Skip to main content

News

Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.

Messages - Radnen

1426
Engine Development / Re: TurboSphere

Things that I come up with for Sphere 1.7 (yes, I do intend to continue that thing), mostly. The first thing that came to my mind was SQLite. Also possibly a pathfinder plugin, as JS pathfinders tend to run out of memory (in my experience).


Those are nice to have for RPGs. +1 on SQLite, I've always wanted an easier way of storing values for items, creatures, and players. As plugins they would be appropriate too since you don't have to make these right away, and are optional anyways. It might turn out that your game doesn't need SQL or pathfinding, etc.
1427
Game Development / Re: The Screenshot Thread

This is using the throw trick from the old forums, right?


Yes, it is. But some care went into dissecting the stack trace (it's stored as a single string... can you believe it!?) and the line numbers were off by 1, at least for the Sphere versions I use. You can see how at the source on line 204 here.

(edited URL to jump to line number ~neo)
1428
Libraries / Re: RadLib
Fairly easy. However, a lot of the namespaces are global. But, they all use closures, so none of their internal functions pollute the global scope. You just can't have an object called, 'Resources', or 'Audio' for example. But even if you did, so long as you load RadLib first, further classes would just overwrite earlier classes. So, in the long run, RadLib might not be so hard to work with anyways.

I didn't exactly design it to be very easy to integrate with other libraries though, because it was intended for Sphere rather than, say, the internet. Instead I tried making the library itself, or at least the GUI potion easily extendable. So I'm sure someone could adapt their library into this library easier than trying to get multiple libraries working simultaneously.

For example, suppose you have your own way of handling update and render scripts. One, you can decide to ignore the 'Game' class and handle them the way you normally do. Or two, you can use the Game.updates and Game.renders hook lists and hook into them the methods you use to handle the update and render scripts respectively.

Finally, instead of loading all of the radlib library you can cherry-pick portions out of it by requiring only the individual files. Files that rely on other files have redundant require scripts, so automatic dependency resolution is handled. Most things are self contained, however.

Test edit
1429
Libraries / RadLib
Hey guys, I'm going to introduce you to a new a powerful game creation library for sphere called radlib!



What is it?
RadLib is a library intended to aid the development of Sphere games. I looked at the most common pieces of code between all of my game projects and developed a library that I could use to have instant access to those features.

What's in it?
Everything! You have various distinct classes:

Assert: To check code statements, tests.
Audio: To play sounds, music.
Color: Various colors.
Debug: To log messages; display errors.
Game: To wrap update/render scripts of map engine.
Input: Keyboard and Joystick interface.
Lib: General Library values
Mouse: Mouse interface.
Resources: Manager of game resources.
StateManager: Game state manager.

Plus many, many other classes and features.

Where can I get it?
You can check out the bleeding-edge version at github here: https://github.com/Radnen/radlib

No official version has been announced, but it will likely release as several different versions:
- Release: JsMin version of the source; no help provided.
- Development: Full code, not JSMin'd, and all comments available.
- RadGui: As a separate release from the core package
- Full suite: Core library with all sub-libraries, such as RadGui
1430
Game Development / Re: The Screenshot Thread

Excuse the language, but fuck that's nice. I need to try RadLib for any potential future Sphere projects.


I might actually put it on github, and throw up a documentation as well. I'm liking where I'm going with this library right now. Soon, you'll be seeing more of it (now that we have forum!)
1431
Game Development / Re: The Screenshot Thread
I'm going to now show you guys the greatest feature about my new radlib library and statemanager (with UI controls).

It is a log of debug messages. Add checks throughout your code to find troublesome parts and they will be here. You can log general messages (white) successful events (green), warnings (yellow) or straight-up errors (red). When you double-click a message you get a complete, and accurate call stack. This will show you (for each call)  the file and line of code of the call chain. This, for me, was crucially important to fix all kinds of errors. This is what Sphere needed all along, and if you develop using my library, you get this in a clean and easy to use GUI. And since the errors are logged, you no longer need to view them 1 at a time.
1432
Game Development / Re: The Screenshot Thread

The main advantage of using the built-in map engine over making one of your own is the built-in collision detection when using a Sphere format sprite. If I wasn't so adamant about trying to leverage the built-in offerings of Sphere as much as possible, Artyxx (a shmup) would've been all custom. It still needs work, but at least I didn't have to spend hours writing and testing pixel-perfect collision detection myself (yet; I'll probably have to do it for a web version :/ ).


The map engine can do a lot of the heavy lifting. I tried to make my own isometric map engine in Sphere, but found out that the code, not the rendering was bottlenecking the performance. Really, two for loops that compute tile positions and draw tiles slowed it way down. If I added a call that culled the tiles off screen, the fps took a further hit. The JS was doing it!  :o

I was only able to get back to normal fps by pre-rendering the map onto a gigantic image, and then blitting that image to screen. But then the overall memory use skyrocketed!


@Radnen - were you intending on "leaking" Hold the Line 2? ;)


Huh... What? How'd that get in there? ;)
1433
I don't get it in my spam folder. Replies to my PM's went straight to my inbox.
1434
Site Comments / Re: What about botters?

Re that specific user - the website in question has a YouTube video for what looks to be a Castlevania 3 mod or something, and the YT channel seems legit. There's also a highscores tracking page on the site, so the game in question might very well have been made from the ground up in an engine instead of hacking CV3. Original announcement of that game seems to be on this forum.


Good! I'm glad :) I was wondering that we've already begun falling into the pitfall of the previous forums. Anyways, I trust you will have all the best anti-bot stuff installed.
1435
Site Comments / Re: What about botters?
Yeah, but considering only the active members of sphere knew this place was up this early, I doubt it's just someone random. They would have at least said 'hi'.

N E O: I don't like the verification process, since it would harm our outreach. Isn't there any way we can detect bots without having users PM a mod? RMN has virtually no botters (I do see them from time-to-time) but it's for the most part fairly secure. Their account register uses a reCaptcha, which is far better than the captcha we've been using to register here; this could be a good start.
1436
Game Development / Re: The Screenshot Thread
Pretty cool; I like the pixelated look of the rooms!

Since this is now the official screenshot thread, I'll add a few o' mine. They show off my new UI system for Sphere games. Also, these screenshots were not taken by pressing F11, but with the in-game variant... 'Insert' (which I guess could be reprogrammed to whatever the coders wants it to be). Right now, it';s for some reason the only way to get screenshots from sphere v1.6
1437
Site Comments / What about botters?
Are we protected from bot accounts? Already we have one: http://forums.spheredev.org/index.php?action=profile;u=7

I'm just curious. Now that N E O (neologix) is an admin, I'm sure everything he wanted to do to combat such attempts can now be done. I hope, that is.
1438
Spherical News / Re: Welcome Back!!!
There is a wiki: http://wiki.spheredev.org/
1439
Spherical News / Re: Mooving Sphere to GitHub
1440
Spherical News / Re: Welcome Back!!!
Smells like a new beginning! <sniiif> Glad to be back!