side scroller physics

I was working on porting my collision detection stuff from C++ to C#:



It's a simple AABB colliding with line segments using SAT for collision detection and response. I added friction so it's not sliding around everywhere, but this kind of physics doesn't seem appropriate for this game. I'm going to try to make it work more like old side scrolling SNES games, where the movement is more predictable and easier to control.

Also I made a little particle physics test. It's surprisingly easy to implement this kind of system:

random face

old programs

I came across my old programming stuff from highschool. These are some of the more interesting examples.

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QBasic

Behold, my first game!






Some silly ASCII animations:





I was a Star Wars junkie back then. This was made with the drawing commands:




Fake scandisk with animated progress bar:




Connect Four. No AI or win detection though:

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Turing

A little tile based program with an animated player-controlled character and collision detection. I came up with an interesting method of faking the tile transparency so the tree tiles would overlap the character properly. The tiles were stolen from various SNES games but I made the sprites myself, including walking animations:





Obligatory Pong clone:




The Maya were another one of my obsessions. This program takes a date and calculates the Mayan long count date from it, then displays it in Mayan numbers:

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Visual Basic 6


A clone of Flying Pictures which is a clone of Flipull. Graphics are from Gundam Wing:




Some tile map editor, more stolen tiles:




Paint program:




A clone of that slime volleyball game, no scoring and no collision with the net though. Background stolen from Gundam Wing: Endless Duel:




A game I made with my friend Michelle. We had to do a "who wants to be a millionaire" type game. Yep, Gundam Wing was yet another one of my highschool obsessions. The graphics were made by me and I animated Heero; he blinks, moves his eyebrows, shifts his eyes, and looks like he's talking while the text is appearing. It's a pretty cool effect:





I wanted to make an RPG but never got past the tiling graphics/animated character/collision detection stage. The sprite in the middle is mine:

bunnydev

I really suck at coming up with names for things. BunnyDev seems to fit though.

The icon is based on the arctic hare:



=:3

c++ vs c#

One question I keep coming back to is whether or not I should switch to using C# and Managed DirectX instead of C++ and unmanaged DirectX for my game. (I also considered XNA, but decided against it for various reasons.)

I'm a lot more productive in C# than C++ and I'm already using C#/MDX for my tools so it is quite tempting. However MDX is no longer being developed, and I'm not sure what kind of features it might be missing compared to native DX, if any.

I already have a lot of working C++ code, but it shouldn't be too hard to port it. Any drop in performance would probably be negligible and I'm not too concerned with cross-platformedness at the moment.

Another thing about C++ is that it makes me feel like a Real Programmer™, which is kind of stupid, but I spent long months learning the intricacies of the language and I'm hesitant to give it up now even though a lot of what I learned also applies to C#.

The most important thing should be to get things done, but still, it's a tough choice.

sketch dump

I have pages and pages of notes and sketches that I make while trying to figure stuff out. These are some of the better ones.

lighting implemented

In addition to the light and shadow generation, I have also implemented multiple textures and four polygon layers (lit non-colliding background, lit colliding foreground, unlit colliding foreground, and unlit non-colliding foreground). I've been able to salvage some code and design from the discontinued PW2 but this map editor is still in the very early stages.

redesign

Driven by my desire to have a recent comments section on the sidebar, I redid the design of my blog. I'm not sure I'm really satisfied with it but I think it's quite an improvement over the old design. I will probably change the header as soon as I come up with a better idea for it.

lighting

Originally I was going to use 3D polygons and DirectX lights, but I changed my mind because 1) working in real 3D, even in a limited way, is a pain, and 2) it's hard to predict the effects of a light on 3D geometry. Instead I'm going to implement a two dimensional method that includes shadows. I used one of VirtualTT's maps to do some testing in Photoshop.

unlit:


red, green, and blue lights overlapping, night:


shadows and light-blocking polygons, sunset:

animation editor

I just started working on the third rewrite of the character/animation editor for my project (C#):



After it's possible to create and save animations I'll be able to start properly implementing my animation system, starting with walking and jumping.