Elysian Shadows

Yeah, those videos are pretty cool - I like the one with the predators, they react so realisticaly. I wish that they'd add these advanced AI behaviours to games already... seems like all enemies ever do is follow waypoints or charge right at the player, even in the most modern games. The demo I'm do...

Ooooh! - I made a little demo of the moving back and straffing idea last night, and it works like a charm!. Really straightforward as well, I'll post up the basic code later. It's as if they fight to get to the player, swarm around and try and push their way in. Would work great for a zombie game.

Ahh, I remember those, scarily thin little things the slotted into the front - at least on the first gen angular SMS, the SMS2 was more rounded and I've no idea where the slot was on that. The only card game I had was Spy vs Spy, good times playing that with no clue as to how it works, we had no ins...

There is one other strange little option... If you take your whole game world, and split it into a grid - not necesserily the same size as your tile grid (if you use one), maybe a grid that is about the right size to just squeeze one zombie into, with a container variable and a stamp variable. Then,...

One technique I've found that can help, is detecting if another zombie is in front of each zombie - and those zombies then move at a slower rate, or backwards, or if the zombie in front is moving slowly, sidestep. When I did this, the zombies would behave more intelligently, moving out of the way of...

I think your using too many shades, and making too many assumptions about lighting. It does look pretty good, but in that 1995 style. I think that if you limited yourself to a maximum of 5 shades of each colour, and considered the shape of the cloak more with lighting it would look better. For the l...

As the disappearing roof is a big part of the game, I would do something similar to the tile ID idea mentioned. I'd have 3 layers to the map, ground, building, and roof, and an extra byte sized ID, unique to each building. This would be set for each tile, so you would just figure out the ID the play...

That's something that has been happening for years, since the demise of the 16-bits. I mean, on the Amiga and Atari ST, you couldn't do anything efficiently without Assembly. As soon as C became fast enough for games, Assembly started it's very short death. Nowadays most programmers barely touch ass...

I always meant to learn vectors and matrices, but working with trig for so long, it's difficult to see any other solution!. I should investigate this stuff for my sprite library, vertex rotation and stuff like that would probably benefit.

Ahh, I think that ATAN relies on the X and Y component to be divided somehow, and it doesn't allow for automatic quadrant checks. Atan2 rings a bell now, in the language I use it's called ATANFULL, but it works the same way as with C++. It is a damn fine command, I remember trying to work this stuff...

There is a need for trig when you plan on rotating something! I imagined this problem as a little tank, with a turret that rotates to point towards the mouse cursor. With ATAN, you would have that exact angle, rotate the turret to suit, and use SIN and COS to work out the velocity of the bullet. I f...

I'm not familiar with Blitz, but most languages have this function automated, in C++ it's ATAN, arc tangent - maybe do a search for it as it would save some trig headaches. ATAN takes the difference on each axis and works out the angle of that vector... in psuedo code, say you have 2 sets of coordin...

It can be tricky to layout the tiles neatly without practice. I suggest looking some tutorials. Anyway, I usually have blocks of 3x3 tiles, with the middle tile being one texture, and the surrounding tiles being another - say water in the middle, with sand on the other tiles, but blending in, like a...

Ahh, so your using double sized cubes?
I can see how that would help, quick to detect, and having the doubled up textures probably wouldn't affect things that much. Let us know what improvements you get after doing the same with the sides and bottom.

The combined cubes idea would work great, except for texturing. I just don't think it would work for texturing and lighting very well. The top, bottom and sides of the cubes would have to be different textures, because you can only scale the texture if the texture repeats. I think that minecraft tex...