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.

Rincon High School

As you may know from previous posts, I am in the marching band for our school and we go to football games to play and cheer on our football team. So yesterday we went up to Rincon High School. By now, we’ve had 3 games and I didn’t expect to see much of an improvement from our 0-3 win-loss record for our football team. We arrived at the high school, got into the bleachers on the visitors side and started our normal stuff. We got to march our pre-game show and I say it wasn’t the best, but decent. Pretty soon (I think it was 4 or 5 minutes into the first quarter), we make a touchdown! Well, this happened in our first game, but we ended up getting beat, so we were like, ok that’s great, now let’s see what happens. So we wait and wait, and I think 3 minutes before the first quarter ended, we make yet another touchdown. The kick gets blocked, but that still has the score at 13-0. So the game continues into second quarter, near half time, Rincon gets their first touchdown and kick. So score is 13-7. We then got to watch Rincon’s half-time show, which I must say is pretty dang impressive. Although I did watch their off-step’ness happen here and there (They wore black pants compared to our white pants so being off-step isn’t as major for them), but other than that, they created some impressive sets. The fast follow-the-leader move at the beginning of the show was great, and near the end they got into a perfectly made diamond. I noticed there were a lot of gaps, but other than that they did impressive. Afterward, they played their fight song which was also one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen, not just the quality of the song, but what they did during it. They bobbed up and down, turned left and right, moved here and there, and was just all-out fun. I do not think any other band has ever done something as spectacular as this before. But this wasn’t the only thing that made this day probably the best football game I’ve ever been to. It’s also when we got to meet them. Rincon has about the same amount of band students as we do (A Division One band just like us) and we got to meet and greet them. These people were great, I couldn’t believe how exciting they were, how they felt about everything, and most of the Alto Saxophone’s names were short 3-5 letter names (Like Sam), which I found kind of funny. We got to make a crazy train of people and about 100 kids all ran around the tennis courts we were at turning this way and that with others grabbing on to the end, it was crazy fun, probably the most active group of band students I’ve ever seen. After that, we got to watch the rest of the game, and only from the third-fourth quarter did I notice their band in the bleachers and got to see exactly what they did. During some of their songs, they would start doing little dances in the bleachers, the trombones would duck while every other trombone turned to the left or the right, and they’d alternate this throughout the song. The tubas turned left and right and it was very noticeable as the bells were very large. And all the other sections also did nifty things in the stands. We were in awe at everything they did to make their band look so fun. (Even makes me think about joining them XD) They even got to play the Mortal Kombat Theme Song, which was amazing. And as if it couldn’t get any better, our football team won 13-7 and making our win:loss record 1:3. Go Buena!

Oh man, I just wrote such a long passage on that, but this is a moment I’ll probably remember for the rest of my life. I do not think I will ever forget yesterday. So, want to know what else is going on? Some less-exciting things (In my opinion) including that we’re gonna be joining in on this 3-month YoYoGames competition. The Z-Gamers are going to try to win money if we can and we’re gonna create hopefully what’s gonna be a great game. (For more information on this, see http://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker/competition04) This is going to be called Project GLOBE for us, since the competition needs to be based on Saving the Planet in some way or form. (From Natural Phenomenon, not Alien Invasions) So that’s something to think about.

I also have never talked about a neat little desktop-viewing program I found called TeamViewer. (http://www.teamviewer.com/) What is this program you ask? Well, it lets you easily view another person’s screen by just giving them a 9-digit ID and 4-digit password. You may think this is a little insecure, but who would really need to view someone else’s desktop and guessing could still take forever. Anyways, I can’t tell you how easy this program works. As a very convenient feature, you can simply run the program from the installer, and not even install the program! This is great for just trying it out and I installed the program thereafter. This program also easily passes a firewall, so you don’t have to sit around wondering why you cannot connect. The reason why this happens is because it authenticates through another server, so your computer won’t bother blocking out that connection in which a user can pass through. By default, the user that connects with you can interact with your desktop (As in move your mouse around) and type things, not just watching. If you do not want to do that, you simply go to the Options menu before connecting, and change what you want to let them control. I also like how it’s easy to simply switch to the other person’s monitor, this makes it so that you don’t have to restart the program and give out a new id and password. Also as a final note, your id will always stay the same, so you just have to give out a new password!

What else has been happening? (As if that’s not enough reading already!) I started playing BZFlag again! I think it’s kind of a bored-sense thing, but I’m back now, and I introduced to myself to the players that still played. It’s still pretty fun, and I still have my servers I run and everything. Warinthestar wants me to rebuild Twilight, but I don’t think I’m ready for that yet. I just wanna play for now. One thing I want to create is a large randomly generated BZFlag maze, where there are different colored teleporters so that you can distinguish if you’ve been through a path already. This will hopefully be nice once I complete it, and there will be I think 400 different “squares” in the teleporter maze. This will make for a pretty challenging teleporter maze, and I’ll probably let it rotate mazes every once in awhile. (I may make an added challenge where you must find the flag, then the base!) This’ll be a fun Bash Script to create!

Hmm…Is there anything else I have to discuss? I think that’s it for now! This is the longest post I have made so far, but I think it covers 2-week’s worth of missing posts, so that should do it.

Starting an Ultimate Game Maker Guide

I notice that no matter what websites I go to about Game Maker Tutorial, I either find separate parts to tutorials or unfinished websites. Also, these tutorials are not progressive and usually assume you know quite a bit. To overcome these limiting factors to learning about Game Maker, (Especially for new people) I am working on a guide that will cover everything from the drag and drop all the way through 3D coding. I will need help near the end because I do not know much about C++ and writing DLLs in Game Maker. Until I get more in-depth information about that, I will be sticking to just showing how to add DLLs into Game Maker, the basic structure to them, and listing a few common DLLs. I will be able to explain Libraries and Extension Packages though, as those aren’t too bad.

So far I have this for an index:
 
Unit 1: Drag and Drop
Getting Game Maker 2
Sprites, Objects, and Moving 2
X and Y Positions
Using the Keyboard and Mouse
Collisions
Score, Lives, and Health
Direction, Speed, and Gravity
Rooms and Views
Persistence
Animations
Draw Event
Variables
Saving and Loading
Checks and Blocks
Parents and Masks
Paths and Timelines
Unit 2: Game Maker Language
Variables and Strings
Object Movement
Drawing Codes
Image Variables
Mathematical Functions
If statements
Keyboard and Mouse Controls
Enemy AI
Rooms and Views
Dialogs and Menus
Scripts and Arguments
Saving and Loading Files
Loading Files Externally
Effects
Particles
Mplay functions
3D Games and Views
Unit 3: Extending Game Maker
Extension Packages
Libraries
DLLs
Continuing Your Game Making Hobby

If I have forgotten a topic, I will eventually add to this list to make it more thorough.

Second football game last night, we lost again so we have a 0/2 win/loss record now.  The band was more active than the first game though and we did fine in cheering them on.

Finished 2001 A Space Odyssey, since I already read the 2010 odyssey two book, I see how the two stories connect now.

I’ve also started playing Shaiya Online. It is a pretty decent game, I am level 16 at the moment and I like it. I like it better than fiesta because they seem to have more skills altogether and the game is more explorable and keeps you wanting more because you get cool skills. Priests aren’t stuck with just lame heals like Fiesta’s Clerics, they actually get magic and help out with killing. It seems to keep me more “awake” than Fiesta.

Video Game Mayhem 0.1

About a year ago, I started to work on a game called Video Game Mayhem, so this is kind of like a revival of this game too. Video Game Mayhem is based on Super Smash Brothers, and will have a large amount of similar features to the game. I am declaring this file Version 0.1 as there’s a lot of work to be done. I will explain the game a bit in its current state. When you start the game, you are shown a Select a Character screen, which lets you select from three characters. There’s Red Square, Blue Square, and Purple T. Red Square and Blue Square are obvious, and Purple T is a purple Triangle. Currently all characters have two attacks, and when you choose a stage and use them, you can see how they work. The spacebar is your normal attack and down arrow key is your special attack. Red has a sword that swings around him when you press space, and when you press Space, it creates a small red square that spins downward to the ground and bounces off anything it hits for about 1 second, and then disappears. It’s powerful but quick and you can shoot up to 3 of them at a time. The Blue square has a slightly longer sword than red’s, but is not as strong. The special attack is a lightning bolt that can really hammer opponents under platforms. The Purple Triangle is more known for its great recovery moves and longest survival rates if you know how to use him. Whenever you turn right or left while ever falling, your falling rate slows down by 2/3rds the normal rate, so you can get back on platforms easily when you fly off. It’s normal move is a black line that moves upward from it. It’s very hard to hit someone with it, but can do about 30% at a time when it hits someone as it goes up and brings the person with them. His special move is not an actual attack, but more of a recovery. When you press it, for about 2 seconds, it turns into a black block and moves quickly downward and if it hits a platform, it’ll start bouncing. No one can attack it while it is in the black box, but you have to be careful about using it. Whenever you fly really high up and about to die, you can use that to stop falling. If you do not choose two characters, one for player and one for CPU, it will cause an error currently, but I am going to fix that in future versions. Once you’re actually playing, you’ll see two numbers on each character. The black top number is the percentage of your character. The larger it gets, the farther you fly off with each attack and the longer it takes to regain control of your character when you go flying. The green number is how many lives you have until you lose. The goal is to not fly off and die. Going too high or too low kills you and you lose a life each time. On the character selection screen, you can select how many lives there are by clicking the Stocks:3 button and then it’ll ask for a new number. Making it 0 will cause a game to end instantly. It will also keep track of your wins, losses, and total games played for the time you play that game. The camera system works quite well in the game as I have fixed it from a rather buggy camera system before, but now it always keeps both players on the screen at least. You can download this game here: http://www.box.net/shared/u5nqdrascs. I will update the Z-Gamers site soon.

Enough of that for now. I also completed the next version of Ball Amnesia with a few extra fixes, and the official level 3 added in, so now levels 1-5 and level 10 are now all in the Easy path to play, so I am halfway there to completing the official Easy path levels. You probably are wondering what the medium path will be like, hehehehe. Link to new version here: http://www.box.net/shared/o2m5m2es8s

The reason why I didn’t post for a whole day was because I was at my friend Michael’s house again yesterday, this time with my other friend Charles. It was fun. We played some Super Smash Brothers Brawl and that was fun. At the smash league, I was told that I really should start learning grabbing. They say I can become a much better player if I start implementing grabbing into my move arsenal, so should I? We also played Mario Kart DS and all three of us did go on wifi. At one point Michael and Charles found each other in a match against two others. One was a noobish player and the other was a decent power slider, but it ended up only being against them two. All three of us are snakers and love to play Mario Kart occasionally. We played some Magic: The Gathering. Now, I never was into the game and still never will be, but I guess it was ok. It took me about 30 minutes to learn the basic rules and terms of the game, but I did ok for the dark deck I was given. I was playing against a so-called Control deck and some other deck. My problem was using all my life for cards that were really good but sucked life out of me each term, which I eventually learned was bad. So that was all exciting and such.

We now have our general music for next year’s marching season for band, and I decided to take my E flat Alto Saxophone this weekend. I’ll put up some audio clips of me playing the tunes. Obviously just my part won’t sound that great, but I guess it’s ok to hear me play. I am not too good at playing my instrument but the effort is there. I will put some audio clips up tomorrow.

I also did another part of Earthbound today and am uploading the new video now.

So that’s a summary of what I did today and yesterday.