all costs. The end.

It's also important to find time to learn new things or you fall behind. I've been managing rather than doing hands on stuff for the last couple of years and as I've got more hands on again I've realized just how much stuff I've missed out on (for the same reasons you describe). I'm back in full coder mode now, new job with much more technical responsibility and less babysitting drooling juniors and I forgot how much I love it!!

Still get that tingling sensation in the tip of my penis when I make something new and cool looking work. TMI?

Also picture, forgive 'coder art' buttons :)

I like the way "blitting" sounds.

Progress is kinda slow for me. For the typing game and the iso rpg, there's about a thousand things I could do, but I don't know what to work on. It's easier when there's someone telling me what to do next, but I'm the lead on these two. I get random bouts of inspiration and add a nifty feature that I didn't think of in the design doc, then a dry spell while I stare at the code wondering what to do next. It might be staring at my ugly ass programmer art that's holding me back.

The one I do have art for is an underwater color-based bullet hell, which is going swimmingly. I get to add different steering behaviors which is interesting. And I'm using haxe, though I don't have any plans to make it a not-flash game.

Starting on the next juggernaut rpg in a few weeks, and it won't suck to code this time. I'm hoping the post mortem will be "Game dev was smooth, I had no problems." I suggested voice acting on a whim, and after dozens of responses from the collabinator, I think it's actually going in the game. If there are any issues, they will be because of that.

I guess screenshot saturday and wip wednesday didn't pan out for tom :(

At 7/29/13 01:27 PM, Rustygames wrote: What... what is this???

well, generally a list of words in a specific sequence is called "writing" :P
It's a giant-ass framework i'm still developing. It's getting closer, but these APIs are going to be a bitch, I can tell. I hate tedious work :(

At 7/29/13 01:56 PM, MSGhero wrote: The one I do have art for is an underwater color-based bullet hell, which is going swimmingly.

a-ha. A-ha, ha, ha.

At 7/29/13 02:57 PM, egg82 wrote:

At 7/29/13 01:27 PM, Rustygames wrote: What... what is this???

well, generally a list of words in a specific sequence is called "writing" :P
It's a giant-ass framework i'm still developing. It's getting closer, but these APIs are going to be a bitch, I can tell. I hate tedious work :(

I don't really get it still. So you've written alllllll those utilities you listed? And it all is accessible in one uber overall framework or is it just a bunch of utils?

What lang is it for? Who is the target? Surely all of those things are available in the form of many utils rather than one big thing?

At 7/29/13 03:31 PM, Rustygames wrote: I don't really get it still. So you've written alllllll those utilities you listed? And it all is accessible in one uber overall framework or is it just a bunch of utils?

It's an actual framework. I made sure to do my research and think things through :P
It references itself quite a bit, and most of the classes use other classes i've created (for example, GWRect and GWPoint instead of Rect, Point, Vec2, etc etc. There's good purpose for these; mostly precision. Int vs double)

What lang is it for? Who is the target? Surely all of those things are available in the form of many utils rather than one big thing?

I thought use-case might come up. It's a game framework. Unfortunately I decided to target both 2D and 3D games (half of me thinks this was a mistake, but the other half is going "do you REALLY want to create two frameworks for 2D and 3D?")
Every util, library, engine, class, and function in this framework is designed specifically with games in mind. Every time I came up with a new idea, I thought "would I use this in a game? What would be the point?" - and I can tell you everything has a purpose.

The steam API and Steamworks, for example, is... Well, it's Steam. That should really be self-explanatory.
The Paypal API I can see being used for microtransactions (though i'm still deciding on Paypal vs some other service)
7zip is for assets, and string compression + JSON could be used to serialize objects to be sent from a GWClient to a GWServer or vice-versa.
If you're confused on the use-case of something, go ahead and ask :P

At 7/29/13 03:55 PM, Innermike wrote:

At 7/28/13 02:05 AM, MSGhero wrote: Have you tried synctoy? I have it sync each of my project folders with its counterpart in the dropbox folder.

Windows only. Also if it's syncing that means it's overwriting the existing files anyway right?

I remember seeing mac alternatives. I have the project folder in my documents and a separate dropbox folder. The dropbox folder is my rollback in case I accidentally delete a line and exit FD before I notice (not happening again). I only update the dropbox when I've made progress and that progress is stable.

I have nothing to show as usual. Maybe soon though, I'm hopefully getting my first smartphone.

I just sold a smart phone via ebay. I would ask if you bought it, but it wasn't international :)

At 7/29/13 04:09 PM, MSGhero wrote: I have the project folder in my documents and a separate dropbox folder. The dropbox folder is my rollback in case I accidentally delete a line and exit FD before I notice

You should look into Git. It takes up a bit more space but from what I've used of it I quite like it as a revision control system.

At 7/29/13 04:58 PM, pirateplatypus wrote: You should look into Git. It takes up a bit more space but from what I've used of it I quite like it as a revision control system.

I made a git for fun recently, I hadn't though about it for my actual games.

Maybe someone could make an open source game on git (with open bundle art and music), and the commits log could end up being like a tutorial of sorts...

At 7/29/13 05:06 PM, MSGhero wrote:

At 7/29/13 04:58 PM, pirateplatypus wrote: You should look into Git. It takes up a bit more space but from what I've used of it I quite like it as a revision control system.

I made a git for fun recently, I hadn't though about it for my actual games.

Maybe someone could make an open source game on git (with open bundle art and music), and the commits log could end up being like a tutorial of sorts...

Flixel.org links to a few games whose code is on Github if I remember right. I'm pretty sure the guys that made Code Bummer (Frogger clone) have their code on Github as well.

I'd like to make a tutorial at some point. I'd decided that when I eventually do so I'd have the code on Github so better minds than mine can mock/improve my code. I'd never thought about using the commit log as part of the tutorial, it could be a really cool way to do it.

I had a burst of creative juices yesterday and drew up loads of concepts. Really eager to make a start on it but I've got a few things to wrap up first.

At 7/29/13 09:01 PM, Sam wrote: I had a burst of creative juices yesterday and drew up loads of concepts. Really eager to make a start on it but I've got a few things to wrap up first.

I did the opposite. Been doing a lot of work on a lot of things lately and i'm really starting to burn myself out. Decided to take today and maybe tomorrow off to play games and watch movies.

At 7/29/13 09:31 PM, Innermike wrote: I know all my work related posts are probably annoying people by now but I have one final question (promise), how do you avoid being homeless? I mean, I don't see a lot of homeless people but I know a bunch are unemployed right now. So like, what's up with that? Do you just take out a loan or hibernate under a rock or something?

I don't even want to think about that. Taking out a loan hurts if you don't have any means of making the money+interest back in a decent amount of time. Most people hibernate in boxes under the interstate.

Also, I just downloaded Flash CS3 (I don't have the patience or SSD space for 4 or 5 etc). I'm amazed at how quickly I could start doing stuff again after so long. I still think Adobe should have just developed a lighter, sexier

Flash CC is lighter and sexier, idk if there's a native Mac version though.

Just got sent this for the iso rpg. Not too shabby. Gives me a good bit to work on now.

At 7/29/13 10:26 PM, MSGhero wrote:

At 7/29/13 09:31 PM, Innermike wrote: I know all my work related posts are probably annoying people by now but I have one final question (promise), how do you avoid being homeless?

A few years back I was homeless in the middle of winter in the Rocky Mountains. Unfortunately I wasn't the only hobo flying a flag that said "Will fix computers/write code for food." I eventually bartered some coding for a couch to crash on while I found a job, which later got sent to Indonesia.

Just got sent this for the iso rpg. Not too shabby. Gives me a good bit to work on now.

That looks really cool. I love me a good rpg.

At 7/29/13 10:26 PM, MSGhero wrote: Flash CC is lighter and sexier, idk if there's a native Mac version though.

It's lighter and darker ;)

I had a strong need to derail this thread with my curiousity. But do you guys do other stuff outside of the computery things for fun / to unwind? I've taken a liking to film photography this year and I try to bring my camera along for my travels and just wanderings. I'll later eyedrop and make color palettes later as design inspiration or something.

What about you? Do you play guitar, are in a sports team, part of the choir, brew your own beer, etc. TIRED OF FLASH TALK.

At 7/30/13 01:34 PM, Luis wrote: I had a strong need to derail this thread with my curiousity. But do you guys do other stuff outside of the computery things for fun / to unwind? I've taken a liking to film photography this year and I try to bring my camera along for my travels and just wanderings. I'll later eyedrop and make color palettes later as design inspiration or something.

What about you? Do you play guitar, are in a sports team, part of the choir, brew your own beer, etc. TIRED OF FLASH TALK.

I try and fuck around with the guitar now and again but I'm not very good.
I spend most of my time drinking, smoking, gambling; all the normal stuff.
Want to play more Starcraft, there is a new bar in London where they do a tournament every friday, so I want to brush up to avoid making a complete tit of myself (although it's not serious, so it's fun even if I suck).

Also I'm getting married, did I mention that?

Oh, also off to Germany in 2 weeks to crash some more cars on the 'ring :D

At 7/30/13 01:34 PM, Luis wrote: I had a strong need to derail this thread with my curiousity. But do you guys do other stuff outside of the computery things for fun / to unwind?

I used to swim (took lifeguard training, that was all sorts of fun in a barrel), sing, and play soccer and piano. Or read.
Now i'l occasionally sing or on rare occurrences pull out my guitar. Took a bunch of lessons for both of those, so at least i'm not terrible with them :P
Most of my fun comes from either creating games or playing them, though on occasion i'll watch a movie or show. I haven't watched television in quite a few years, though. Generally i'll just use Netflix.

So my friends and I have finally completed most of the things to start the new campaign. It'll be a traditional 3.5 with a few twists I learned from my DM friends. There'll be some big thing going on in the world that's threatening everything and such, but for the most part the story will be told around the player's actions. It allows much more freedom, I think. I'm just plopping them down in specific areas and watching them travel around the world I created; telling the story around where they are and what they decided to do.
It looks like the start of the campaign will be tomorrow morning at 8:00 AM MDT (UTC/GMT -7) (+1 because DST) and i'll be livestreaming the whole failboat of a party they've created :P (since everyone seems to be okay with the idea)

It's turned into a lonely hearts section...

"Egg enjoys long walks on the beach"
"Mike's turn on's include reading and fine dining, and his turn off's are smoking and facial hair"

hobbies

I have developed a bit of an interest in cooking. Even though eating out in korea is much cheaper than in europe, it's not cheap enough that I could afford making a habit of eating out regularly. In central seoul you could could get a meal for as low as 5 bucks, but it would probably mostly be fastfood-like korean chains that "cook" everything from frozen ingredients. For an acceptable meal in central seoul you'd probably find yourself paying 6-9 dollars.

2 years ago I pretty much started making food for myself for the first time in my life. I had not a single clue about anything that has to do with cooking, because for the duration of my entire life food just appeared for me at home, and I never had any interest in the process that brought that food to the plate in front of me. I started out with no guidance and no advice, and for a pretty long time I'd pretty much just cook some rice with the rice cooker and throw in some pan-fried frozen food. Took me a while to realise how terrible that was, to stay away from frozen foods completely and start buying fresh meats. And then it took me ever longer to realise I should start cooking with vegetables, and create dishes that are more than just <some kind of meat> + pasta/rice.

I'm at the peak of my interest in cooking at the moment, so far. I'm watching a lot of cooking shows. I'm having a lot of fun watching Gordon Ramsay's shows. I still don't have the broadest repertoire in cooking, but there are a few dishes I can do pretty decently by now and it's very enjoyable to eat them when they turn out well.

another thing I've been spending a decent chunk of time at recently is martial arts. signed up to a gym/dojo place, that was recommended to me from a former instructor in israel. the master is insanely skilled. learning a lot, and getting a good work-out, i suppose.

besides that i'm taking great pleasure in constantly learning more Korean. It might not count as a hobby because I don't actively spend too much time on it. I go to a free 2 hour class every saturday taught by students from a local women's university. it's great fun and it's a great way to meet people as a foreigner in an asian country.

one hobby that i wished i could take at several points through the years is chess. i played chess in elementary school but dropped it when i moved countries. never played it seriously since then. i had a few short periods of trying to play online, but i don't enjoy chess itself enough to play strangers on the internet regularly. i do enjoy the situation of playing someone face to face.

in other news, I'm returning to europe to pursue studies next month after a 2 year sojourn in korea. feels a bit awkward saying this like an announcement, because i really haven't shared much of my life with you new regs. i feel like sam is the only one still here to whom this would be relevant at all.

i enjoy ending all my posts on bitter notes

I was a cellist in another life. Ended up pawning her years ago to keep a roof over my head and couldn't afford to get her back. In hindsight, I should have kept the cello and ditched the apartment.

I kind of play guitar once in a while. Though these days 90% of my fun involves either making or playing games.

I've been meaning to find a new hobby, something mech eng related when I get back to uni. There's a bunch of different clubs I could join, but I'm pretty sure I'd get the shit end of the stick for any team building (building something as a team) groups. And they're mostly all about cars, and I don't really care about cars that much. I'm more interested in stuff like the carbon nanotube research I was doing, any kind of research and math/physics application really. There's prolly not a club for that, though.

I've been watching a ton of movies and tv lately. The summer between high school and uni I watched 80 movies, all classics and stuff my friends had talked about in the past, like Back to the Future and other stuff everyone should have seen. Now I scroll through imdb's top 250 and their related movies looking for another one to pique my interest.

And lots of Dota 2.

Just finished watching "Pan's Labrynth" for the first time, and I have to ask:
Are we intended to believe it was all magic, or that she may have just been a little crazy?
Or is that the intended ending? To take the in-between the those who believe in magic and mystery and those who are firmly grounded into reality and blur the line a bit?

Either way, a very bittersweet ending, with emphasis on the bitter part :(