[49/90] Sailerius - MonoGame Engine + Demo

[Sailerius]

Perihelion and I are working on a Monogame engine, and my goal this month is to finish ironing out compatibility issues between other platforms (namely Windows RT).

(Un)fortunately, the biggest challenge in this regard, porting over the scripting engine, was finished at the end of last month. :< Alas!

Engine:
* Remove all dependencies on System.Threading in the Windows RT version, as Windows Store does not support creating or managing threads directly.
* Remove use of List<T>.ForEach() :<
* Re-implement Future<T> class to allow asynchronous tasks to return results.
* Find some way to refactor the alternate Windows RT implementation of Metis.Concurrency such that a special conditional compilation directive isn't necessary to use it.

Demo Game:
* Write new content
* Revise old content to fit new background art

 

[Perihelion]

Yay! Glad to see you made a thread. We'll have some pretty great stuff done by the end of the month.

 

[Kingdom Ablaze]

why did you have to remove List<t> foreach?

 

[Sailerius]

why did you have to remove List<t> foreach?

Not available in WinRT.

 

[Kingdom Ablaze]

im so glad i dont plan to develop for Winrt then

 

[Sailerius]

Between last night and today, spent another two days finishing getting Metis.Concurrency compiling for Windows RT. It's a really critical module of the engine and although it compiles, it hasn't been tested at all. Next step: Actually test the engine on Windows RT and see what explodes.

 

[Sailerius]

Spent around 6 hours yesterday working on the battle system. I've got a very simple battle loop running now, with two AI bots attacking each other until one is KOed. Right now, there's no reactions or damage algorithms in yet, so it's entirely deterministic. Going to work on adding in reactions and stats today.

 

[Kingdom Ablaze]

sounds pretty awesome :D once you got it all pretty, id love to see screenshot

 

[Sailerius]

There's probably not going to be anything pretty to look at any time soon. I'm just doing the logic right now (the numbers, turns, etc) and will wrap it in graphics once the logic is done.

 

[Kingdom Ablaze]

i lvoe logic, and even if its not pretty i can imagine how it works better

 

[Xilef]

why did you have to remove List<t> foreach?

For the best, on ARM devices for each is slower than a forward-declared for loop

 

[Sailerius]

I should be more prompt about updating this. :<

Spent six hours the other day working on the battle system. Got a very simple battle loop going where two teams of two AIs duke it out using their one attack skill, randomly targeting someone on the other team. I also have barebones reactions in, where some of them use Dodge and some of them use Guard. Next up, I'm going to do a huge bit of refactoring to implement the AI game master who manages dice rolls. Right now, I just get random numbers from the Random class, but I think I'm going to create an IBattleManager interface which has methods to request dice rolls, and have all randomization come from requests to it.

 

[Sailerius]

Spent another four hours yesterday working on a Tiled map importer. It's coming along slowly but surely. Currently, it imports the main Map data. Next I need it to import tiles, tilesets, and layers. After that, I need to come up with a scheme to render it to the screen.

 

[Kingdom Ablaze]

i know how annoying working with tiled can be, i ended up just making my own tilemap engine, i had more control and better preformance

 

[Perihelion]

Tiled isn't great but is better than any of the free alternatives I've found. It's usable.

 

[Kingdom Ablaze]

i love the program, just not how they store data

 

[Xilef]

Tiled isn't great but is better than any of the free alternatives I've found. It's usable.

I used tiled once, it very quickly made me look for a different editor, I settled with the UDMF map format and Doom Builder [http://www.doombuilder.com/] as the editor, you can write your own profiles for Doom Builder for your project that handles default settings and formats, and the BIG bonus is the 3D visual-mode where you can make simple height modifications to the sectors or do texture changes, extremely handy with texture alignment.

You can write your own exports for Tiled, but I do agree; the default export formats are comedy gold when it comes to data arrangement.

 

[Kingdom Ablaze]

Tiled isn't great but is better than any of the free alternatives I've found. It's usable.

I used tiled once, it very quickly made me look for a different editor, I settled with the UDMF map format and Doom Builder [http://www.doombuilder.com/] as the editor, you can write your own profiles for Doom Builder for your project that handles default settings and formats, and the BIG bonus is the 3D visual-mode where you can make simple height modifications to the sectors or do texture changes, extremely handy with texture alignment.

You can write your own exports for Tiled, but I do agree; the default export formats are comedy gold when it comes to data arrangement.

^^^^ :D

 

[Sailerius]

Tiled works fine for my purposes. It supports everything I need out of the box. It looks like Doom Builder is 3D; I need a 2D tile-based level editor.

 

[Xilef]

The sector format is actually 2D, the 3D is engine-side and that's how the visual mode treats it

Edit: as an example, all height is handled by the sector boundaries and the format doesn't allow for stacked-sectors, you can bend it to allow for these things but then you might as well go full 3D with gtkradiant, I'm still using doom builder because of my 2D background, I gained all my 3D modelling skills later on

Don't rule out sector formats just yet, they are a hell of a lot more flexible than tile formats and the custom metadata literally makes UDMF infinitely expandable