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Shalinor posted:It's Saturday somewhere, so - this week was mostly focusing on movement mechanics, which doesn't really screenshot. I've also started playing with chat bubbles, though: Make sure the text is pixel aligned, and has no antialiasing, if you can manage to do that. If not, you might have to implement the font as a texture and make your own super simple text engine.
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Apr 20, 2013 12:59
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Shalinor posted:It's Saturday somewhere, so - this week was mostly focusing on movement mechanics, which doesn't really screenshot. I've also started playing with chat bubbles, though: It's neat, but I'd stick to something that would contrast more. Either black on white or white on a black bubble, with a stroke on the bubble of the inverse color.
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Apr 20, 2013 18:14
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the chaos engine kind of slapped my hands away from the keyboard, and did this: ... which works perfectly. So I'll just grab that font, render it without scaling, and boom, done. This is why programmers shouldn't be let within 50 feet of font rendering effects.
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Apr 20, 2013 18:25
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That looks really good and very readable = design done right.
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Apr 20, 2013 20:48
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LP0 ON FIRE posted:I see that you're now featured on Neatorama! Congrats. Thanks! When I saw the amount of traffic coming from Neatorama, I just about had a heart attack.
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Apr 20, 2013 21:51
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Shalinor posted:This is why programmers shouldn't be let within 50 feet of font rendering effects. Oh, the damage I've done...
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Apr 21, 2013 02:09
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LP0 ON FIRE posted:That looks really good and very readable = design done right.  NGUI's method of font rendering is always going to have that blur, so I'm toying with drop shadow to make it a bit sharper. Though better color choice may also help, that bubble is using a placeholder color. TildeATH posted:Oh, the damage I've done...
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Apr 21, 2013 02:15
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piratepilates posted:
 I know your pain  Stuff I write ends up looking like poo poo compared to all the other examples I can find. Although most of that is thanks to repeated attacks of "OH GOD WHAT THE gently caress AM I DOING I HAVE NO IDEA."
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Apr 21, 2013 05:36
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Shalinor posted:... and, implemented in-engine: Looks good and it contrasts well enough to be able to read and looks even better with the shadow. Maybe there's a way to round off to exact x/y pixel values to not get a blur on the text? Just a guess, I don't know anything about it!
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Apr 21, 2013 05:44
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Shalinor posted:... and, implemented in-engine: Honestly, I'm not a huge fan of that font for dialogue. The arbitrary mix of upper and lowercase letters makes it kind of uncomfortable to read in a subtle way. Like, in the word "good", the "ood" part is capitalized while the g is not, so my brain really wants to read it as 9ood. And yeah, I would hope you'd be able to eliminate the blur by making sure to render on pixel boundaries and potentially adjusting the font size. Maybe not though. But the bluriness at least doesn't seem as bad as the first screenshot.
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Apr 21, 2013 11:11
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I'm going to second not liking that font, if we're giving feedback. It looks cool. But it's hard for me to read.
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Apr 21, 2013 11:22
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Tres Burritos posted:I'm going to second not liking that font, if we're giving feedback. It looks cool. But it's hard for me to read. To be honest, I'm reading it as 900D rather than as "GOOD", though common sense lets me know that it's obviously the latter.
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Apr 21, 2013 11:49
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Shalinor posted:I've made horrible decisions, literally, every single time I've had to pick or work with a font in a game, and it stays horrible until someone else says "no, just - here, do this." And then I do that, and all is well.  Despite the amount of free fonts out there, finding the right one and getting it to fit and look right is a nightmare. Specially when you find one that is 99% what you want but it's got a few peculiarities that just ruin it.
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Apr 21, 2013 12:37
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SupSuper posted:All my games run on glorious Arial. That's the truth. Bought a 10k font pack last year for cheap, and couldn't for the life of me find one that worked. gently caress it, Arial for life.
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Apr 21, 2013 15:31
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Azazel posted:That's the truth. Bought a 10k font pack last year for cheap, and couldn't for the life of me find one that worked. gently caress it, Arial for life. The trick is to find fonts that are basically Arial but have a cooler name. Then you're like, "Oh that, I went with Akzidenz Grotesk..."
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Apr 21, 2013 16:46
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Who in their right mind would choose Arial over Helvetica? I too suck at font selection...
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Apr 21, 2013 17:30
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Tres Burritos posted:I'm going to second not liking that font, if we're giving feedback. It looks cool. But it's hard for me to read.   ... which is good enough to move on. Right now, the drop shadow is important for legibility, but a lot of that is probably due to the placeholder colors. Shalinor fucked around with this message at 18:48 on Apr 21, 2013 |
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Apr 21, 2013 18:44
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Shalinor posted:Frankly, looking cool is very important - especially in a game with a lot of dialog interactions. I'd argue that legibility is more important in a game with a lot of dialogue. If it's hard to read, I'm not going to want to read it. I mean, you don't want to use Times New Roman or Arial either, but it shouldn't be too hard to find a font that looks cool and is legible.
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Apr 21, 2013 18:55
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Shalinor posted:Frankly, looking cool is very important - especially in a game with a lot of dialog interactions. I'm sure New Times Roman would be more consistently legible for everyone, but it'd make the game look pretty naff by comparison. Anywho, turns out that bluriness mostly goes away when (*gasp*) I use an actual game resolution, and size the text as it would be at said actual resolution. Anyways I think it's less about "looking cool" but more about "fitting the style". Most adventure games just use regular fonts with an outline and they fit, and I think yours fits the retro style of your game.
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Apr 21, 2013 20:29
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Orzo posted:Yes, I was pointed to BMFont as a tool to help generate font textures with kerning pairs and will likely be using that. Used that exact tool in the past. It's pretty nice.
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Apr 21, 2013 20:33
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Lots of behind-the-scenes work this week. Added some support for screen management. Barely worth posting in a screenshots thread...but I do have a 'pause' screen now and the world's ugliest HUD. I tried to make up for it with an in-depth technical explanation on the blog. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eyyw8xTlV8&hd=1 Blog post Here. 
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Apr 22, 2013 02:45
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lord funk posted:Who in their right mind would choose Arial over Helvetica? Arial is a variant of Monotype Grotesque that was teweaked to be more like Helvetica. For a sans-serif that would work well in games (if I understand the needs) you want something with a large X-height, like Verdana. Picking good typefaces is hard.
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Apr 22, 2013 03:10
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I've been working on a lot of various AD&D DM tools written in C++, like random generators, full DMG treasure generator, spellbook creators using thousands of spells, npc group rollers, things like that. I've finally gotten most of a full 2e character generator done... But it's all console based. Here's an example:  It prints out to the console, and when it's done it prints out a little character sheet to a text file like this: quote:Elf Mage, level 1, Thaco: 20/20, HP: 4 I have many of these programs, with a lot of in depth things written up, but as it's all console based people aren't interested. Any suggestion on some C++ GUI packages? I've never done a gui for anything really, but I'd like to start making the programs I've written a bit 'prettier' to generate a little interest.
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Apr 22, 2013 04:47
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Ravendas posted:I've been working on a lot of various AD&D DM tools written in C++, like random generators, full DMG treasure generator, spellbook creators using thousands of spells, npc group rollers, things like that. I've finally gotten most of a full 2e character generator done... QT is a good option for a C++ GUI toolkit. However, if you want the easiest intro to GUI applications and don't mind using C#, try a WPF app. You can install Visual Studio Express for free, and it's pretty easy to jump into. WPF has C++ bindings, but it's not as straightforward and you won't find as much example code out there.
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Apr 22, 2013 05:32
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 ->  ->  Wrote a global map viewer that can pull tileset data off a web service and render it on an OpenGL scene graph. It is heavily multithreaded so that tile loading does not block the interaction (runs at 150+ fps and moves around super fluidly). Right now it's rendering the Mapquest Open data but its trivial to switch to other tilesets (OpenStreetMaps, or something that we might serve locally). The debug overlay is from Equalizer, a C++ SDK for building distributed rendering applications, so this puppy can run on my laptop and on a tiled display wall. There's a couple of things that need fixing (I got some issues with the garbage collection and tile seams are visible sometimes) but overall I'm quite proud of this.
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Apr 22, 2013 07:47
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shodanjr_gr posted:
If you're curious about other approaches, OSG with osgEarth does this as well, with (if I recall) XML configuration files to point at many different sources of map data.
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Apr 22, 2013 15:40
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Not much to look at but I'm putting together a little Offline Documentation Server in NodeJS. Type in the language, library and version, and where to get it from, and it keeps it organised. Currently in can fetch zips, copy local directories, or use wget to mirror online directories.   Pretty pleased with what I've put together over this weekend, set it up with a way to locally search and I'll be Googling a whole lot less I reckon.
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Apr 22, 2013 16:03
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Salvador Dalvik posted:However, if you want the easiest intro to GUI applications and don't mind using C#, try a WPF app.
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Apr 22, 2013 16:07
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Luminous posted:If you're curious about other approaches, OSG with osgEarth does this as well, with (if I recall) XML configuration files to point at many different sources of map data. I hate you so much now...I spent a solid amount of time looking for something like this and could only find "scope-limited" solutions so I basically rolled out my own... Oh well. I'm that much smarter I guess  .
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Apr 22, 2013 17:52
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The BeagleSNES documentation is all typed up! Check it out. Print out a copy and keep it in the bathroom for reading. I worked hard on that thing. EDIT: I forgot to mention that I mentioned you guys! Thanks for the help!  I had the opportunity to see BeagleSNES on an HDMI TV this weekend, and the analog signal looked awful. For my tiny video captures, I had assumed that most of the garbage in the signal was due to the capture device. Unfortunately, all of that snow, crawling, and poor color was the signal itself. So, I made the command decision to rework the registers a bit and configure the system to push everything out over the HDMI connector as a DVI signal. It took me about four hours to switch the configuration in the kernel and bootloader, and then another three to four hours to get the game selection menu and emulator adapted for the new video output. The difference was incredible. It looks nice. I mean, I know a digital signal is going to be sharper than an analog one, but having all of the garbage removed from the signal makes a world of difference. Analog:  Look at all the garbage in that signal. And all that noise moves around the screen, too. Digital:  This is taken with the camera, and is not a screen capture in software. That is how much cleaner the signal is. The colors are also not anywhere near as washed out as they are in the analog signal.  The whole system with the new digital output. As an added bonus, the video encoder (VENC) kernel driver (for analog output) is slower than the LCD kernel driver (for digital output), so performance has increased a few FPS. That's enough for me to add in a smoothing 2x2 scaling filter, rather than the raw 2x1 block filter that I has before. I don't get NTSC overscan on the digital signal, but the resolution I am now using is smaller than the old one. It used to be 720x482 at 30Hz for analog, but now it is 640x480 at 60 Hz for digital. I had to tighten up the game selection menu a bit for the smaller resolution, but it was certainly worth it. I was also surprised to see on the BeagleBoard-xM product page that BeagleSNES was one of the three highlighted projects listed in the "BeagleBoard-xM Projects" area. 
hendersa fucked around with this message at 01:22 on Apr 23, 2013 |
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Apr 23, 2013 00:25
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 Slightly better looking backgrounds to set the mood for block design.
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Apr 23, 2013 14:51
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BeagleSNES v0.2 escaped into the wild this evening. These software releases are going to kill me. Here is the latest and greatest trailer that shows off its new digital video support: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzwZX1AFjIU I think that right now is a great time for me to curl up on the floor and sleep for about a day-and-a-half.
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Apr 24, 2013 05:48
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In my latest update I'm showing off something I spent the past few days tying up loose ends on for my engine. Now I can start writing permanently usable entity behaviors (i.e. the meat of the game) and edit their properties in the editor. Here is a video of my start-to-finish workflow once I have an art asset. Might wanna make big/HD. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBBI0v8zbr8&hd=1
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Apr 24, 2013 18:57
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I got inspired by an article about using voronoi polygons for terrain generation, and decided to revisit an old project for an HTML5 risk-like TBS game with procedural map generation. I've never messed with voronoi before, but I'm having a lot of fun already. Randomized then slightly relaxed diagram, with perlin noise applied: 
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Apr 24, 2013 23:17
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SlightlyMadman posted:I got inspired by an article about using voronoi polygons for terrain generation, and decided to revisit an old project for an HTML5 risk-like TBS game with procedural map generation. I've never messed with voronoi before, but I'm having a lot of fun already. Nice stuff. I've been working on an HTML5 RTS. Just added building placement/construction:  
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Apr 25, 2013 14:45
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Orzo posted:In my latest update I'm showing off something I spent the past few days tying up loose ends on for my engine. Now I can start writing permanently usable entity behaviors (i.e. the meat of the game) and edit their properties in the editor. If it's one thing I've experienced lately, tools really help expedite the process of making things and sometimes would be close to impossible without them. If I knew more about coding in OS X, maybe I would make my own for a game I've been developing for iOS over the last couple of years. I use Tiled, and it's a nice simple program that's helped me a lot, but the way I've been placing redundant sprites is to use 16x16px tiles that represent the sprite. The sprite most of the time is a lot bigger, so it only serves as a symbol of sorts in the editor. The map editor you made that shows the actual sprites looks really handy! Very inspiring video.
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Apr 25, 2013 15:22
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Thanks. There are actually some pretty big limitations when it comes to displaying the sprites in the editor. For example, I have a 'ghost' entity that looks way cooler than just a single texture (see the fonts video--it has a hat, a shadow, the body is partially transparent, and it floats). But the optional 'EditorTexture' property I've exposed in my behavior class just allows for a single texture name. What I really need is a full-on optional custom rendering function for the level editor (i.e. answers the question 'how do you display yourself in the level editor?) At some point last night I realized that eventually I'll probably end up reworking my level editor to be a 'game' that uses the engine. That is, the game runner that runs the game itself will also be used to run the level editor. This will let me integrate a lot more WYSIWYG features, plus it'll just be way less code to maintain overall.
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Apr 25, 2013 15:41
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I put editing tools directly into the game, sometimes with a standalone GUI which talks to the game over the network. That way you can visualise exactly what you're getting, edit on console builds, etc. Here's my space game, showing the editor in action (please ignore the placeholder art):  
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Apr 26, 2013 09:44
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HappyHippo posted:Nice stuff. I've been working on an HTML5 RTS. Just added building placement/construction: C&C 95! 
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Apr 26, 2013 14:51
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I'm having way too much fun with this voronoi generator: I've tweaked things a bunch, and added a post-relaxation pass that collapses rendundant nodes (any node surrounded entirely by nodes of the same height). That leaves the terrain edges intact but removes huge swaths of the same tiles, and I think looks much more organic. The plan is eventually to use this for a Risk-like game. edit: Bridges! 
SlightlyMadman fucked around with this message at 18:30 on Apr 26, 2013 |
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Apr 26, 2013 15:13
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