VoiD.net: the Developer's Log

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.