Ed.Note: I am not going to lie to you. I recently started a Twitter account and it has been taking up a lot of my time and it is easier to maintain than Tumblr, and I became entirely sidetracked with it. I had actually written this post in December of last year, then saved it as a draft intending to get more images ready for it. 

I forgot and only remembered now, so here they are!
Again, sorry for the long delay. u_u;

So I have spent the past few months working alternatingly on a project for/with one of my fantastic girlfriends, making art slides for her project called “Skeleton Planet.”
These slides have been fun to do, with the mixed challenge/handicap of a four-colour monochrome palette and fixed image size.
Here are some of them:

Admittedly, these art pieces have not taken up too much of my time in contrast to the length of time it has been since my last update. The other work I have been alternating back and forth with have been my original project (derailed months ago by the stupid jaywalking game; both still incomplete), a grid maker tool that should help me lay out doodles for landscapes (finished!) and pixel dailies submissions that tend to take a day or two to make (I will show you those later~).

The work I have done on the original project has centered mainly around a complex set piece in an even larger tile-based map for Opark Forest. The set piece has involved a great deal of animation for a number of materials I have never had to animate (properly) before, namely a canvas tent (in a breezy spot) and leaves on large trees (also in that windy location), and while it has required no new elements in terms of my engine (though a few have required revision), the map editor has so far been updated several times to correct flaws and improve its useability. The creation of the animated elements has been painstaking, though rewarding and I will reveal those later.

Matan kids on an incomplete fort!

Besides that, much of my time has gone to laying tiles and trying to make them look good next to one another. I have made a quick time-lapse thing using ASEprite to show the evolution of a part of this current map, although it is not particularly impressive.

Mazarre Ridge: Work-In-Progress.
There are some colour palette issues in this .gif related to ASEprite’s palette quantizing that I could not avoid and sorry. :s

Now that you have seen it, maybe you would like to know a little about it? This is the ‘Mazarre Ridge’ area of Opark Forest. It is a rather unstable formation at the edge of Omalla continent’s central plains that did not collapse (as the rest of the plains did) during the initial tectonic conditioning of the planet hundreds of years ago. The ridge is rocky and covered in a thin layer of soil created by the leaves and needles of the shrubs and large conifers the grow on top of it. The soil is quite good once you move away from the ridge where the wind prevents it from accumulating for long. There is a large lake not too far away, separating the ridge from the Matan Terraforming Platform. The terrain below the ridge is riddled with narrow caves and swallowholes that join and link together in Nigran Cavern beneath, and these holes are the primary reason why the road connecting Matan to the platform take the much longer route to the east of the lake, and why the area has only a narrow and seldom-used hiking trail connecting it to the town. The wind and steepness do not recommend it, either.
Six years ago, Gustek Radomr constructed a small shack on one of the few stable outcroppings on the edge of the ridge for Celia Roscoe to play in; since then, Celia has expanded it slightly and maintains it to this day. It is quite difficult to reach.

Seedbird, in the woods on Mazarre Ridge.

Anyway, that is all for this update. I will try and be more diligent about adding more to this weblog but realistically, who knows– I am not good at publicity. u_u;

I have made some new visual effects in the past couple of days. I hope to have a post ready soon, because I realize that it has been entirely too long.
Here is a preview for you: a sort of shattered-funhouse-mirror effect for uneven reflective things!

Garbling a reflection was both harder and easier than I thought it would be.

Incidentally, if you were looking forward to more stupid-jaywalking-game updates, they will slow somewhat, but I would like to continue that project in the future. I just did not want to leave my main project on the back burner for any longer, so I picked it up again.
The most recent thing I worked on for SJG was a code module that allowed me to make road layouts more easily from sets of locations and road-width data, rather than having to work out the carriageways on paper. The next element is other pedestrians, I think!

That is all for now!
Talk to you next time! :y

Distractions X: “Stupid Jaywalking Game, Part IV″

This weblog is still alive, if you could call it living. I apologize once again for not updating, but my reason is at least a good one?

In the past few weeks, I have been able to actually take my jaywalking simulator from being an unattractive and ineffective traffic-themed screensaver and turned it into an actual, playable, though mind-numbingly basic, “game.”

Here is an itemized list of the things I have added since I wrote last:
(It is a bit on the long side so I will break the post here for easier scrollin’…)

Keep reading

I have done a lot on this the past week or so, including these things:

 - Stop sign AI, which reliably stops vehicles from colliding with each other and admits them to an intersection in an efficient (though currently somewhat hard to easily predict) sequence
 - Turn indicators on vehicles, which broadcast to the player which direction a vehicle intends to turn (it is currently very hard to see; I will add an effect that makes it more obvious soon!)
 - A motorcycle vehicle with its own unique stats.
 - Timer and event object classes, which control scheduled and repeating events.
 - Expanded graphics generation options to allow specific roads to have individual surface and curb colours (eventually, maybe, textures).
 - Dozens of smaller things which, when taken collectively, are a pretty big deal.
 - The automated construction process for intersection transit routes has been improved but there remains room for improvement yet.

You cannot really see the blinkers and brake lights on the cars, so here is a big version. I am working on making these more visible, or perhaps adding some kind of marker to show vehicle turns.

My next goal will probably be to tie up the loose ends with signal timing (as there are still several left) and to work on making a player character and implementing that into the game. Probably the hardest part of that will be actually creating a player sprite that does not look too awkward– as anybody who has played either of the first two Grand Theft Auto games can tell you, top-down views of humans get bland rather quickly.

I should also like to add other pedestrians to the game, which will no doubt create its own problems related to that (how can players differentiate themselves from NPC pedestrians?) as well as unique ones of their own (how will they navigate and will the player collide with them, or pass through them unimpeded like spooky-ooky ghosts?). As in life, “other people” remain a stretch goal feebly cheering me on from the bottom of a surmountable heap of tasks and a less-surmountable mountain of distractions.

And speaking of distractions, this whole affair is itself just something I find myself led away by when I ought to be working on my primary project. I know I promised I would produce something for you for that soon.
I have delayed “soon” somewhat so that I may keep that promise and I am really counting on you guys to have not read this far. <3

Anyway I hope you like this stuff because it was very difficult to make, although the production of it did go far more smoothly than I had thought it might.

Should have more in a week or two, and talk to you then! :D
Auf wiedersehen!

Distractions VIII: “Stupid Jaywalking Game, Part II”

Okay, so it has been at least three weeks, going on one month, and I have said exactly jack squat.
Until today! >:D

The truth is that I have been out of town with another fantastic girlfriend, and my attention has been divided badly between being with her and doing fun things and being in one of the United States’ republics with a reputation for being rather hostile towards no fewer than three of the minorities to which I belong.
The former has certainly weighed more heavily on my productivity, but the latter contributed little, as well. In any case, I find myself back in my home now and am gleefully ensconced in my underachievement, staring at reflections in my own river of mediocrity, desperately fighting the urge to dive in and seize the glittering images taunting me from its surface.
(Not in a Narcissus sort of way but more like Li Bai*.)

Anyway, in the time since my return (it has been three days, more or less), I have managed to complete most of the code in my Stupid Jaywalking Game (and that is its working title, by the way) required for the automatic construction of Intersections and their attendant components, which include entry and egress points (Nodes) for vehicles transiting the intersection, generation of Routes for vehicles to follow between them, and methods which produce graphics which represent the intersection area to the player.

This is what it looks like so far:

The jumble of tabs and characters that creates this mess of pathways looks a little (exactly) like this:

  ...

IXN = {
    'center' : (300,300),
    'control' : 'SIGN', # currently does nothing.
    'edges' : {
        'N' : {
            'inputs' : {
                'n_left' : ('ENTRY', (40, 40), (215, 40), ('B', 265, 40), (265, 90), (265, 220)),
                'n_right' : ('ENTRY', (560, 40), (385, 40), ('B', 335, 40), (335, 90), (335, 220))
                        },
            },
        120 : {
            'outputs' : {
                '120_out' : (('A', 110, 120, (300,300)), ('A', 240, 120, (300,300)), ('B', 'A', 300, 120, (300,300), 12), (580, 450))
                        },
            },
        240 : {
            'outputs' : {
                '240_out' : (('A', 110, 240, (300,300)), ('A', 240, 240, (300,300)), ('B', 'A', 300, 240, (300,300), 12), (20, 450))
                        },
            },
        },
    'links' : {
        'n_left' : ('240_out','120_out'),
        'n_right' : ('120_out',)
            }
    }

  ...

I have also reworked the vehicle navigation code, which, previously, was the software engineering equivalent of a Novocaine-addicted dog’s breakfast (”profoundly messy,” I mean). It was a bit of work but I find myself pleased with the results; I am also surprised that it was only a half-day’s work. I am not sure if the code runs faster (the most micro of optimizations, if better at all) but it sure does look better and it ought to be easier to maintain.
More significantly, it ought to be able to include and respond to Stoplights and Stop Signs, which are instrumental considering that the whole purpose here is to create a predictable traffic regime for the player to negotiate and not just a busy roadway. All I need to do now is actually write the signal controllers for the intersections and get it working.

Anyway, there remain a few problems with the way vehicles respond to each other, and which may be an issue with their code or may be an issue with the obstacle-detection system entirely, and that still demands my attention, so there is a bit of ground to cover before I can move on to greater things.

I also miss working on my main project. It has been a month or two. Or three.
I should like to maybe poke at it soon, as well, if for no other reason than to keep it fresh in my addled little mind. I think I also promised you guys a view of an animation I was working on before I started this whole jaywalking side-project affair, and I ought to make good on that, I suppose.

Anyway, I shall try and be more diligent in my updates, and where have you heard that before, I wonder? :y

See you next time! :D

* If you get this reference, drop me a line so that I may award you your fifteen points!