The Usual Fall Break

As normal, during my fall break I do nothing special, I just chill and relax and try not to think about school, because that’s obviously what you are supposed to do. I did work on a few things during fall break though.

Mostly Game Maker related, here are 3 projects I will definitely be slowly working on (Including Screenshots):

Elite Beat Agents Simulator

I have loved the game Elite Beat Agents and so I am recreating a version of it. The version I found on the Game Maker Community is such a crappy version, so I decided to remake it. Here’s a screenshot for now, it uses midi files to conserve space, and the notes are in sync. I have been working on a very good syncing system to keep the notes in time so you can enjoy the song and the game.

Wings3D OBJ to GML Converter

As another note, the current type of OBJ file converter does not work for Vista users, and is always quite complicated. All this will do is take a Wings3D OBJ file and converts it into GML code automatically with just the file needed for user input so that you can just paste into your 3D game as a model of points to use.

Why Wings3D only? Well, first of all, Wings3D is a very powerful program itself, so that statement itself should let you understand why I’m restricting the file format to just that. If you want to use this once I finish it, you should simply get used to using Wings3D now to create nice models for Game Maker, which is our goal with this program.

Super Mario RPG Game (Possibly a Sequel)

The game is based off the super popular Super Mario RPG game from the SNES. Although the game is quite vague to most people for Mario games and got a low amount of sales, it is a very good game with lots of challenge. As an isometric RPG, it had lots of cool features and I want to make a possible sequel for the game with great implementation. Right now I have finished the jumping engine, there IS a z variable for this game and jumping makes Mario go “higher”. I have allowed Mario to walk in all 8 directions and given Mario the ability to jump in all 8 directions. Now I am going to start importing platforms into the game and then start working on the battle engine, it’ll be fun! (Screenshot below shows Mario jumping SW)

As you can see, I have got quite an amount of projects going, all of them should keep me busy until I get close to finishing them, in which I stop. Tune into this blog for all the latest info on all three of these promising games!

In addition to Game Maker, I have started learning some Visual Basic, a minor thing that I may never get enough experience to make advanced programs in yet. Hopefully I can find it useful in the near future.

We also went to ASU on Saturday, 10/18/08 to perform for our marching band competition. Buena got an Excellent rating, and I think we deserve exactly that. (I’m sure all of the other Buena members would agree) We will be working hard in the next week or so to hopefully do better at the Ironwood Ridge competition. Good luck to me and all the Buena Band members, let’s work hard to go to state!!!

I also surprisingly started playing Fiesta. Now, if you’re read previously, I also started playing BZFlag again. I must say, I am going back to all my fun games I used to play, and I like it. So I’ve started playing again (I’m glad I never gave away my account items even though I wanted to), so now I’m continuing my slow trek to level 60 as a cleric. I have had some help from Lanowar_Elf (Charles from previous posts) to gain about 20% while helping him level to 78 on his archer, so he’s still much higher in level than I am.

That sums up all that’s been happening during this week.

Fun with bash History

So today I found a nifty script that shows your top 10 commands used in bash. This is a very cool script to let you know what you have been doing and tells people about you.

So, this is on the unstable server, where I do most of my experimenting on. It returned these results:

57 cd
56 bzfs
43 screen
27 ./obstacle_course.sh
24 ./super_maze.sh
20 killall
16 mysql
13 history
13 g++
13 crontab 

So according to these results, I experiment with script running alot, do a lot of file browsing, run BZFS (BZFlag Server) which means I do a lot of testing in BZFlag maps. Screen is up in third also, which means I do a lot of programs that I stay running. I got killall, which I used to kill all my scripts and BZFlag servers. MySQL was strictly for my website. History is just this script XD. g++ is used to convert plugins to .so from .cpp so that they can be used in BZFlag, so I do lots of plugin conversions. Crontab shows up, which I use to modify how often my random map generating scripts run.

So, unstable isn’t the only server I have available, so I took a look at twilight, my strictly BZFlag server:    121 /bzflag/builds/2.0.x/bin/bzfs
     84 screen
     61 killall
     35 cd
     32 nano
     20 ./keepalive.sh
     17 ps
     17 ls
     14 kill
     12 bzfs

According to this list, I have bzfs up at the top with 121 uses. So obviously bzflag strictly. Again, we have screen and killall up there, both used for bzfs related stuff. cd and nano (Command Line Editor) are up there too, as I did minor modifications right in the terminal. We have keepalive which is basically a script that runs the whole server (Including bzfs, so bzfs could really be 141). Down near the bottom, ps (While I was experimenting with processes), ls for file browsing, and kill which I used in correspondence with ps. bzfs is at the bottom, these are just failed attempts to execute the top bzfs because I remembered that this wasn’t unstable, so bzfs wasn’t included as a normal function, so you have to go to the actual directory where it’s installed.

Ok, so that was a little interesting with the command line. By the way, that code is:
history | awk '{print $2}' | awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}'|sort|uniq -c | sort -n | tail | sort -nr
Placed it in that textarea because wordpress does not show ' and " correctly in a terminal.

Alrighty, next up on the list of stuff to talk about, is Game Maker.

First off, my new game release, Multi-Breakout 2.

(Taken from http://sigonasr2.servegame.org/zgamers/v2/index.php?Multi-Breakout2)

Main Goal Although this may sound like a basic Breakout game, it is not. The concept itself is completely original. Instead of just hitting blocks, you have to hit blocks with 2 other players! You have health, and every time you hit a block, you gain 3 health and your opponents lose 5 health. Over time, this health adds up! There are also powerups you can get, and as you see the effects of each and their icons, you can try to memorize which ones do what. Finally, when you do hit a block, it gets sent to your opponent’s fields after a short amount of time. This means that the more blocks you hit, the more blocks you create on your opponent’s side to block out the stage and possibly make it harder for them to survive!

Some screenies (Click to view enlarged):

Download: multi_breakout2.exe

 

 

Alrighty, that’s that. Next up, I have made a Steady Healthbar example.

(Taken from http://gmc.yoyogames.com/index.php?showtopic=400958)

Title: Steady Healthbar Example

Description:The goal of this example is to accomplish a smoothly decreasing healthbar.Most of the time when you play a game, and you lose a health, you see the healthbar
go from a certain point directly to another point.This example makes smoothly decreasing healthbars instead, which can be useful in
lots of ways to make your game graphically enhanced.

GM Version: GM 7

Registered: no

File Type: .gmk

File Size: ~38 kb

File Link: steady_healthbar.gmk

This is an example that I am pretty proud of. It shows a ball getting hit by a continuous bullet slowly losing health, and then there’s a DDR-style healthbar that you can press the up and down arrow keys on to make it gain or lose health, smoothly, of course

 

So that takes care of the topic of Game Maker. What else have I got…

Oh yeah, I finished reading the Space Odyssey series. Great books, probably the first ever I’ve seen with so much science fiction and action in it. If I were to rate these books in the series on a scale of 1 to 10, I’d give them:
2001: A Space Odyssey 

8

(Great Book, but I read this one second, so I kinda knew how everything was gonna turn out. Kind of interesting to connect it to 2010 after reading it.)
2010: Odyssey Two 

9

(The book that got me started on this series. Just loved it.)
2061: Odyssey Three 

6

(Why such a low rating? Well, truthfully, half of the book was retelling of 2001 and 2010, which I sort of hated, but it was still pretty cool that they went out to Haley’s Comet, then to Europa. And Heywood Floyd’s son.)
3001: The Final Odyssey 

10

 (The best of the series in my opinion. I loved all the future concepts and how communication and exploration of the various planets worked. I just liked the fact that we got to see so much detail from Frank Poole’s mind and that he was living a literal luxurious life.)

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So, what am I reading now. Well, guess what? I went to our library, and looked at more of Arthur C. Clarke’s books, and I found a book called “Rama Revealed”, so I picked it and started reading it. Truthfully, another great book so far, I loved the first chapter, already intense with Nicole scattering to a hideout she’d have to live in for a few weeks until phase two of the escape plan can start. Just great. One strange thing though, is that I picked the last book in the series (hmm), see a patten yet? I always seem to pick a book that is not the beginning of a series. But I think it’s kinda cool, because later you can link it to previous reading and put it all into the big picture!

 

So, now I want to talk to you about a neat little program called CExe.

Cexe’s goal is to produce smaller exe files using the smallest possible exe compression method. It uses the framework of zlib and lzw. It worked quite well with the Game Maker Executables, dropping fightersfield from 6.3 MB to 5.3 MB and dropping simple_race (another one of my unreleased games) from 2.6 to 1.5 MB. Basically, it drops them 1 MB, which could make some difference for some people, so it works. If you really wanted to, you can then put it in a zip file dropping fighter’s field to 4.8 MB and simple_race to 1.2 MB.
This was produced by a person named Scott Ludwig, and that’s the post about CExe, and the download by it. Very nice job Scott, you did well.
http://www.scottlu.com/Content/CExe.html

 

That’s about all for tonight. Yes, another long post, I think this’ll happen often now since I’ll be posting once every week or so, so I get a lot of stories then post. Anyways, see you later!