Advanced LMMS episode 3

Despite a rather chaotic week, I still managed to get this week's episode together in time. I'm covering a hardstyle screech:

This is actually the first recording, I didn't have time to re-shoot at all. You'll have to live with it and ignore the mistakes. This time. ;)

Enjoy!

Digging up the dead (projects)

I just love digging up projects I once had on hold. You may have guessed based on the last post that I revived my movie project. You are correct. I dug out my old 3d computer lab and started working on it in Blender again. I posted it on BlenderArtists to get some critique so that I could know what to improve. Here is the latest version at the time of this post:

It's the same old lab but you can probably tell I've been working on it. There's still a lot to do, but that doesn't mean it hasn't progressed. I'm also trying to get some good looking droids together in Blender, but that's apparently quite hard when you have nothing but your imagination to guide you. Maybe I should dig up some free concept art or write some out myself. I dunno...

As for the script and storyboard, those are secret. I'm hiding them until after I finish. If I fail first, THEN you can see them.

I have zero work done on the protagonist, but I have some idea's. The idea I've given the most thought to is not showing their face. I'd have to have them wear a motorcycle helmet or something sometimes, but it would really help set the mood. It would also help me get around the problem at being really horrible at facial modelling...

So anyway, this project is no longer on hold. No guarantee's that I'll move very fast, I'll probably actually end up only posting every once in awhile because of how slow it will be. And no, I'm not setting up a time budget because my estimate would either be way to huge or way to tiny. I don't really have experience with such large projects.

        --LazerBlade

What makes a hacker's paradise?

I must admit that I really enjoyed the last couple weeks or so. I started out working on Infiltrator(more on that in a later post.) I added in some basic enemy structure, and went about trying to implement spawn/die system. Everything went perfectly, before the evil monsters of pointers in C++ arose from the pits. I couldn't get the application to stop crashing on me. I worked late into the night drinking more and more coffee.

I was pretty much out of ideas. I needed a break, a new look at the code and problem would probably help. I decided to do a little 3d modelling for the movie I'm working on:

That got boring after awhile, so I did some kung-fu, and then some music. Then I played around a bit with my new Linux Mint system, and decided to burn down the house of the person who decided we didn't need ~/.bashrc anymore.

And you're asking, what makes a hacker's paradise? I'm telling you. It's a world full of fun and interesting little(and big) problems to play around with. Oh, that and coffee and pizza. That's why we techno-geeks came to planet Earth, we didn't have coffee and pizza on our home planet. There has been no shortage of fun stuff to do for me, and that's what made things well... fun.


          --LazerBlade

Advanced LMMS - Episode 2

Yes I'm calling them "episodes." Yes it's now officially a webshow, with a simple intro and some spiffy outro music. Just watch and enjoy okay?

I'm starting to settle into the role a bit more, but I still need practice.

Infiltrator - Season 2, part 3:

Some developments, but no huge improvement this time around. You can probably tell from the screenshot that I have it running on Linux Mint. It's actually a bit of a pain to develop, since I keep the source code on an NTFS partition on my Terabyte drive and Linux won't let me execute the files. I have to copy/paste the executable from my Terabyte drive to my internal drive every time I make a small change.

I guess I'll be developing it on Windoze, but I can port to Linux in the snap of a finger once it's done. This is because I don't use platform dependent code. What kind of knucklehead does anyway? Oh yeah...

So on top of figuring out how I'm going to do cross-platforming, I also put a lot of the plans I made previously into effect. For example, a lot of values like how fast the player and lasers move, and other game data like that is now loaded from config files instead of being hard-coded.

I also fixed up that nasty object structure, it now makes a lot more sense. I'm glad I made those changes while there's still a fairly small amount of code to move around. It would have been a nightmare to do that after I'd been coding for awhile longer. I still need to add some kind of enemy base-object, but now I have a solid base to build that object on.

This session took two hours again, mostly because I had stupid IrrBullet linking errors to fix, but I was ready for 'em. Seven hours down, I don't seem to be having time budget problems just yet. Stay tuned next time where I will hopefully stop clowning around and get down to setting up some enemy objects.


        --LazerBlade

Infiltrator, Season 2 part 2

Yes this project is all but dead. I don't have screenshots for you, but it's still not dead. And the reason there are no screenshots is because most of the changes are internal.

Firstly, and of course, most importantly, I've improved the laser system. You can add collision objects which will kill the lasers on impact. The new system searches the set for an open data slot and sticks the new laser in it. This way, you can fire an infinite number of lasers but only have up to 30 on the screen at a time. 30 being the number of data slots for lasers.

I've also vastly improved the config file setup, allowing any object to open a config file and load data from it. I now store all the config files in their own directory. So far, only the player and base load config files.  This setup allows for an infinite number of config files and an infinite number of variables within the files.

I do have a problem though. My objects don't exactly interact with each other the way I want them to. They just float around bumping into themselves. Here, let me draw you an example of what it's like:

See what I mean? They don't communicate with each other properly at all. I have far too many global variables, mostly due to this same problem. I want things to be more orderly and actually work together in a way that makes sense. I end up with a mess that will cause even more trouble than it's causing now. I want something more like this:

It's not all bad though. I did fix some of that. For example, there's no longer a global config object. Something more important I think, and probably almost necessary for this anyway, is to setup enemy objects. This poses quite a few design questions.

Most of them are asking how I intend to do this. Do I have a base enemy object that specific types derive from, or do I have a single enemy object that can be different kinds of enemies? Will the enemy objects belong to the level or will they be independent, just as part of the game like the player? Now we can see that this may get involved.

Anyway, I haven't put either of these plans into action yet. Those are just the plans. The action will probably be in the next session. I've only spent about five hours now, which isn't too shabby for how far I've progressed up to this point. That's only a hundredth of my total budget. Don't worry though, once I get going I'm sure I'll have no problem eating my whole budget out from under myself.

That's a good thing right?


        --LazerBlade

Advanced LMMS, part 1

I'm starting a video tutorial set about making advanced music with LMMS. If this goes well, I should be posting every Saturday with the next episode in the set. Here is the first episode:

For those of you who are wondering, no I haven't given up 3D or programming. Things are moving pretty slow though, so I've started this series to keep the content rolling. Enjoy!