VoiD.net: the Developer's Log

I have a break from work just to wish you Merry Christmas and a happy new year, and all that… everyone out there, thanks for reading although I don’t almost write nowadays. Someday in a not very distant future I’ll retake this, I hope.

Enjoy these days!

“I’ve declared war on stress! … I see that caught your attention”

I don’t have free time for almost anything. Too many faculty projects, work, and more faculty related work, and now I’m taking driving lessons too. VoiD.net has been on hold form some time, the VBA library that I wanted to finish and distribute too, and ACABAN, and any other personal project too.

I don’t know how much I’ll last.

We’ve appeared in TV, in Spanish channel “La 2”, in a quick video article about the Tú También Puedes competition, where ACABAN finished first place 😀

I can’t seem to find the video in the “La 2 Noticias” web, where theorically it should be… fortunately someone uploaded it to Youtube. You may watch it here, but keep in mind it’s in Spanish.

Alright, so mid-August is here and, as I thought, I have no time… to code or post.

But not everything’s bad, after Campus Party and so, I bring a couple of good news.

Firstly, ACABAN has won the Tú También Puedes competition! 😀 first place, and we’re very happy. These news are a bit late, but better late than never, I guess.

And secondly, we took part in the Campus Party Fast Development Competition 72h, in Videogames modality, and we won a symbolic third place that’s great too 🙂 and about the game, BrainEaters, although a lot of things didn’t make the cut, (the competition release even had no Unif Studios logo at the start screen!) I think the final result is a very addictive game, and we had a lot of fun developing it, and playing it afterwards.

To finish the post, I hope to find some time to work on my VBA library, as I plan on publishing it (freely) when it’s a bit more polished. But I want to keep on working on ACABAN chapter II and VoiD, and oh well, so many other things…

I know, I know, no posts…

No advances these days. I haven’t been much at home lately and I can’t even do some work for the uni I’ve got still pending… so no need to say, VoiD.net hasn’t experienced any major or minor change since last time I posted… I don’t even have time to post here *sigh*.

Next week I’m going to Campus Party 2007 so I’ll be off for a week… and then I’ll leave again on a small vacation…

So… maybe about 15th August I’ll be back to coding, or maybe I won’t. I can’t tell yet but I hope so.

I’m starting to become somewhat… stressed…

With this particular (and incorrect) name, I released a game for the Fenix CRAP COMPO 2.

It tries to be kind of a lion life simulator, but can’t even get near that. It’s surrealist, incoherent, and full of engrish 🙂

Anyone who’s bored can try it out, for Windows, here.

I’ve been working in several things.

First, I had a shocking problem. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, when running the game it couldn’t reach 30fps (when normally it easily runs at 60fps). I made a profiler, y checked and rechecked everything thrice… and after a lot of suffering I realized the stupid reason of the problem. It seems it’s due to having the desktop color depth on 32 bit… when it’s on 16 bit it runs perfectly. The strangest of all is it happens in fullscreen too. Whatever.

Changing terms, I optimized some code. For example, the Resource Manager, a class used for loading, keeping and freeing up resources when they’re no longer needed… it was based on dynamic lists, and now I did a new implementation using an AVL tree, to search faster for already loaded resources. I changed some other things in the lines of that one, in benefit of efficience.

Lastly, the impact collision system, the CZone is already functional. When the characters slashes, its CZone is created with calculated parameters for type of weapon, impact estimated power, direction, etc… only thing remaining, make the characters detect, make the proper checkings and react to those CZones.

And related to that last subject, the item system is finished too (although static information for about 99% of the items is not yet written, I have only Hit’s basic sword –Rusty sword– and some other basic item.

Summarizing, I changed some things in the core code that, although can’t be seen when running the app, make this little creature grow in robustness and maturity.

Slowly, in my studying breaks I’ve been developing a bit further the system I’m working on right now, and it is no other that an early combat system.

I have a primitive yet impact collision system, that unifies every attack, skill, explosions and everything that could hurt a character or that he had to react to… and when coding these “reactinons” I noticed an important thing I still hadn’t begun with: items and equipment.

As the equipment has an important role when deciding blockings, evasions, damages, counterattacks, etc, I had to begin working in this area and right now I’m with the weapons module.

Time ago I thought about having a fixed, “hardcoded” list of weapons, items, and so, or giving the possibility to the scripter of defining everything via script. I chose the first option, although when I started playing with that now, I chose both. There is a predefined weapon list (extendible to any kind of item – shield, accesories or objects) and it will be posible to define new weapons with the scripts. This is because actually all the information about each weapon is read from its particular instance of the Weapon class (talking in OOP terms), so it’s not really much cost to add one real-time with the specified atributes. Same goes for any object.

Depending on how much spare time I have, maybe I’ll have in a not very far future a test app with Hit hitting (no pun intended) his “shadow” and making him react.

Finally! ACABAN 1.0 R1 has been released. It’s taken a lot of effort and hard work, but it’s finally there. I learnt that the “closure” of the game can be sometimes as time-consuming as the whole development process…

Well, HERE is the official web with downloads, information and screenshots. And here is a mirror.

Now I’m right in the middle of my exam weeks so I’ll be busy I guess, but I just took VoiD.net’s code again and fixed a bug and started getting in the mood. I’m motivated after releasing ACABAN and will be continuing VoiD as soon as possible.

Before anything else; I’m sorry about not posting lately. Exams are sneaking up on me after a lot of uni work and my free time starts to disappear.
Another reason why I don’t post much is because VoiD is currently on vacation while we finish ACABAN. Good news are it is almost finished (with the “Tú también puedes” compo deadline closing up) and with that, our new Unif Studios web.
I hope to have it ready for the 18th, and after that and a bit of relax I’ll go on with VoiD where I left it.

Changing subject, from time to time I change some things in the worklog. I installed some more plugins and stuff to make it a bit better.

I fixed some things and configured some plugins and the blog’s template. I really like the way it is right now. I’m checking jLanguage with this post. Let’s see…

UPDATE: wow, it is very cool! if someday I decide to publish posts in both languages, it’s easy to use, it supports “shared text” and easy to add new languages… the only issue it’s the post content zone gets reduced due to the flags but…
RE-UPDATE: well it really is cool. What I said earlier only happens for the first paragraph. It works even in RSS so, perfect! great plugin for WordPress!