The Pieces Are Set
Maybe I spoke too soon. My milestone isn't quite past. I misunderstood my accomplishment, tackling the issues of matrix transformation. That was good at all, but working last night I just realized that I've come 180 degrees back to where I left off before...
A month ago, I diverged from my main game-in-progress to work on MapTastic - my small test bed turned tile-based map editor. My goal all along was to explore and learn more about how to arrange the physical objects (landscape, player, items, etc.) in a manner that they would behave realistically on the 2D plane and interact as intended. The map editor functionality was just a bonus side-effect that would help me out later on. Well, for the past month I've worked on the functionality aspects of my little editor only to come to the very same juncture I left one month ago... a whole mess off physics interaction.
You see, the real challenge here is that the physics stuff is more or less transparent. It's running behind the scenes in it's own more-or-less isolated little world as it should. The physics engine doesn't need to know that all the images and logic even exist, really, it just needs to know that some rectangle is bumping into these edges and how to react. The difficulty is attempting to monitor these tens or hundreds of points and edges that are transparent to make sure they're doing what they're supposed to. You can attempt to draw dots and lines over it, or images over a rectangle, but can you be certain that they're being drawn accurately? They should, but can you be absolute certain? There's a lot of guess work going on there, and your guess is as good as mine! :D
Honestly it's got a pretty positive outlook to it. My game was over complicating the task. I couldn't possibly have sifted through it in that environment. My current test bed is much more streamlined. I've got much more tools at my disposal to track what's going on and present it in an intelligible fashion. I've learned a LOT in the past month in my work such as serialization, GUI management and population, lots more about game state management, among other things. The game is set. The pieces are in place. I'm raring to go and I've got my strategies in line. Next time expect to see something working here... in motion... yar!!
A month ago, I diverged from my main game-in-progress to work on MapTastic - my small test bed turned tile-based map editor. My goal all along was to explore and learn more about how to arrange the physical objects (landscape, player, items, etc.) in a manner that they would behave realistically on the 2D plane and interact as intended. The map editor functionality was just a bonus side-effect that would help me out later on. Well, for the past month I've worked on the functionality aspects of my little editor only to come to the very same juncture I left one month ago... a whole mess off physics interaction.
You see, the real challenge here is that the physics stuff is more or less transparent. It's running behind the scenes in it's own more-or-less isolated little world as it should. The physics engine doesn't need to know that all the images and logic even exist, really, it just needs to know that some rectangle is bumping into these edges and how to react. The difficulty is attempting to monitor these tens or hundreds of points and edges that are transparent to make sure they're doing what they're supposed to. You can attempt to draw dots and lines over it, or images over a rectangle, but can you be certain that they're being drawn accurately? They should, but can you be absolute certain? There's a lot of guess work going on there, and your guess is as good as mine! :D
Honestly it's got a pretty positive outlook to it. My game was over complicating the task. I couldn't possibly have sifted through it in that environment. My current test bed is much more streamlined. I've got much more tools at my disposal to track what's going on and present it in an intelligible fashion. I've learned a LOT in the past month in my work such as serialization, GUI management and population, lots more about game state management, among other things. The game is set. The pieces are in place. I'm raring to go and I've got my strategies in line. Next time expect to see something working here... in motion... yar!!
posted by Liege at
10:49 AM
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