You read it correctly..

Since gabehabe's making a game I stupidly decided to rival him and say I'd make a game by 11pm tomorrow evening. I'm actually going to try really hard to meet this , with the "engine" already completed (the "ball engine"!).

It's 3am right now, 20 hours until the deadline. I need 8 hours sleep minimum, so this will leave us with around 12 hours development time. I've got an insomniac working on the storyline/quests through the night so that shouldn't be too much of an issue..

Download the networked version of BALLs now! http://rudivisser.com/MMOTest.exe

It's very exciting.

Note: The server will recycle itself every 15 minutes so BALLs could crash or just stop updating itself, not really sure, but doesn't matter it's purely for demonstration.

EDIT: Oh I wouldn't mind if you could post what FPS you get from the engine either, would be pretty neat. FYI I'm getting around 140.

EDIT: Oh ya some of you are scared of apps arn't ya, SS:


This post has been edited by MageUK: 19 Jun, 2009 - 06:27 PM

That's crazy! Sounds like fun.

Hi MageUK,
Cool idea! I'm not convinced someone young like yourself really needs 8 hours of sleep. Maybe 4?

I got 80 fps, and about 36-40 fps at maximized window. I'm running ATI Radeon HD 4350, Vista, 2.4HGz, Intel core 2 quad processor at 1680x1050 resolution on main monitor.



Regards,
Chuck

I dunno where my post went but I said something like:
Yeah it's all GDI+ so it's processor dependent, quite interesting because most "higher powered" (asin more cores) processors will get less FPS compared to my extremely old dual core (E6850, but clock @ 3.2GHz)!

Anyway yeah, I'll be working on a map today, and the class design of the game which I'll post up (or edit this post if nobody else replies) throughout the day.

A problem I overlooked is that it's my aunty's birthday, so time will be even less.... Still plan on doing it though

More cores doesn't really mean anything in regards to a single app's performance, if that app isn't multi-threaded . It means if that one app takes up 100% of one cpu, I can still use other apps fine.

Speaking of, on my core2duo 2.6ghz, it takes all the cpu it can get (1/2 of total), and about 18M of ram. FPS is 100-120.

Good luck on completing it on time

I know what other cores means but the clock speed of a single core will give more performance to the application since GDI+ is dependant on the processor.

Anyway I just had a chance to get back onto my laptop to actually do some work, 2 hours later, another 2hours away from the deadline. around 9 hours left.

HAHAHA - less than 7 hours left, still confident Rudi? I don't really see how a couple of balls can be considered an "MMORPG", but whatever floats your boat.

However....

Before it even launched. Good luck.

This post has been edited by gabehabe: 20 Jun, 2009 - 07:38 AM

Could you tell us some stuff about how you made it?

Extremely confident actually, I think you missed the point of what I'm doing. The BALLs thing was just a test of the engine and networking, which work perfectly fine (surprisingly!).

The reason it crashes for you is that the server's offline now

PlayerEntity Class:


This post has been edited by MageUK: 20 Jun, 2009 - 08:33 AM

Well, as was to be expected I didn't get it done on time.

But then I thought hey it's not so bad, afterall I only got 8 hours development time (excluding the 1 hour for map research/creation) and I wasn't using *ANY* previously written code. So now I've kind of set the challenge to complete it within 24 hours development time, which would still be quite an acheivement

Here's an SS and video of the current stage
Video (DivX)


The game runs at 14,480K memory usage and 100% CPU @ 1 core. This could of course be fixed by limiting the FPS since it's GDI+, but where's the fun in that?

The "engine" itself is basically a Panel, it hands control over to another class that will clear the previous frame and recreate the next. This class holds all player information, etc, etc, and also does anti-lag on the clients' movement (when networking is fully integrated this will have great effect).

The next thing I do before anything will be a command console (drop down from `), a proper storyline, and a real "welcome" map. The code for the NPC (non-player characters), ie. quest givers, etc. is already there, just none are setup in this test as I'm working on the user GUI first. It has the ability to draw an overlay of text around a specified point (the point's location can also be set, so you can set a point to the center of where you want the text to be and it will calculate the appropriate point).

Each player has a set of movement "animations", which are basically just 3 alternating images for each direction. Strangely enough it works quite well, which I wasn't expecting, but hey!

I'll post more as soon as I have it tomorrow As you'll probably see it's very pokémon-esque, and you can probably guess why, too If anyone's interested in making some sprites for the game let me know and it would be greatly appreciated. The amount of effort I've put into trying to make this before the "deadline" is enough to warrant me to continue with it in the long run. It's quite fun and a good learning experience imo

Mage,
Excellent! Just took a look at your AVI. Looking very nice. You had the character interacting with the environment...collision, popups, etc.

It is a commendable effort for just a few hours.

Keep up the good work!

Regards,
Chuck

Hey Chuck!

Thanks I may setup the game as a "sequel" to my web/text-based game Elders Online, or just a replacement version "Elders Online II". At least that way I have a base/understanding of what I want to acheive and somewhere to start for creating maps and an actual "storyline" that the character will work towards fulfilling.

I think after the "next" list above I'm going to work on getting other character classes/sprites into the game.

Best to get all that sorted before I hook up networking again.

nice work man ... soo amazing , wander if u will finish it

Hmmm... I wanted to move away from the pokémon sprites but I think they look alot better than the typical medieval-style + more-"realistic" map that I could come up with.

Which is better do you think?

Note that the 4 bridges are going to be start points for different users (so not everyone piles up on a single entry/spawn point in the game...).

EDIT: These are not final maps (obviously), I just don't want to spend too much time on either style and have to go back and remake..





This post has been edited by MageUK: 21 Jun, 2009 - 08:30 AM

I'd go with the PoKéMoN-like stuff. It's a tad bit empty for the moment, though.

I agree with milfins here. Pokemon ftw!

I would have just stayed awake. It's worth it.

Haha Raynes, sadly my mind doesn't work like that and I need at least 10 hours sleep every 18 hours, 12 optimum

Anyway, I've improved collision detection quite alot (it's now 8 point rather than 4, and corner detection is inset a bit), added a console, added NPC capabilities, added quest definitions, and changed how the maps work.

Development time: 9/24 hours (Excluding map related stuff)

The maps now work through a mapdef.xml file, which defines everything about the map, name, exits, NPCs, overlays, etc. etc.

Everything I've got so far (maps, mapdefs, collision maps) is uploaded here: http://www.rudivisser.com/elders/res/maps/

The two maps (Riviera (starting city) outside + Riviera City Hall), still not finished of course, are below:



This post has been edited by MageUK: 21 Jun, 2009 - 04:33 PM

Hey everyone

Forgot to say, I added something to limit the FPS so that there doesn't have to be extra calculations to smooth stuff over a million frames (well, 60 anyway).

It should be limited between 16-24 FPS, which is surprisingly perfect, can you try it out and report your FPS counts?

http://www.rudivisser.com/fpstest.zip

i rofl'd my way into a wall

please add muzik