It's Been A While

Hello Everyone!

It sure has been a while, hasn't it? I ended up getting the job I mentioned in one of my last posts, and that has kept me really busy. I even got sent across the country for a couple weeks! Things are finally settling down to where I have been able to start working on game development again.  Here's what I've been up to!

Winds of Commerce                                                                         

I took a look at what I had previously made for Winds of Commerce, and taking what I have learned since I put it on hold, I think if I want to continue on with that I will end up remaking it from scratch. There is a lot of code that I am not happy with, and going forward I think it would be more work trying to build the new code from the existing code base than it would be start over and have a better design of the whole thing. This is especially true for when I would need to add enemy AI. The existing code is not very modular, and it would just be adding to the disorganization to continue on with this code base. In the end I'm going to shelve the game until a later date. I may create it in a different engine, since UDK is not really suited for running what essentially is a 2D game. There is a lot of overhead that isn't being utilized.

New Project                                                                                       

I was playing Sonny a couple weeks ago and thought that something like that might be an interesting game type to try and make. I spent about a week designing the base combat system (since that game style is almost solely combat) and I got a system I was happy with. I haven't been able to test it in a real life situation, so it might have to be overhauled once I get a chance to test it. Basically you have four base stats that six other stats are derived from. The six derived stats are what are used in combat to determine your effectiveness. There are also boons and skills that can affect different aspects of combat.

Given what I decided to do with Winds of Commerce, I sat down and looked at some of my options for game engines. I wanted to stay with a language I was already familiar with so that left m with either Flash (AS3), UDK (Unrealscript), Construct2 (Visual Scripting), or C#. I immediately ruled out UDK, for the same reason I don't think it was a good choice for Winds of Commerce. I also ruled out Construct2 because I think setting something up with the all the features I want, while doable, would be overly complicated using Construct2. That left me either using Flash, or finding a game engine that uses C#. I was leaning more towards C# since I use it at work and have gotten used to some of the features it has, and working in Visual Studio. I found that the Unity game engine supports Java, C#, and Boo script. Unity has a lot of built in support for doing 2D games, including sprite sheet handling, layers, and a pretty cool animation state editor. I could also do all of my code development directly from Visual Studio and utilize the power that it offers with Intellisense and refactoring, among others. To me, this made the decision easy since Unity offers almost everything that Flash offers, with most of them being better than Flash.

I plan on going through documenting the process I'm going through. I'll save that for another post since this one is getting a bit long.

Complimentary Code Bit                                                                 

To wrap things up here is some code I am using. For drawing the GUI elements you have to provide a rectangle to tell it where and how big to draw the GUI element. It didn't make much sense to me to have all of that be calculated every frame since mine won't be moving at all. To make this easier I created a small class to create the rectangle for me, as well as store other data as I need to. It is essentially a glorified Rectangle class, but it allows me a bit more flexibility, plus I can add any other fields I want associated with a particular GUI control, such as an image or particular GUI Skin.

Here is the class:

public class Control
{
    private int x = 0;
    private int y = 0;
    private int width = 0;
    private int height = 0;
    private int bottom, top, left, right;
    private Rect rectangle;

    public int X { get {return x;} }
    public int Y { get { return y; } }
    public int Width { get { return width; } }
    public int Height { get { return height; } }
    public int Bottom { get { return bottom; } }
    public int Top { get { return top; } }
    public int Left { get { return left; } }
    public int Right { get { return right; } }
    public Rect Rectangle { get { return rectangle; } }


    public Control(int newW, int newH)
    {
        width = newW;
        height = newH;

        UpdateBounds();
    }

    public Control(int newX, int newY, int newW, int newH)
    {
        x = newX;
        y = newY;
        width = newW;
        height = newH;

        UpdateBounds();
    }

    private void UpdateBounds()
    {
        left = x;
        top = y;
        bottom = top + height;
        right = left + width;

        rectangle = new Rect(x, y, width, height);
    }

    public void SetWidth(int newW)
    {
        width = newW;

        UpdateBounds();
    }

    public void SetHeight(int newH)
    {
        height = newH;

        UpdateBounds();
    }

    public void SetX(int newX)
    {
        x = newX;

        UpdateBounds();
    }

    public void SetY(int newY)
    {
        y = newY;

        UpdateBounds();
    }
}

Here is how you would initialize a Control:

private void InitializeBackground()
{
    panBackground = new Control(800, 800);
    panBackground.SetX((Screen.width / 2) - (panBackground.Width / 2));
    panBackground.SetY((Screen.height / 2) - (panBackground.Height / 2));
}

And here is how you would use it in the OnGUI method to create a button:

public void OnGUI()
{
    GUI.Box(panBackground.Rectangle, GUIContent.none);
}

Thanks for reading!

Some Completed Projects 3/3 - Village Trader

Hello everyone!

This post is the third of three presenting information on a couple of projects I've completed in the last two weeks.

After I finished up with the resource buildings in UDK I decided to try a similar concept in C#. Since I couldn't think of another project to do in C#, I figured I'd give it a shot. I figured this would give me a chance to learn a few more controls from the Visual Studio Toolbox, like panels and a progress bar. I had also planned to learn how to use the Task Parallel Library to do multithreading for the resource gathering, but that ended up being way over-complicated, so I used timers instead(I would essentially be creating a timer with the new tasks) since they supported all the features I needed without a lot of work.

The game (besides being really boring) puts you as a trader who has contracts with several resource gatherers(Steel, Candles, and Wheat). You provide these gatherers with workers and you can collect any resources they gather. You can then sell these resources to establishments in the local community (Blacksmith, Cathedral, and Windmill respectively) for a profit. After a variable amount of time it displays how much gold you made and your average gold per second. You can choose between a 3, 5, or 10 minute duration. Here are screenshots of the game, and you can download it here:

The gold and average is different on this due to the
screenshot coming from a different round.

There is a lot of balancing that would need to go into this to be remotely entertaining, as well as some structural changes. Since this was a C# learning project, not a game development one, I chose to leave out a lot of the balancing in order to complete it faster.

I learned quite a bit from this project, which was good. I learned that working with panels to create a 'paged' WinForm is tedious, unless there is some way to hide the panels in the editor. I read about using a tab control to achieve a more designer friendly 'paged' window, but that came with its own set of issues. It seems to me that the panel method is difficult at design time, but nice at runtime, while the tabbed method is easy at design time and (potentially) difficult at runtime. I also learned more about timers and how to update a progress bar based upon how far along the timer is. I also worked with picture boxes, which I hadn't used before.

Another thing I learned was how to make a custom UserControl. I had made one previously for another small project, but I didn't add any custom events that could be called so interactions between the control and the main form were messy to say the least. On this project I actually took the time to learn how to add custom events properly.The control I made was essentially a numeric stepper(or a NumericUpDown in C#/Visual Studio). I decided on creating my own because I wanted specific methods to run when I either increased or decreased the value of the stepper. The default stepper only has a ValueChanged event so I would have had to save the old value to a variable the compare it to the new one and see if it increased or decreased. I also didn't want the user to be able to input their own number into the textbox, since this would be displaying the amount of workers assigned and I wanted all the numeric checks to run through my custom Increased/Decreased events. I also wanted the control to blend in with the background more, so by default it has a gray background.  Here is a comparison between my custom stepper and the NumericUpDown:

I think that about wraps up the little projects I've been working on recently. There have been tutorials, but nothing too spectacular.

Some Completed Projects Part 2/3 - Resource Buildings

Hello everyone!

This post is the second of three presenting information on a couple of projects I've completed in the last two weeks.

During a break from a C# tutorial I was playing a round on Stronghold Crusader and I was looking at the resource gathering buildings and thought, "Hmm, I wonder if I can make something like that..." I've been interested in attempting to make an RTS after Winds of Commerce, but I think I have a lot of learning to do. Anyway, I decided to let my mind drift away from C# and back into Unrealscript. I decided to try and make a stone mine that gathers up to three units of stone if there are enough workers to run the building. Here is a demo that I made for it:

I added in some rudimentary functionality to select different buildings. Ideally this would be done via a point and click mouse system, but that was not my primary focus for this project. It just uses a trace to see if the actor that was hit was a resource building, then assigns the hit building to the currentBuilding. If I were going to make an RTS this would only be a small part of the game, but it was fun to do. Learned some stuff about the trace function, and getting a specific instance of an object.

There are only a couple things I would like to add to the building. One is actual animations to show the stone being mined. Another is some indicator as to whether or not the building is fully staffed. Scaling the buildings up to the correct size would also be nice. The last thing I would probably do is add some sort of graphical interface to aid with all of the tasks.

Some Completed Projects Part 1/3 - Meal Generator

Hello everyone!

This post is the first of three presenting information on a couple of projects I've completed in the last two weeks.

Last week I finished up the meal generator I was talking about in this post.  You can download it here. Just unzip it and double click the MealGenerator.application.

It works pretty well, though after using it a bit I thought of some stuff that would make it more complete. Some things I would like to add:

• Having the list 'print' to a rich text box that would allow the user to edit the list, or add stuff before it actually gets printed. 
• A section for additional items that you need to get, since some things don't need to be bought every time(Bottle of Ketchup, Box of Rice, etc...). You would just put those down in this additional list if you knew you need to buy those items this trip.
• Have all the windows display at the same place over the main window.
• Add another list of sides
• Better search functionality, so if there are several things that share the same name/type you can search through them. Currently it just selects the first one that meets the criteria.
• Additional options for quantity on ingredients, i.e. 1/2 Cup

If I decide to do another version I'll add these features, but that will be much later.

A Lot of Rambling About a C# Project

Hello everyone!

About a month ago a friend of mine told me a local company was hiring for a software developer, and they had told them I would be stopping by to talk to them. Unfortunately, my friend didn't really know what the company did exactly or what coding language they used for developing software. I went in and talked to the company and got a bit more information on what they do. They use C# for all their software development, which I had no experience with. It is an Object Oriented Programming language like Unrealscript, so at least I has some knowledge of how the language was supposed to work. Long story short, the guy I talked to said he'll put together a small project for me to try out and see if we're compatible. While I'm waiting for that project I went ahead and started learning what I could about C#. I'm nowhere near being proficient in it yet, but I've learned quite a bit. Hopefully enough to work out the project when it arrives.

So, Winds of Commerce is on hold until I learn if I will be getting the job. It saddens me because I really want to finish it, but all my free time has been spent going through tutorials and creating some basic programs with C# to work into more advanced stuff.

One project I'm working on is a meal list/meal generator. How it works is you create a master list of different meals(like dinners and such) with optional ingredients and notes. Once you have some meals in your master list you can either manually add them to a smaller meal list(for instance to make a dinner plan for the week), or you have the option to automatically generate how ever many meals you need, or both.

For example: if you knew you wanted to have burgers next week you could manually add burgers to the list, then generate the other 6 meals randomly to make the full 7 days of meals.

After you have your finalized list of meals you can then print them off using several different formats. You can choose to just print the meal names, print just the ingredients, or a all the meals and their ingredients. If you choose to print just the ingredients it will compile all of the ingredients from all the meals into one list, combining duplicate ingredients into one with the combined quantities. On the other hand, if you print meals and ingredients it will print each meal with the individual ingredients directly underneath the meal name. This way you can see exactly how much of what goes into that particular meal. I guess I should add one in for printing the notes off, but I forgot about that until just now...

Enough rambling for now, I'll go over some of the issues I ran into while trying to create this once I'm satisfied with it. Here are some images of the meal generator:

Main Page

Adding a new meal

Viewing the notes

Viewing the ingredient list

The selected meal list randomly generated

Print options

Printed with the "Both" option

Printed with the "Ingredients Only" option

A Little Detour To Revisit a Old Side Project

Hello everyone!

My buddy Andrew contacted me the other day and asked if I wanted to help him redo a lot of the stuff that we made for SpaceWings now that we have a bit more experience. So, we dredged up as many of the old files that we could and got to work figuring out what we needed to redo. He wanted to tackle most of the base code himself, while I took on getting the menus put together.

Unfortunately, the only assets we had from the original menus were screenshots. A bit of Photoshop magic and I had almost all the elements I needed. A major thing I was still missing was the font. None of the other guys that worked on it before that I talked to had the name of the font we used in the original. So, I had to find some new fonts. I then had to try and replicate the effects that Justin Bucher made for the originals. He's much more proficient at Photshop than I am though, but I did my best.

Here are some of the HUD assets:

Once I got the main aspects of the menus done I decided to start working on getting the pickup system working. This has four main parts to it: Picking up and classifying an item, adding to the inventory if applicable, updating the HUD if something was added to the inventory, and checking to see if the player has a particular item. 

Picking Up and Classifying

---

Getting the item to be picked up proved to be surprisingly difficult for me. I haven't really worked with skeletal meshes/skinning/animation before in UDK. I got almost all of it set up thanks to some help from Andrew, mostly setting up the anim tree. The part that kept throwing me off was the collision. To get collision on a static mesh is really easy, but I was having a trouble with a skeletal mesh. Turns out I was looking at too much code and over looked adding BlockNonZeroExtent = true default properties of the skeletal mesh component...

As for classifying it, there is a variable in the actual pickup that holds what type of pickup it is. When the pickup is touched it calls a function in the player controller class that takes that variable and decides what to do with it. Here is my base pickup class:

class SW_Pickup extends Actor
    abstract
    placeable
    ClassGroup(SW_Pickups);

var string PickupType;
var SpaceWingsPlayerController PC;
var SpaceWingsPawn P;

event Touch(Actor Other, PrimitiveComponent OtherComp, vector HitLocation, vector HitNormal)
{
    PC = SpaceWingsPlayerController(GetALocalPlayerController());
    P = SpaceWingsPawn(PC.Pawn);
    
    PC.MyLog("A" @ PickupType @ "Pickup was touched", 'PickupTouch');

    //If the instigator is the player, then process the pickup
    if(Other == P)
    {
        PC.ProcessPickup(PickupType);
        Destroy();
    }
}

defaultproperties
{
    PickupType = "None"

    Begin Object Class=SkeletalMeshComponent Name=PickupMesh
    Scale3D=(X=1.0, Y=1.0, Z=1.0)
    CollideActors=true
    BlockNonZeroExtent=true
    End Object
    Components.Add(PickupMesh)

    CollisionComponent=PickupMesh

    bCollideActors = true
    bBlockActors = false

    CollisionType = COLLIDE_TouchAll
}

And then all you have to do is extend off of that and add the relevant skeletal mesh properties in the defaultproperties of the child class and assign the item type to that variable I mentioned earlier. For example, here is the the red key card pickup class.

class SW_RedKeyCardPickup extends SW_Pickup;

defaultproperties
{
    PickupType = "RedKeyCard"
    
    Begin Object Name=PickupMesh
        SkeletalMesh=SkeletalMesh'SW_Meshes.KeyCard.KeyCard'
        Materials(0)=Material'SW_Meshes.KeyCard.RedKeyCard_Mat'
        AnimSets(0)=AnimSet'SW_Meshes.KeyCard.KeyCard_Anim'
        AnimTreeTemplate=AnimTree'SW_Meshes.KeyCard.KeyCard_AnimTree'
        PhysicsAsset=PhysicsAsset'SW_Meshes.KeyCard.KeyCard_Physics'
    End Object
}

Adding To My Inventory

---

Adding it to the inventory was really simple. Since the inventory can hold a maximum of 3 items I didn't need to implement a grand inventory manager. For simplicity I assigned each pickup that could be added to the inventory a number instead of trying to save a class into the array, or something overly complex like that. I could have done a string, but I end up using the id number when updating the HUD. Here are the functions that manage my small inventory:

exec function AddItem(int ItemID)
{
    local int i;

    if(ItemList.length < 3)
    {
        i = ItemList.length;
        ItemList.length = ItemList.length + 1;
        
        ItemList[i] = ItemID;

        HUDGFx.UpdateItems();
    }

    else
    {
        MyLog("ItemList is full", 'AddItem');
    }
}

function bool CheckForItem(int ItemID, out int FoundItemID)
{
    local int i;
    local bool bHaveItem;

    bHaveItem = false;

    for(i = 0; i < ItemList.length; i++)
    {
        if(ItemList[i] == ItemID)
        {
            bHaveitem = true;
            FoundItemID = i;
        }
    }

    return bHaveItem;
}

//This would be used like this in whatever function needs the check
//If not being called from this class, get PC reference like normal
/*
local int FoundID;

if(CheckForItem(1, FoundID)) //If we have a keycard (ID 1)
{
    RemoveItem(FoundID);
    //Insert the rest of the code that happens if they have the keycard
}

*/

exec function RemoveItem(int ItemID)
{
    ItemList.Remove(ItemID, 1);
    HUDGFx.UpdateItems();
}

Updating the HUD

---

Now that I have all of that in order I have to update the HUD to show which items I have in my inventory. As I do more and more Scaleform projects I try and migrate as much code as I can from AS3 to Unrealscript, since Unrealscript runs faster than AS3. Since I will be spawning movieclips directly from Unrealscript I have to keep a reference to them in order to adjust them or delete them. To help manage my references I decided to make my AttachMovie function a bit more dynamic on what parameters are passed. The first step was to create an array that holds the linkage names(to match the ones in Flash) and the desired instance names for all of the different item types that can be added to the inventory. The element number then corresponds to the ID I gave the items when I added them to the inventory. Here is how I have the AttachMovie and the reference array set up:

var struct ItemInfo
{
    var string LinkageName; //Name used in Flash
    var string InstanceName; //Desired Instance Name
} ItemReference;

//ItemSlot[0] holds the id number of the item assigned to that spot.
ItemOneSlot.AttachMovie(ItemReference[ItemList[0]].LinkageName, ItemReference[ItemList[0]].InstanceName);
ItemOneMC = GetVariableObject("_root.itemOneSlot_mc." $ ItemReference[ItemList[0]].InstanceName);

//In the defualt properties
ItemReference[1] = (LinkageName = "redKeyCard_item", InstanceName = "redKeyCard")
ItemReference[2] = (LinkageName = "blueKeyCard_item", InstanceName = "blueKeyCard")

CheckForItem Kismet Node

---

Since I like using Kismet for setting up triggers and other level specific things I needed a way to check if I had the correct item before the actual action could be executed. For instance, if they have the red keycard when trying to lower the force field. If they don't have it they shouldn't be able to lower it. So I made a custom Kistmet node that calls my check inventory function in my PlayerController class(see above), then outputs the correct result. I wanted to be able to set which item was being checked and also if I wanted it to be removed when the check was made. If I had like a master key card or something that could be used over and over again I wouldn't want it to be removed from my inventory. Anyway, here is my Kismet node:

class SeqCond_CheckForItem extends SequenceCondition;

var bool bResult;
var int ItemID;

/**Remove the item if found? */
var(Items) bool bRemove;

/**Expected Item Type*/
var(Items) enum ItemTypes
{
    ITEM_RedKeyCard,
    ITEM_BlueKeyCard
} ExpectedItem;

event Activated()
{
    local SpaceWingsPlayerController PC;

    PC = SpaceWingsPlayerController(class'WorldInfo'.static.GetWorldInfo().Game.GetALocalPlayerController());
    bResult = PC.CheckForItem(ExpectedItem + 1, ItemID);

    if(bResult && bRemove)
    {
        PC.RemoveItem(ItemID);
    }

    //If the check result is true, activate the first output link, else the second
    OutputLinks[(bResult == true) ? 0 : 1].bHasImpulse = true;
}

defaultproperties
{
    ObjName="CheckForItem"
    ObjCategory="SpaceWings"

    bRemove = true

    InputLinks(0)=(LinkDesc="In")
    OutputLinks(0)=(LinkDesc="True")
    OutputLinks(1)=(LinkDesc="False")

    VariableLinks(0)=(ExpectedType=class'SeqVar_Bool',LinkDesc="Result",bWriteable=true,PropertyName=bResult)
}

Wow, this post ended up being a lot longer than I had anticipated. I was going to throw up a video of the pickups and HUD in action, but that will have to wait until later. Time to work!

Returns and Removing Children

Hello everyone!

I don't really have much to report on Winds of Commerce, I wrapped up the transaction list/receipts feature. When you bring up the receipts menu it will show you a list of all the cities you've been to, what day of the journey you visited it on, and how much you spent or earned there. You can then click on a city in the list and it will bring up an itemized list of what commodities you purchased/sold, how much you spent/earned on each commodity, and how much you spent on purchasing information.

The next thing I have to tackle is the navigation system. Right now I'm using exec functions to simulate going between cities. This will probably be the biggest system I've had to tackle developing this game. Unfortunately, before I can even start coding I have to get the routes figured out. That way I know how many days away each city is from one another and try and make the shortest route to each city. The hard part is trying to make it logical. Each time I get a route down I look at it and think, "Is that the most efficient route to that city?" then proceed to convince myself it isn't... and redo it again!

Returns

---

While I was working on getting this game put together I ran into how to use returns in a function. I had only used them a handful of times before, and didn't quite know how to use them. I knew you had to have 'return SomeVariable;' but I guess the usefulness didn't really hit me. Since I read more about them and did some tests I have started to use them more. I find them very useful for doing calculations, conversions, or simply checking if a function has completed running.
Setting up a function to return something is really simple, though it is different in Unrealscript and AS3. In Unrealscript the function setup looks like this:

function ReturnType FunctionName()
{
    local ReturnType SomeVar;
    
    //Set SomeVar

    return SomeVar;
}

Here is an example of a function that returns an int:

function int GetSum(int A, int B)
{
    local int Sum;

    Sum = A + B;
    
    return Sum;
}

//To call use it
Total = GetSum(5, 10); //GetSum would return 15

The return type can be any of the standard variable types: bool, int, string, array, and even a class. An example of a class being returned can be found in the GameInfo class, with the SetGameType function. This function returns the GameInfo class to use for the game.

static event class<GameInfo> SetGameType(string MapName, string Options, string Portal)
{
    return Default.Class;
}

A bool return can be useful if used in an if statement to make sure that function has ran completely before moving on with the if statement. An example of this is in a lot of the bot AI code that is floating around the internet. It is being used to make sure that a path has been found or not, basically:

if(FindPath())
{
    //Commence moving
}

Return functions work the same in AS3, just with the different declaration. Here is how you would declare a retunr funciton in AS3:

function functionName():ReturnType
{
    var someVar:ReturnType;
    
    //Set someVar
    
    return someVar;
}

Speaking of ActionScript, in my last post I mentioned the different ways to call a function in AS3 from Unrealscript(ActionScriptVoid, ActionScriptBool, AsctionScriptInt, and so on). These are there to allow you to receive a return value from your AS3 function. For instance, if you had the GetSum function in AS3 and needed to call it from Unrealscript it would look like this:

//In AS3
function getSum(a:Number, b:Number):Number
{
    var sum:Number;

    sum = a + b;

    return sum;
}

//In Unrealscript
Total = ActionScriptInt("_root.getSum");

Now you have several examples of how to use a function to return a value!

Removing Children

---

The next code bit I found extends what I talked about in my last post with the removeChild function. Sometimes it is necessary to remove all the children from a MovieClip, and since there isn't a function for removeAllChildren there is a work around using a for loop. It's pretty simple, you get the number of children in the MovieClip, then go backwards through the children and remove them one at a time. Here is an example of what I'm talking about:

for (var i:int = container_mc.numChildren-1; i >= 0; i--)
{
    container_mc.removeChildAt(i);
}

I think that is all I have for you this week. Hopefully by my next update I'll have all of the routes figured out.