Sunday, December 30, 2012

Gathering Skills

The time has come to make this game fun, and by fun, I mean not just some beautiful fork of Crossfire, but rather it's own game with its own game mechanics.  One of the major things missing from Wograld, that was never in Crossfire is gathering skills.  By that I mean things such as fishing, lumberjacking, and mining.  Other rpgs have had other various gathering skills such as farming, herbalism (or the picking of herbs), hunting (for animal parts) and skinning (animal and monster hides) and enchanting (removing magic essence from items).

We simply have to make maps that allow players to use the skill on certain spots and gather resources, then, when the skill gets high enough, they can gather different resources.  The resources could be used in crafting, but for now, we could have ways to sell them to npcs.
The crafting system is sort of a separate system and could use parts from gathering skills and parts from other things gotten elsewhere.

Friday, December 21, 2012

Omg Trees!

A week ago, I made some trees and added them to the project. Now, walking through the forest, I feel like I am walking through a dream world.  Even though several other tiles still need to be replaced, game play needs to be changed, and maps need to be made, the trees themselves give it something special.

The strange part is, when I made them, I worried they were the wrong shape. I worried the trees were too round or too triangular. I spent a lot of time working on getting the colors to give it a certain feel.   I did basically 3 trees, but two of them have ground tiles attached for a total of five trees.

I think my art style has been improving and I use highlighting in different colors to get certain effects, like a gradient of different shades of green.  They look better in the game then they do here because of the way tiles all interconnect with one another.

Monday, October 15, 2012

Performance and Messed up Tiles

Well, we got the java client working, doing what it was supposed to do, but then I tested it, and every time I walked into the zoo, it just moved too slow.  It got so bad I could not move my character at all although the rest of the game seemed okay, but still slower than I would have liked.

So a change in algorithms was an order.  Unfortunately the new one doesn't work so great.  Instead of refreshing the whole screen, the new algorithm seeks to only draw those objects that have changed. Makes sense, but unfortunately pieces are not showing up properly, and you can see items, both still, and animated sticking together the wrong way. I would love someone else to look at the algorithm, but who wants to?  It seems there is a rule about free software projects, first make a game people want to play because it doesn't suck, then fix the things that are wrong with it.  It ends up that the first few developers either make or break a project, and if you don't know the correct algorithm to use, then you are out of luck.

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

jwogclnt now connects to the sever but..

I figured out what was holding development up.  We were having some trouble importing the project into netbeans until I figured it out. Unit tests on jxclnt do not work in netbeans.  The orginal developer of jxclnt suggested using Intelej IDEA instead.  So I tried that.

We found some bug with the server as well, probably better not to blog about it here. 


so now, the new client connects to the sever, but does not display the tiles yet properly.  I hope to have that fixxed in the next few days.

Meanwhile, I wonder if our CVS version control is holding us up.  One of the things that concerned me is sourceforge is moving to the allura platform.  At first I worried CVS would not be supported, but it looks like it will be supported on allura.  Also, later versions of netbeans require you to download a plugin for CVS rather than it coming out of the box.



I've been looking at distributed version control systems, both git and mercurial are under consideration.  At first I was kind of leaning towards git, but it looks like mercurial is easier to use, espeacily for windows users, probably the main platform with lots of gamers who want to be developers. Of course the server probably does not work all that well on windows, but I havn't really tried it, not being a windows user myself.  One of the reasons I choose a java client is the fact it will just work regardless of the underlying platform os.

The thing I don't really like about mercurial, is it is written in python. Python is a fast moving language that changes to fast, so I worry if its going to break future releases, although I don't really think that's highly likely as I would think for smaller projects.

Saturday, June 2, 2012

What's my name? Java Development

For the past six months or so, I have just basically been trying to learn to code in Java. I have done the occasional upload of artwork to sourceforge as well. But mostly I have decided to focus on learning Java really well so I can modify the new crossfire java client enough to work with the wograld server. For those who don't know, Wograld originally forked from the crossfire code. Since then the projects have gone in different directions. Crossfire has the same bad game play and artwork and while fixing some bugs, while wograld fixed some ugly artwork and game play while adding new bugs and keeping only the awful messed up x11 client. That is the brutally honest assessment anyway. I understand that user interface developers are the best of the best in the world, and that you could search endlessly to find one who can make such a thing. While I can do the basic hello world, and have been learning some object oriented and graphical user interface, my knowledge isn't quite up to the level to comprehend the entirety of the crossfire jxclient code base yet.