Development Update - November 22, 2010

[Mycal]

Didn't quite finish my previous todo list. I've had a pretty hectic couple of weeks. With problems from work and an enormous amont of schoolwork, I have done almost nothing since my last dev update. What I have done is finally finish converting the WorldEditor fully over to c#. That was an enormous pain. I have no idea why, but any errors associated with System.Drawing.dll refuse to show for me, so I have to use try/catch blocks with Debug.WriteLine in order to see any kind of error. Those errors were also not very descriptive and it took me a long time to track down exactly what was going wrong.

Steven has decided that we should move away from phpBB in favor of another software. He mentioned myBB and I now have a copy running here at http://www.burningstormstudios.com/myBB/. It has some .htaccess problems so occassionally you will start seeing a /main/ between the main url and the myBB part, and you'll magically not be able to login anymore, but if you want to test it yourself, I've already migrated all data over. From yesterday onwards, no new data posted here will be shown there (unless I feel like copying it over). But until I figure out how to work with the software to do everything we need (or steven takes over and fixes everything that is currently wrong with it), these forums will stay. Though overall, I'm really liking the change.

No todo list this week since I never finished the last one and I'm still pretty busy until Thanksgiving day. Though I will say, over the course of the past couple of weeks, I think I have finally come up with an easy method to solve this bridge problem. It may not be the most intuitive solution, but it is definitely the easiest. So to addon to the last todo list, if this does indeed work as well as I want, I need to cleanup the redundant methods for dealing with depth (there's like 3 or 4 of them built into the map format for different tests). Second, this method involves a little map scripting, so this will also be the first official test of BSGame's scripting engine. Yay!

So mildly updated todo list from last post (percentages are estimates):
- [st]Figure out some kind of[/st] Implement solution to the bridge problem, [st]doesn't have to be perfected just yet, just decent enough for testing.[/st] 5% Complete
-- Additionally, choose the preferred way of drawing above and below player.
- Test scripting engine on client-side. 0% Complete
- [st]Decide how to store map scripts (inside the map itself or seperately)[/st] : Inside the map itself if XML (for quick editing on WE), or seperate for Binary formats
- Setup some map events to deal with scripts : 5% Complete
- Fix world editor tile properties (need a much better way to change them) : 30% Complete
- Clean up the client code (its a big mess right now) : 5% Complete
- Add MySQL & SQLite support for saving data (SQLite needs to be finished for local storage) : 20% Complete
- Start on network connections between server and client : 5% Complete

 

[Mycal]

Sigh, I've discovered more and more issues in the World Editor while trying to create a simple map for testing the bridge. I've fixed a good majority of them, but some bugs are still very visible in the client.

For example, here is a screenshot of a map that I was using to test blocks and layers above players which I also adapted for a bridge. The blue rectangle is the player.


If you look closely at the top of the makeshift bridge, you'll see a tile that resembles the ones at the bottom of the bridge. The only difference is I rotated the tile. Here's where my current problem lies. On the WorldEditor, using pure GDI for rotation, there is no problem. However, on the client, I am using DirectX for rendering and trig calculations for rotation. In fact here is the trig calcs

vertex.x = x * cos(angle * 180/PI) - y * sin(angle * 180/PI)
vertex.y = y * cos(angle * 180/PI) + x * sin(angle * 180/PI)

That's not exact, but it is the gist of the code (the angle is pre-calculated in radians so it's not necessary to run many similar calculations at runtime, every loop). I don't know what is going wrong, but right now, every angle besides angle 180 degrees, looks great. However, angle 180, there are some strange issues with the left-most pixels (exactly 1 column of 32 pixels). To counter this, I changed any reference to angle 180 to 180.007. Now there are no more artifacts, but there is a pertty apparent gap between the two tiles. It just totally removed the left-most pixels.

So, no idea what to do on that right now. But just to remind myself what has been done and needs to be done:

- Directional blocking works 100%
- Tile tinting needs to be fixed
- Texture cache index mapping is fixed and works 100% now (*crosses fingers*). This one has given me issues many times in the past.
- Drawing tiles above and below player work almost 100% (I promise, they'll be broken again very soon).
- Rotations semi-work (all but 180 degrees work flawlessly).
- Fixed font textures hopefully for the last time. I was having problems rendering new font textures, but it seems to work now.

So it looks like tile tinting is the only thing that is totally broken right now, and that's not needed for the actual bridge testing (though I was tinting the bridge tiles brown so it didn't look like the wall behind it :\).

 

[steven]

Hey, I can take over getting the mybb working perfectly, we can talk about it next time we are both on I think I still have the FTP info from our last conversations log....buuuuutt

The link from the main site is still broken so if I make it in the FTP I can fix that, annnnndd

How is Multiplayer Survival playable for Minecraft, do you have to run a server and designate it a survival server? If so and you said you had one? Can me and my cousin play on yours? If yes, info?

 

[Mycal]

Yea Survival Multiplayer is playable, you just have to specify in the settings. You have to turn health and mobs on and upgrade to the latest server. My server is up and playable (has anti-greif measures though, so I'll have to give you full access). I have 2 other people who play on the server from time to time and we're trying to build a fairly large city but not getting there very fast. We don't plan before we build so it's obviously a giant mess while working on things.

Server info: server.burningstormstudios.com, the port is default so no worries there. It should be upgraded to the beta build before the end of the day.

 

[steven]

How can we get access, both be on at the same time? My username in Minecraft is steven1022.

Oh, and that URL to the mybb forum is dead, did you take it down or move it?

 

[Mycal]

Uh, yea, I screwed up. I changed the folder name and forgot that folders are case sensitive. It's actually http://www.burningstormstudios.com/mybb.

Anyway, minecraft, sorry, the server uptime is very inconsistent lately. Since minecraft went beta the server has been crashing constantly. I'm hoping hey0's mod gets updated soon to support the extra features, but you should have total access right now. Since all mods are still out of date, my anti-greif measures are also not working.

Anyway, I'm tired, late night for family get-togethers. Merry Christmas everyone!