Elysian Shadows

Hello everyone.

I have introduced myself and my project before including my youtube page with my first vblog up of my project, but now that I have a new vblog up in a more structured format and i've encoruged people who watch and wish to talk about my project to come here I figured it was time for a more proper post of my project to follow my progress with my vblogs. For thoese who dont know, my game design/programming project is in VB.NET (2008) and is based off the project that I worked on and learned from a VB.NET Game Programing Book. I am using this project and continuing work on it as a basis a starting point into game development and programming to take into newer programming languages as I use them and to hopefully apply to a professional level one day. This project whenever concluded and released will be open source, anyone wishing to contribute to the project in any way (ideas, code, resources (ie sprites, music, graphics, etc.)) will be givin full credit in the projects credits.

My first vblog on this project was a pure commentary and it spanned 12 parts, not the optimal way of doing things but it was primarly for the programmers out there and well i figured I should show off how I am still a learning programmer. The vblogs from now on have the same commentary as before but also have more cut up/pure coding parts this speeds things up, i do provide some addtional insight in these parts sometimes and in others where I have nothing to add at the moment I simply have music playing. My hope is these vblogs in this format will still be as informative as the pure commentary without the bore of watching me code and esppicaly debug every single thing. It also makes the vblogs shorter (this one is roughly 4 parts) so please let me know what you think of the format, the quality and video didnt come out exactly as I hoped so i'm going to look into recording it in a better encoder but for now for at least a few vblogs this will have to do. I want to say first a big thank you one more time to Falco and the ES team first for helping to inspire me to work on game design/programming now rather then latter and of course for a wonderfull fourm for all of us to share are projects as well as there warm welcome, i'd also like to thank moonsader for her further insperation and encourgment through her series of game design/progrmaming tutorials (pickin sticks), i'd also like to thank thoese who have sent me comments and messages and even subbed from my first introduction, jamesdk, GroundUpEngine(herbonsawyers), and BladesBrotherEngine(warlord90210), thanks guys! And to everyone else who has or has just subbed and is following along, thanks for your support and encorugment.

So enough with all that stuff, lets get down to it! I have made a lot of progress with the engine, lot of changes and enchancments many witch you can find in the my first vblog I got over the majority of what it started as from the book to where I got it to in just the first two parts, so if its your first time looking at these I encoruge you to at least take a look at thoese. Where i'm at now is quite simple, i'm adding real GUI or UI elements to the engine and game. I have made my way from the main menu GUIs to now the in-game guis and its time to start working on the fun stuff, the acutally overlays or GUI's over GUI's. Thats where my second vblog here begins and goes over. First a word of note, most vblog footage being posted will not be latest, this is true of this post, in fact i hav quite a few more days waiting so if you like to know the absloute latest and just cant wait for these vblogs, ask it here and i'll respond to it and let you know best i can as soon as I can.

Here is the striaght embed/youtube link to my 2nd vblog, enjoy it, let me know what you think everyone and i look forward to posting here and keeping you update on my project as i read all of yours. Thanks.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJCkj-dtqVc

Nice Work! I 5 starred and favorited.

p.s. warlord is Blade Brothers Engine
I'm(hebronsawyers) GroundUpEngine :P

GroundUpEngine wrote:Nice Work! I 5 starred and favorited.

p.s. warlord is Blade Brothers Engine
I'm(hebronsawyers) GroundUpEngine :P

Thanks a lot Glad you liked it, and opps sorry about that it was late or early or er whatever lol anywayz all fixed up

Heyaz everyone back again Things with my project are going really well, it feels good to make great progress! I've got anothe vblog up for you all. Its again 4 parts so encoruge everyone to check it out and let me know what you think! As always feel free to ask if you like to know more up to date info about how the project is going. My passion for this project and your support help keep me motivated and focused! So thanks so much again. Here is the youtube embed and link to the first part of this new vblog post.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fK5d-w7fQ58

And as always you can find the all the other parts from my youtube playlist and homepage. And you'll have to escuse the way I sound and am typing its spring I have year round allergies and well nebreska's springs are not very kind to me. Anywayz please let me know what you all think. Thanks!

Hey all I got an up-to-date update for everyone no new vblog yet. I'm posting this here primarly cause your not going to see most of this done in the vblog and so I wanted to show it off. With my CDialog class done i've decided to take a break from the engine its self and start address some more of the editor for the engine. Granted theres still a lot to do in the engine its self, but it would be a good idea now before I get to far ahead (cough like a rework or how the map files are loaded etc) to work more on my editor. Before as most of you probley saw from the first vblog all it did was just create and save and open map info files for loading. We'll i've started taking the next few steps. I havn't gotten to far but i'm encoruged by how well thigns are going. In these screenshots you can see the map editor now when first run, when loading a mpa and the map loaded. The scroll bars work, and will scroll the tile map both ways. Right now all it does is load the map and display it the 'viewer' and I can scroll with it. With that done I can move on obviously the creating new maps, modifying existing, saving, and of course acutally laying tiles (that will be fun lol)

Honeslty the only real cavaet right now is the map loading. Its not as fast as it should be, and I know this is probley because i'm using a standard timer class. I have tried just doing a loop and while if I add some sort of delay it will update the progress bar it won't show the text ??!!! Its dumb I know and is probley an easy fix i'm just tired of messing with it for an hour now (so sad ) so i'll come back to it latter. EDIT/UPDATE: I fixed that up yeah was very easy solution/ fix of course go figures lol. Needless to say it works great and this is using all the same classes that the acutall game engine does. Only diffrence here is the editor has its own 'core' class to process things. Otherwise all the rest you have probley seen in the vblogs is here still. I can already tell input is going to be a bit diffrent and not as straight forward as it was for the acutall engine. Primarly because of the acutall 'render' window is smaller the the form size and its pulling the info fro mthe form size (I bleive) i'll have to see.

Anywayz this is what i'm working on for the game at the moment, i'll try to have another vblog update out for everyone next week, so you can see more of my progress with the dialog class I was working on. Hopefully the new format i've encoded most of that in, will also work much better with priemer and with encoding so it looks better. Please let me know what you all think and any ideas I have a pretty straight forward approch to the acutal editor as most of you can probley see where i'm going with it. But by all means let me know. Thanks all!

Hey you started an editor! Nice, looks good so far

GroundUpEngine wrote:Hey you started an editor! Nice, looks good so far

Thanks, yeah I figured since well everyone else is pretty much and I know i would be anyway plus if i'm going to avoid latter headaches of re-writing my map files latter on I may as well really get it started now. Its acutally been quite enjoyable and fun and not too diffcult, i'm thankfull most of the heavy lifting work is covered by the engine everything else is well standard .net and vb.net application stuff, things its of course best at.

Anywayz I have made good progress and have gotten pretty far theres still some hiccups/things to iron out, including the scrolling it can get somewhat out of sync its just really a math issue something i tend to be iffy on, i'd continue my progress even more right now but i'm just too tired i need to get some sleep as i have homework to do and i have a class tommorow (vb.net intermidate programming go figures ;D) so I just wanted to work on it as much as I could before i have to get that homework done for my classes before class on tuesday. So i've definlty ironed things out i've acutally got adding tiles working, it works like a paint brush right now, we pick the tile from the selection and just paint it with the mouse on the map. Simple normal standard easy. All I did was just set the tilenumbers its just well mathy lol but nor horrible as complicated as collison or a tile scroller. We change the tile under where our cursor is when we push the button the same way we get the tile information, only diffrence is we now change what tile is there. It worked very well, doing the tiles and thoese tabs for layers (no layers in yet still just a standard 1 layer binary map) just had to do some image manipulation with the tileset to get it to fit and look proper in the picturebox, then just need to do some math to get where the cursor is when the user click to select the corspodning number of the proper tile.



As you may have notice theres a page option, the acutal picture box can comfertably fit 7x8 tiles (32x32 tiles) in it so thats about 56 tiles obviouysly thats a lot but if the tilesheet is larger it will do multiple pages acordingly to acomidate the entire sprite sheet. It also checks for empty spaces if it finds one it will not add an empty tile space into the display witch is of course nice, however I just relaized I never acomodated the count so the number would be off. Oui math I swear, anyway some other things of notes last thing I was working on was the selection rectangle you can see in the 2nd screenshot here. Though it works fine for the top and left most side selections the math is a litle off and i'm just too tired right now to fix it, its really just a cosmetic problem at the moment so its no huge rush anyway. Other things to note the blank or empty or non-tiles can still be selected and there is no check for it so it will try to 'paint' it onto the map of course causing an error, something of course to fix/rectify.



All in all i'm very happy with its progress and though of course theres minor things to fix, rectify etc. the genreal functionality is there and working. There still is no creating new maps or loading specific maps/saving them quite yet, that is pretty much the next step and with that I need to get my new file format for the maps setup to make room for the new layers we will be able to put it. Should be intresting because this is also a game engine change so i'm expecting this to take more time and probley cause problems. I will probley have some of that recorded and down for my vblog and etheir way seeing the editor in whatever state its in after this will be seen from time to time in the vblogs. So yeah otherwise i'll keep anyone intrested about it here of course. Please let me know what you all think, I know VB.NET isn't exaclty the preimer langauge for you all, but as I stated before this is a starting point for game development for me as I get more familer and learn other languages as well then I can apply them onword to C#, Java, and of course C++. Anywayz thank you all who do view and our intrested and thanks very much for groundup for your replies and of course everyone who enjoys and watchs my programming vblogs. Thanks till next time everyone.

Hey everyone back again with another update for you all! Still no new vblogs just yet but I am still working on the editor so let me share with you what I have done now and what i'm getting ready to do. First a few fixes I got done, scrolling the map works 100% perfect now (math oui) witch makes me very happy lol I was acutally over mathing it...go figures! Also I fixed the red box selection in the tile selector as you can see plainly, works 100% as well witch also makes me very happy. With thoese fixes you might also noticed i've started adding more GUI elements to the editor, some info display on the bottom status display including your current tile X and tile Y cords on the map. The other labels (outside the stauts bar, menu and the tile group box is just for testing pourposes and will be removed) i've also added more to the acutal tiles groupbox just above the acutal tabs. So lets take a look at what i've added and such in the images and then i'll talk about what i'm getting ready to work on.

So first up is the new Tile Proprties button and form. This is plainly global tile proprties that can be set and applied to the tiles on each layer. There global so they effect everywhere, the only property I have right now is Impassable or blocking. Of course thoese who watched my ealry vblogs with the editor know I keep track of all block tiles in that. Thats basicly what this alows the user to easily do with there tiles. This will be workable for each layer, and each layers blocking takes overridng priority. So layers 3 overriding layer 2 and layer 2 ovrrides layer 1. As you can see I also tell the tile number your looking at and also show just that tile in a picture box. Pretty straight forward, but very easy to use and quite effective. This can be used as a template for the more advice tile proprties editor witch is specific by tile location on the map and will not be global.

Up next is something i'm quite proud of, this is simply a view option that acutally shows in a graphic represintation witch tiles have blocking (that impassable flag we can set) this is particuarly neat and works perfectly i'm happy to say. It acutally draws a sprite (same size as the tile so 32x32 for this) witch has an alpha mask. It places and draws the sprite by the location of the tiles and works in real time. So you can leave blocking tiles view on, go into the proprties and turn on and off impassable at will and it will update properly. Very very neat and will pave the way for other views of this type. Once layers are in place it will draw each blocking mask if you will in relation to the tile, should give it a proper display to show how layers impassable proprites can override lower layers proprties.

The last screenshot I have for you is the redesigned Map Info form, this was one of the orignal forms that was the kick start for getting the editor off the ground. As you can see it has much more of a freindly user interface in place and also has tabs for each layer/info. We have the main map info, and then each layer its still a work in progress of course but the new layers do work. In fact I have layer info saving and loading properly and even wrking in the tiles secletion display properly. So this will allow me to work on acutal save/loading of maps and more importantly adding the other layers. I just want to take a moment to share with you how I belive that will work. Right now we have options for adding layers, layer 1 is of course default and a must, but layer 2 and 3 is optional. However you can not have layer 3 without layer 2, when set and enabled it will load and draw the layers. But if a map only has one layer like we do now it will remain uneffected. So the layers will be completly optional! How I belive this will work on the files side is quite simple acutally.

Right now our acutal map files our simply binary map files, they have binary integers in sequence that represent the acutal tile number. Very simple and of course more importanly small! For 1 layer that works great and won't change, simply what will happen when we add layer 2 and then 3 is were just going to add anothr byte in the squence, so right now on a 1 layer map were loading each tile in order of each byte, with a 2+ layer map, we will simple save and load every other byte for each layer, so first byte would be for layer 1, second byte would be for layer 2 and the third byte would be for layer 3. Should be very simple and require little extra code rework in the acutal engine while making it simple to read and save still. The most work I see being done of course is in the acutal tile scroller/drawing. I for see new instances for each layer to acutall scroll and tile each layer properly. Also its important to note that each tilemap for layer 2 and 3 will have to have tile 0 be transparent since its going to be considered an empty tile and if its not well it defeats the whole point of layers lol.

So anyway thats what I have and what i've been up to. Making real progres and i'm ready to start implmenting layers so that will be next. Once its done i'll acutally be able to easily input the new layer code into the acutal game engine. So please stay tuned and let me know what you all think of what I have, i'll try to get a new vblog up as soon as I can, thanks all!

Hmm, VB.NET seems powerful for map editors..

Nice job! I am also making a map editor, but its in C++/SDL. Homebrew GUI is a small pain :P

Your making great progress and the editor is looking great, nice work

Nice progress on tha editor, good stuff!

xiphirx wrote:Homebrew GUI is a small pain :P

lol tell me about it

First sorry it took a while to get back to you all RL oui!

xiphirx wrote:Hmm, VB.NET seems powerful for map editors..

Nice job! I am also making a map editor, but its in C++/SDL. Homebrew GUI is a small pain :P

Well the visual studio and .NET environment in genreal makes things easier, as it was designed to do for application development. So yeah creating something like a game/map editor in VB.NET or even C# isn't to diffcult to do if your of course familer with the langauge and using the studio. Since i've created apps using VB.NET so long and of course now presuing my associates in it professionaly it wasn't to diffcult. The intresting/hard part was including all i've learned and applied with the game development side of things, and thats whats presented the challange so far.

Nothing to be ashamed of with a homebrew particaly gui it gives you complete control and yeah it is a pain, GUI in genreal can be a painfully long process (as i'm learning) but the results are more then worth it. In reallity all visual stuido is doing is saving me coding time with buttons forms, tabs etc. Really all its doing.

MrDeathNote wrote:Your making great progress and the editor is looking great, nice work

GroundUpEngine wrote:Nice progress on tha editor, good stuff!

Thanks its deifnlty coming along great. Since that last update I have full map loading and saving implmented properly now. So now only can I load maps (as i've pretty much been doing already) but more importanly acutally save them with changes. I'll have some screens of all that latter after I start implenting the other layers (beside layer 1) to it. Hopefully you guys will enjoy that! I'm hoping to get a new vblog of my game development/programming out by this weekend. I'll of course post that here when its up. Its basicly where I left off before but as i'm getting closer and closer to getting a basic map editor working here its nearly time to get back to acutal engine coding. Of course that means more recording and I have a lot of back footage so yeah vblogs updates on the way with more gui goodness! I'll keep you all updated, I enjoy the responses and feedback even if its to say thats cool or awsome, I appricate it! Till this weekend!

As promissed I have uploaded a new vblog of my game design/programming. Going more in-depth into the new dialog class so check it out, i'll have more vblogs up for it next week and hopefully this weekend or begining of next week i'll have a new update on the editor for you all as well. Till then enjoy!
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quickshot14 wrote:As promissed I have uploaded a new vblog of my game design/programming. Going more in-depth into the new dialog class so check it out, i'll have more vblogs up for it next week and hopefully this weekend or begining of next week i'll have a new update on the editor for you all as well. Till then enjoy!
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:O why does everyone's code look all neat when mine looks like I was drunk, and was having fun with the tab key?

Nice video :P