Let’s take a look at pathfinding. Pathfinding is the process where the game can determine a suitable or optimal path from one point to another by traversing the game’s terrain. It’s a critical part of almost all games (RPGs, RTSs, turn-based strategy.. basically anything that has a variable terrain or map is going to need
Lately, I have been rewriting some of the subsystems in Icefall. Now that the core of the gameplay is in place, it is time to go back and implement flexible/efficient versions of systems I originally coded in very fast to get the basic game up and running. Mainly this involves recoding subsystems to do things
A small break from Icefall. My network has been a bit flakey recently, and it was irritating because it wasn’t always immediately obvious when it died. So I wrote a little application that can sit in the notification area and send a regular ping to a designated address/site, and make a sound if it suddenly
Sometimes, you produce a UI that makes perfect sense to you, but when you introduce it to another player, they can’t follow it. That happened to me with Icefall’s UI bar. Originally, my layout placed the player character’s health and mana bars in the bottom left corner, with the player’s current target displayed next to
Hi again. Although I haven’t posted anything for a long time, I have still been (occasionally) developing Icefall. There are three new concepts which I have introduced since my last Icefall post – two enhancements to the visual engine, and one to the game core. Today I’ll talk about one of the visual enhancements –
As a general rule, I like to write all of the code used by my games/programs myself. Not because I think I am the best programmer in the world, but because – for me – one of the main reasons I program is to learn more about how software functions on the very lowest levels,
Taking a break from coding topics, today’s post explores how Icefall’s dialog User Interface (UI) has evolved over the course of it’s development. My automatic-backup tool keeps every version of Icefall available, so I fired up a few old versions and took some screenshots to illustrate the process. Original Design This screenshot is actually from the
Icefall uses literally dozens of textures… (and it will probably be ‘hundreds’ by the time the game is completed). Textures are used for everything, from the mouse cursor, menus, fonts, buttons, to the game world itself, spells/action icons, monsters, equipment… everything. Although my own main PC has 512MB of video (texture) RAM, not everyone does!
I’m currently reading a book about the evolution of Windows. One of the most interesting things I keep finding is how stupid some 3rd party application developers must have been…. for example, it seems to have been common practice that if you wanted your app to grab a particular Windows setting (let’s say the Fonts
I thought I’d cover this rule first, because I listed it as number one and also because it’s probably one of the most controversial. Let’s begin: a simple Why/Why Not argument should suffice for this one: Why Allow Windowed-mode: It’s more convenient for your users. Some users multitask (gasp!), even while playing games. This is