Fight Fix

I continue to be amazed at the issues that keep coming up - after all this time. Granted, the fight engine wasn't rebuilt when I re-coded the WorldWeaver engine. Still I thought I had it working with previous games, where I had many enemies and fights defined.

Tonight I uncovered a bug in the fight engine. It wasn't displaying the 'kill' message. Whenever an enemy is killed the engine would simply say 'I'm not sure what you were trying to examine'. This means that the kill message wasn't being passed to the parser - or not being displayed right then in the fight engine.

After a bunch of debugging I updated it to add the kill message to the fight engine's output. That - at last - fixed it.

We'll see what other fight engine surprises are in store.

No Idea

I feel like I haven't actually coded in my free time in a long while. I've definitely been busy with projects but they don't involve coding. I am building the Atomic Cage IntFiction game, and working on modeling some cars for a game, and doing tweaks to my murdered out Jreepad. No real coding.

I want to code stuff, but I don't have any idea what. I love console apps, and nerdy tools like VIM and would love to build something along those lines. I'm limiting myself in my choice of languages - Java. I can mimic multi-line input but it's funky and basic. Also it is difficult to launch other applications.

I have my contacts / todo list maker / bookmark manager but I've been working on it so long there isn't much I can add to it.

As I work on the game and meshes I'll ponder project ideas but so far I don't have any.

Blueprints In 3D

I have recently been tasked with modeling some cars and trucks for an FPS. This is the first time I've modeled cars so I did a bit of tutorial viewing. In Blender 3d you can use images as backgrounds and set them to only show in various views (front, side, top, etc). So I tracked down some free car blueprints and I'm using them as guides. The trick is getting them aligned correctly.

It seems that free blueprints don't quite line up so well (At least the top and side of the one I am using) so I'm taking some creative liberties with BMW's body design :) - but it's fine. We are just looking for generic 'cars' so we may need to tweak some of its unmistakeably BMW-y features anyway.

So far this has been an amazing learning experience. I've done the car's basic body and its headlights and so far it consists of two plane meshes. Every vertice/face has been manually created and positioned... Using the guide images. It's somewhat like tracing a drawing in 3D.

The Tutorial Path

Tutorials are such a great tool. I find that I learn best using them. When I'm interested in a particular goal or project often I'll follow a tutorial or two. After doing so I typically have enough tricks or knowledge under my belt to begin to tweak the project to my liking. From there I become more and more independent of guidance.

Recently I've been going that route with abstract 3D art. I've done three tutorials and tonight I built a creation that is more my own making than a closely followed tutorial. It is probably still obvious which tutorials I learned from but the end result is definitely different from them. And I have some ideas for future pieces that I will most likely be able to pull off on my own.

I am a beginner for sure, but I now know a few tricks that will get me closer to being able create what I envision.

Basic Text Editing

After all this time working in Java I'm just now beginning my foray into basic text editor creation. I'm extending my murdered out version of the Jreepad text editor. It is amazing to realize how many basic features are missing from such an old editor. Notably find and replace within the current article. True you can search all articles and even search the current one, but the results only show which articles have matches, there's no way to locate strings within the article content itself.

Tonight I used a basic input dialog to code a simple find feature, and reused the find string and location to do a find next function. It works Ok. I need to get it to actually select the found text, but it's at least putting the cursor t the start of the found string.

The more challenging piece will be the replace feature, which I'll probably combine with the find later. But I'm wanting to allow a multi-line replace so we'll see how that goes. I'll also be adding a 'go to line' feature. If I were really hardcore I'd also work in showing kine numbers - but it uses a standard text pane so that would be .... interesting.

Fight Code Mystery

I figured out the problem with the World Weaver fight class. I was placing debug messages throughout the various methods of the class when I encountered one method whose code was commented out with a note stating that the engine needs to be rewritten still. A while ago I did a thorough rewrite of the client code and apparently hadn't finished the fighting engine. It seems since the rewrite I hadn't yet done any games that did fighting.

I gave it a couple of variables, one for the Player and one for the Opponent - for easy access in the various methods. I had to tweak some of the message logic and cleaned up some method definitions to use the new variables. Now it works. It still doesn't show the 'kill' message properly but the core fighting logic seems good so far.

Back to work on defining the Atomic Cage game.

Now Broke

I am still building games in the World Weaver IntFiction engine I built. The engine is pretty stable, I haven't had to touch the actual code in a long time. Until recently. I ran into an issue when an Event (As opposed to a Command) causes the Player to travel to a new location. It was outputting the Room description twice, so I created the silent travel Action type. It moves the Player but doesn't output any Room Messages. In these scenarios the output is corrected.

I just ran into another interesting problem. In previous games spawning was working fine, however in this new game it seems to be getting stuck in a loop somewhere. This is very frustrating since it was working in the past. I have no idea what broke it. I'll have to add some output messages to pinpoint where it is hanging. When I find the problem I'll outline it here along with the solution I end up correcting it with.