Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Objectification

Yesterday was a sick day, and right up until fever broke over me like the Persian Hordes broke over the 300 Spartans, I actually got some work done. Then I collapsed, grabbed a small stuffed toy I refer to as The Christmas Moose and made with the nap time.
Today, I'm still a vector of disease, like that monkey from Outbreak (no, I'm not terrified), but I can stand up for longer than a few minutes at a time.
The first thing is that I can now declare, The Necromancer Saga, is at an end. The final bits of code that didn't work, namely that great, big, and downright sexy bit of code that made animated objects work, works again. It saves, it loads, it makes with the candles.
Although, I really, really should learn to comment stuff, especially when it's complicated. It took me 30 minutes of mind bending, Divinci-esque decoding to figure out what in the nine hells was going on, followed by 15 minutes of making it work again.
I went all night-night before I could fix the array boundary bug. What's that? Basically, you can build an array, or as I refer to them, a Table. It has columns and rows (but could have n dimensions - it's just really uncommon, because it's next to impossible to visualize a 5 dimensional anything) and you put things into them. The trick is, you have to tell the computer how big the table's dimensions are. So for the objects, I use the rows to put data - namely the kind of animation it is, and how many frames it has, and the little pictures. There are up to 30 cells that I've made available for this system. (but I'll probably end up adding more by request). The bug occurs when the screen switches and new items appear. The loop doesn't want to reset properly, so it goes looking for animation frame, say 70. Since it doesn't exist, it falls down.
I can fix that by changing the orders of stuff, which I'm hesitant to do since it does work. But I may not have a choice, I'll find out soon enough.

-In level building, I'm into actually building The Tower level now. I've gotten a map that I'm happy with and in an odd way, the levels are builing really fast. The basic thing is that, the level is designed to be wicked hard, and be going for realism in some way. This leads to really minimal layouts on each screen. So in say, the Prison, the puzzle solutions required only 1 or 2 moves to solve. Now, I can create a chain of 4 moves and threaten death for failure.
In any event, I'm shooting to have that done in the next couple of days. there's still a lot of coding that needs doing. Plus installation of assets and gods know what else.

-Oh, the Walls are cut. Well, they're blued. I may get around to doing them in the future, but for IGF, I'd rather have the time devoted to the other levels.

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