Friday, May 8, 2009

FrameWork Updates--

Framework updates just aren't exciting. A lot of the work is back-end stuff you never see and as such is pretty dull. In an attempt to liven things up I added a lot of objects and started the game zero-g. That's kind of cool for 2 minutes. (Click here to give it a try - framework build 3)

Today I added a full-featured XML-to-Box2D importer, and a server communication library to pull the data from (either SQL via PHP or the direct XML files themselves). 

My first semblance of a HUD is in place as well and you can see it loading the level and giving status reports on the connection. (If you have a speedy connection you'll probably only ever see "load complete", but trust me it gives you a percentage progress report if things are slow ;)

I still have to implement better error handling, though. If you have no net connection the game just dies horribly because it's relying on external server files in a few places.

Here is a sample of the XML file I used for this level (the stoves anyway). Depending on your browser you might just have to right click and "view source" to see how simple it is. Units are in meters/kg.

Next up is trying to figure out a way to generate new XML so that I can save it. Once that's in place I can start the mind-numbing process of building a basic level editor.

2 comments:

  1. As I was knocking the blocks and things around I was thinking it might be fun to have a game where you have to knock all the stuff on the level together. Once they touched, they'd sort of click together like little magnets and continue to float around. Get everything on the level connected together, and you move on to the next level....

    This framework has a lot of potential. Physics is fun!

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  2. Might I interest you in Build 3 of Space Squid? I built it way back on March 30th.

    http://www.space-squid.com/dev/3.swf

    Here's the accompanying blog post:

    http://aughtnine.blogspot.com/2009/03/art-of-sticking-to-plan.html

    Instead of "clicking together" there's gravity, which can of course be scaled and tuned to give you the desired effect, and then all it needs is a hud overlay with a score counter :)

    I love physics in games, and I'm .... well... ok this rant is going to get long. I'll have to make a blog post about why I choose physics :)

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