Level editor update!

Had a nice few hours to work on updating the level editor some more.  It now works similar to the GUI Editor, however I haven't quite gotten it to load up the images and such for the level.  It's taking a bit longer to get that done, but the information is all present and accounted for.  Apparently I somehow messed up and don't have an origin for my scene objects...I guess I assumed upper left hand corner works.  We shall see...

Anyway, it's coming along really well.  I got LOTS done today, along with a few major updates to the level editor.  Despite being major updates, the format hasn't changed, which is great.  But I finally found a way to get an ordered pair together from xml, and it was one of those *facepalm* moments, when it's like "that would work much better than this..."  I kind of set it up like the saving of ordered pairs...which yes, it's obvious that's the best thing to do, but originally I was dealing with individual ordered pairs, rather than vectors.  Now, since I'm working directly with a vector class (which has an x and a y for those of you who don't know) I basically just return a vector once I hit the base case, which is the end element for the given value, like Position, or Scale...

This little move saved me about 100+ lines of code, which is great, but it also allowed for reusable code which is awesome for oop languages.  :-D

Also, I pulled another trick out of my sleeve by extending the parsers to save, as well as load.  I know that's not too different, but this helped me out, because I could override other functions to make them more efficient without directly changing the parser library.  Once I found a good build that works, I just copy pasta back into the library, build it, then move the dll.  ^_^  Worked wonders.

Kind of update?

No new news, just updating because my comics apparently just came out...>.>  I don't have a lot of plans tonight, although i'm drinking some alcohol with my dad tonight.  Tis a rare happening, and it's always nice.  :-)  So yeah, no updates on the program, just booze...

Game Engine finally done...but not for Impulse Strike 2. :-(

Alright, just finalized my GSP420 class, and that included making a demo with a game engine we developed as a team.  The team included everyone in the GSP 420 class, which is awesome.  I would say I wrote my own game engine, but that would be a complete and utter lie, sadly.  I just wrote the configuration xml parser, and a variety of small code sections.

Oh I have found my next new love...XML.  Apparently C# has a decent XML parser class, which is pretty badass.  I utilized that parser to create levels from an XML document.  I'll be working on creating a nifty level editor with it, so I can update and adjust the level document outside of the class.  :-D  Will be epic.

As for IS2, there's really no updates, this engine class has taken over most of my mornings, and my nights are filled with watching anime lately...>.>  And Monk...I love that show.  I've also been watching South Park every so often.  It's a very unique show...not as bad as Drawn Together, but still killing off brain cells slowly...

Anyway, gonna go find my song of the day, post that, and see you all later.  Take care.

AGH! No posts lately! The horrors!

:-O  I haven't posted in ages.  Of course, I haven't made any updates in ages either.  I can blame Eric for that :-P  He got me started on SC2 again...check out my facebook if you want to see some pics of our crazy adventures on there.  We were playing a Terran survival match with only marines...was quite entertaining to say the least.  Lots of blood gore and "You want a piece of me, boy?" :-P

Oh fun times...anyway, as far as updates go, I haven't gotten anything new lately, it's been rather boring on that front.  I've been very busy with finishing up a game engine for class, I'll post that once we're all finished up with it, and people can fiddle around with it as they see fit.  It's really simple (very...very...very...simple.) and probably has more memory leaks and unused code than I'd like to admit, but that's just because it was a team effort where people couldn't agree on how things would work.  And a few people on the AI team seemed to be very green at programming C++.

Of course, I'm still pretty green myself.  I can made the XML Parser in C++ using TinyXML2, which is fairly simple and easy to use.  However, that was basically my introduction to advanced C++ programming...after 5 years of programming in various other languages like Java, C#, and Visual Basic.  I've grown very fond of C# though...and XNA.  Once I got the O'Reilly book about XNA, I'm so happy to see I can do a lot with it.  I just need to learn more math and physics.  I feel like despite nearing my Bachelors degree, I still have yet to touch on a full understanding of the mathematical functions I use.  I just use them, and if they work great, if they don't, I beat it with a stick and do everything I can to understand why it's not working.  And if all else fails, I continue the beatings, and then give up.

So yeah, no new updates, just me babbling about stuff going on.  :-)  Take care.

Hello my readers of awesome...Sorry for the 6 day delay between updates...I've been quite busy trying not to die on Diablo 3.  Finally made it to Inferno and I went from being somewhat squishy to super squishy...-_-  Even with 56% damage decrease in defense, I take like...40k damage from really annoying rares, or champions, and bosses.  I was one shotted by a mob, and yet I could take down Diablo on Hell in one go...how the fuck does that happen?  When did Diablo's minions become more powerful than him...o.o

Anyway, enough with my rant on Diablo 3...I'm looking forward to the next couple of days.  Eric and I have redirected our game idea a little bit.  I'd rather not get into that too much, but it's still a platformer.  Personally, I've been a big fan of platformers since I played the original Spyro game.  I'm quite happy with the direction we're going, I would just like to get some work done on it.  We're definitely sticking with Torque for the new direction as well, so hopefully we can get something simple out soon on the website.

The reason behind the redirection/change was primarily because of art assets.  Eric's artwork is good, but he's pretty busy with school and work, and various other life...things...anyway, he's busy, so he can't work on the program if he's doing art all the time, and Impulse Strike has always had very complicated artwork associated with it.  If we can get the art pumped out of the way, we'll be fine...Was the original idea behind asking Summer to help, however that has gone nowhere so far.  -_-  Very disappointed with that, but I didn't expect it to go very far originally, was just hoping she would want to have a side project or something she could add to her portfolio.

Ok, so good news...Updated the project a little bit.  Bad news...There's still input issues that I'm unable to resolve.  If this was a polling language it would be easier, but since it's not a polling language, it's a bit more frustrating, and more difficult to find a workaround or something of a similar nature.

In the project, I've added a grenade object, which breaks into multiple shrapnel bits.  These bits have a random frame to choose from when created, and it works very well.  Whenever the shrapnel hits a wall, or the player now, it will stick to the object.  One of the awesome things with Torque is the mount feature, which mounts one object onto another and makes it follow the other object, so when the player gets hit with shrapnel, it essentially mounts to the player, and follows him around for a little while, then it's deleted.  I also want to get the explosion created as well, which some day or another, I'll get a decent explosion animation.  I'm still on the fence about XNA, because I really want to have some 2D physics in this game, and right now Torque is just showing off...>.>

The physics in Torque still need some fine tuning though, it's rather difficult to get correct for me, because it's a bit confusing for me right now.  I understand how they all work, I just don't understand why there's absolutely no friction, even though it's set to a value of 3000 on both objects that are moving.  @_@  So confusing...

On a side note, I also set up a wall class, which was initially required for the shrapnel, but now it's a bit obsolete, since it sticks to everything now...I also need to use that to set up the jumping to not allow constant jumping.  It would essentially use the collision callback to check if it's colliding with a wall on the players feet...that's going to be interesting.  Thankfully, torque has the points where the collision is occurring, I'll take a look into how to check which points they are, or where they are, etc...and see if i can find a good way to verify that the player is on the ground.  I could also use that moment to set the constant Y force to 0...and then when you jump set it to gravity.  :-)  Less work on the system, at least I think...we shall see how it works out.

Anyway, gotta go, sorry for the long post, but I hope I can get some insights from anyone that's reading this. Thanks!

Looks like as of right now there's no new updates to the program. I'm still getting used to the engine, and potentially looking into XNA, however I'm sort of still on the fence.  I haven't told Eric about that yet, it's rather complicated...To say the least, I would need to create a way to check for concave polygonal collision detection and include physics with that, and it's just...too complicated for me right now.  Unfortunately I don't have a good understanding of the formula, or a way to simplify it for a GUI based tool...So...complicated, yes, possible yes, but would take a very long time for me to master and understand the concepts, and I just don't have that kind of time...

So I think Eric wins on this one then...Torque works.  Anyway, I'll be working on creating more classes for Torque tonight potentially, but over the next week, I'm sure I'll have some decent classes in the mix here to provide some interesting physics, and demonstration.  As for the file that I recently placed on the website, it's really a template right now that's just...incredibly basic, and not very useful right now.  If you want to try it out, feel free, but there's little to nothing to do on it right now.

Oh, and I mentioned this earlier, but our game engine of choice right now is Torque Game Builder 1.7.6.  It's got a decent built in physics engine, and a rather complex and powerful scripting language that I still need to learn a lot more about...@_@  We shall see how this goes.

Almost ready for an update...almost as in maybe 3 days?

Alright, so I'm starting a little bit of work with the engine.  I have control over the player, at least a little bit.  Nothing super fantastic and useful with it.  I'm just glad to see how easy it was to do it, with minimal syntax pains.  I don't really want to talk about the new engine we're using yet, I'll talk with Eric, see if I can post about it yet, but it's actually quite powerful and useful.  I'm just not 100% sure yet about how it will work with other aspects of the game.

I'll be working on updating the program some more over the next few days, but no promises on posting an update yet.  Another quality of this engine is the size of the file went up considerably...so I have to start considering my space on the Google site now, hehehe.  Also, tonight's song of the day is just fucking epic...listen to it when you get the chance!  I have loved The good, the bad, and the ugly since I was a kid, and this song is just...fantastic.

No updates yet. :-O

Looks like we're still in the development phase.  I've been reading up on tutorials for the new engine, to see if I can figure it out, and it seems simple enough, despite all of its complexities.  We've got a decent idea of how the game's going to work, we just need to flesh it out, see what happens, and adjust the program from there.  :-)

I'll try to get something worked on by Wednesday, but no promises right now.  I still need to convert the old image files over to the new engine.

Also, because I've been playing Diablo 3 so much lately, I found a decent way to contain the files.  ^_^  I'm going to use my soulstone USB drive to contain all the files I need for development.  Gotta love collectors edition games with USB drives, right?  I just hope it'll fit my laptop while I'm using my lapdesk.  Hehehe.!

More development, less work! :-P

Alright, long time no see.  I talked to Eric for a little while, looks like I'll just be updating about...three times a week now, instead of semi-daily.  Essentially whenever my favorite comics start updating their comics, I'll be updating my blog.  :-D  Looks like Mon,Wed, Fri for now.  To be perfectly honest though, I haven't gotten anything done.  Eric and I are working on developing the project idea further, and it looks like we may be switching engines.  I can't talk about it too much...need to keep some illusion of interest, right?  Hehehe.  We're trying to focus more on developing the game, rather than me fucking around with a program.  It's fun to fuck around, but difficult when you have no direction yes?

With the decision to switch engines, comes the decision to essentially scrap the work I've done, and start all over.  It'll be nice getting a different view with another engine, and some more experience as well.  Fortunately they seem to use a similar scripting language, but I doubt this new one will be nearly as easy as Game Maker...however, Game Maker did have its major flaws and limitations that we didn't particularly like, I will say that much.

To be perfectly honest, I love using XNA as a game engine.  It works stupendously well, and supports windows platforms, however, I think Eric and I need to work on a broader spectrum of systems.

So all in all, updates to the game are currently suspended until further notice, which may or may not be the next...4-10 business days...>.>  Or something silly like that.  At which point it will be something very simple and/or simple.

Anywho, I must be getting to sleep, Dr. appt in the morning.  Latorz!

The program's coming along slowly...The last few days have been rather busy for me, so I haven't had a lot of time to update it.  I really wish I had a bit of direction with this game, I'm pretty much just flying by the seat of my pants.  Lots of things to change, lots of things to do, and only me to do them all it seems.  Things are looking pretty bleak right now, but I keep going, because I know it will go somewhere useful.

Tonight I was working on updating a few generics, and the inventory menu.  It's rather simple, but works for now.  There's nothing in it other than values for your health, and ammunition.  I can honestly say I don't know what else I should do with it right now, which is why I feel so lost with my program.  It always ends up like this...and I don't know why.  I work on an idea for a long time, hit a dead end, then 90% of the time, I just stop working on it.  I really hope things will be better soon.

After a long couple of days, I still have yet to make any good progress on the game.  Been too distracted with Diablo 3, and my new keyboard.  Once I get some more things updated, I will post it here, however I'm not sure when that will happen.

On a happier note, I finally got to Hell on Diablo 3...unfortunately I need to grind 3 levels before I can get into it.  Apparently it's level locked for lvl 50 players only.  Sooooo....I have another long couple of days ahead of grinding and being generally awesome until I hit 50...then I will be super Lord Squishy...Oh yeah, that's my other self proclaimed nickname, Lord Squishy.  Ramen was given to me by an old friend of mine a while back. :-)

Anyway, I still need to get an inventory screen loaded on the player. I'm hoping that it won't be too difficult to set up at least a basic information screen.  Eric's got an epic idea of what to do with the game story, and some really excellent additions to the game.  I'm rather excited to hear more about it on Monday when we meet up.  I'll update my song of the day (kinda night now...but still) soon.  Peace.

Update Impulse Strike 2 v0.1.1.3

Latest update is up on the Google sites, check it out here.  The Legacy folder is used for older versions of the game.

Looks like most of the stuff I said I wanted to do got put on the backboard...I've been working on setting up the system to use escape to not close the entire game.  That has finally been addressed, and resolved.  I didn't want to get stuck in the game in fullscreen without any means to exit...so yeah, I have it now, I'll be updating escape to load up the main game menu, and tab to load up the player inventory.  :-D  It's very exciting.

That will be my focus tonight.  If I can get more done, I will post again about it.  Otherwise, check out the download page later...today I guess.  o_O  It is 1 AM for me.  Semantics aside, the update will be up within the next 2 hours or so, whether you like it or not.

I'll be working on an update over the course of the day.  We seem to have acquired an invaluable asset, an artist, Summer.  I'll be posting about her on here eventually with a description of her, and her credentials for this project.

Anyway, I already have one update, but it hasn't quite been tested enough, and fixed properly.  I'll be working on updating the Menus, and their positions.  I would also like to update the program to have mods for each weapon, and will be working on that over time.  I also want to have an inventory UI show up in the next week or two if possible.  If anything it will be a black screen with white writing about player info.  :-P  I also need to update the exit functionality of the program, escape doesn't close the whole game, it just loads the screen that tab currently loads.  It's a fairly simple process.

There will also be save points in the game, rather than having an auto save feature that works with every room. I want to make a save station of sorts, think Metroid, but more of them...I think having a save station, as well as a health and ammo station where you can save would be nice.  Maybe just checkpoints.  I will figure it out eventually :-P

Also, check out the latest song of the day, I got Swedish House Mafia up on the left hand side.  Excellent song.  :-)

Alright, latest update is finished up.  It's getting late, so I'm headed to bed...

There are a few new things here.  Particularly umm...unlimited grenades.  >.>  I was messing around with the grenades, so the best way to test them was just throw them everywhere I could to see if it would give me an error of some kind.  Anyway, for the non-devs out there, the executable should be running fine.  It runs you through 3 very basic levels, the last of which is incomplete.  The game will make a file on your computer called autoSave, which is the auto save for the game.  This is the save that loads when you walk into a room.  I will be changing that to occur every so often, possibly something like..Metroid, where you walk into a chamber, and save.

Either way, the latest update for both source code and executable is 0.1.1.1.  Feel free to try it out, if you get any funky errors send me an email, or make a comment please.  Since this is in alpha stage right now I really can use the help finding those pesky bugs.

Also, I will work on adding the website link on the sides, or the top in a few minutes.

Alright, so I'm just about to get around to updating the program.  I created the website for Impulse Strike 2 downloads...It's at the following website:  https://sites.google.com/site/impulsestrike2/.  The program may or may not pop up as malicious software (I know Avast doesn't particularly like it), but it's quite legit.  If you have any concerns about it please leave a comment, or email me.  Thanks.

Anyway, as for the update tonight, I have no clue what I'll be doing.  I know I need to generic the grenades, so we can have multiple types of grenades, not just one.  The white box in the UI needs to be changed over to the current grenade selection.  I would need to make generics of both grenades, and the extra stuff that's dropped, that's a fairly simple process with Game Maker, but will still take some time to change.  I also need to set the player up to work with the stats object and grab the grenade that's currently in use.  Although, I think I could put that in the player...not sure which would be more complicated.  o_O

I need to consider xp as well, probably just like...100 xp per level, and the mobs gain 1 or 2 xp per level.  I would need to do graphs for figuring that out though.  @_@  Fucking graphs...We shall see how it works out.

In other news...I finally beat D3!  Had the help of my buddy Eric, but somehow or another we skipped the ending...-_-  So I have to go beat Diablo again tomorrow just so I can see the ending again.

Today's song of the day:  Moves like Jagger, by Maroon Five (feat. Christina Aguilera).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suRsxpoAc5w&feature=g-vrec
(That one doesn't have crazy dancing ladies with their very occasional boob shot...gotta be non-adult content here, excluding language.)

As for tutorials, I think I'll be starting with simple Game Maker Tutorials...If I do any of them, I will post on here about it first thing.

Alright, so it doesn't look like I updated much on the program, but trust me...from what it was, I fixed it up pretty well.  Programmatically speaking of course...Anyway, I added a continue button, which starts you off where the last auto save was.  Unfortunately I'm not entirely sure how to save games on Game Maker without using the game_save function...which essentially saves a screenshot of where you're at.  So, I'll have to work something out with that...

Also, I'm working on the physics some more in the game.  It's very simple pseudo physics, but it looks like I need to update the player, and the mob physics.  I also need to find a good way of dropping items as well, when the mobs drop them (they always drop shotgun ammo for testing), they tend to fly everywhere, so I need to work on finding some middle ground where it doesn't just drop, and where it doesn't fly across the room.

Looks like I have to make a link to download the files, I'll be working on making a simple Google site for that I think.  Then I'll update you guys with the latest and greatest.

As a side not, the reason I haven't worked out the kinks yet today, is that I've been playing Diablo 3...I'm finally on my way through Act 3 on normal.  As for my opinion on the subject of D3, I love the game.  Yes, the first few days were awful, but what do you expect from Blizzard...plus it's partly a ploy to make us want to play more once it comes back online.  I played a few hours on opening day myself...was fun.  Just glad to be playing it.  So to all you flamers out there, and people who are just generally obnoxious when it comes to video games, suck it up, and deal with the internet connection.  It's not as bad as you make it out to be.

Updating the blog layout.

Please bear with me as I update the blog, I'm still getting used to using Blogger.  :-)  Tonight, I'm hoping to get a little work done on Impulse Strike 2, if I can, I'll post a link to download the .exe file, although I'm not 100% sure if I can do that on here, but we shall see, yes?

Also, my music choice of the day is Kelly Clarkson: Stronger (What doesn't kill you).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avYxiIRG4xQ&ob=av2n

Please enjoy the song, and support all artists in their endeavor to make the world more awesome!

First Post

This is my first ever post on a blog, my name's Ryan "Ramen" Miles, and I am a computer programmer.  For anyone dropping by, please feel free to follow my posts, as I will be making more and more blogs over the next few days.

I've been working on a program, and came to the realization that I need a way to share it with other people, not just one or two people, and I figured blogger would be one of the best places to start.

I would also like to eventually get some video blogs (vlogs I guess they're known as now), so you guys might be seeing me eventually.  I also want to create some simple tutorials for different programming languages as I move along in classes.  If any of this sounds like a good idea, feel free to post about it.

Over the last month or so I've been working with a simple game engine called Game Maker.  The game itself is fully 2D, and acts as a side scroller.  I'm having a great time making it, and I would like to use this as a blog for updates on this game called Impulse Strike 2 at the moment.

Yes, it's named Impulse Strike 2...there was a previous one which I created with my team for GSP 380 at DeVry University.  Impulse Strike was built completely different, but this one we're hoping to be somewhat of a sequel to Impulse Strike.

I will try to post every time I update the game, however I don't want to flood the blog (even if it's not being read by anyone yet...) with a bunch of silly little update comments.  Also, I will be talking a lot of code, if you don't understand it, just skip it, if you do, I'd be glad to get any amount of input.

It's pretty long for a first blog post...but I hope it works.  :-D