Oh btw I found the One Piece book. Was buried in a desk drawer. Took me long enough, right?
Been a little while since I did this, hasn't it?
Been trying to work towards releasing another tech demo thing hopefully soon-ish, probably including at least a little bit of what one would consider "map design." As opposed to the blank field with random scattered Entities like last time.
Refactored some stuff, hunted down redundant pieces of code (there was a considerable amount), maybe shaved a off a couple nanoseconds per frame.
Made toilets that you can flush and coffins that you can "sleep" in to restore your party (I was playing Dawnguard recently, okay?)
Also started playing with particle effects, text effects, animations, and a few other things.
Still haven't done any battle programming. I still want to put that off to the end, so I can make sure everything else works and all that stuff.
Here we go again
10:10 PM 7/23/2016 Implemented toilets. Made data scripts for toilets (and doors). What am I doing with my life.
7:49 PM 7/25/2016 Reorganized the Settings menu, splitting it up into a bunch of sub-menus.
8:43 PM 7/25/2016 Implemented "Restore Default Settings" options in each of the settings menus.
11:33 PM 7/25/2016 Created a loading screen.
12:35 AM 7/30/2016 Actors no longer stop falling at z=0. Instead there's a very large sheet object at z=0, and actors stop falling when they land on it, just like any other part of the collision mesh.
2:08 AM 7/30/2016 Playable character calculate how far/fast they've been falling when they hit the ground. The physics ball does the same thing, but accounting for three dimensional movement.
2:16 PM 8/2/2016 Removed Trainer Class team generation rules and about 300 lines of code. Created game data arrays with array_add before filling them in; overall startup improved by about a second. Created a special move category for Psyshock which uses physical defense.
5:21 PM 8/2/2016 Player now stops when about to step over water. Collision models need to have a buffer space around their land area unless you want the player to stop moving when they hit the edge, thanks to the way collision chunks are loaded.
11:07 PM 8/4/2016 You can buy stuff from NPCs. You can't sell stuff yet, though.
4:20 PM 8/10/2016 Player stops before stepping over water, now using some kind of movement state machine thing.
7:02 PM 8/10/2016 Check for movement status /after/ updating collision cells. you can move freely between cells without getting stopped for no reason again!
9:44 PM 8/11/2016 Can add events through the "Events" tab. They don't react to the player stepping on them, though.
10:15 PM 8/11/2016 Markers for HMs 2 through 8. Copy and paste of HM01, really.
12:50 AM 8/13/2016 Fixed the moon (finally). Disabled phases because they simply looked bad.
9:58 AM 8/13/2016 Changed the Object and Event editors so you can change an object's model or event's cutscene indexby clicking on an entry in the list on the side.
11:51 AM 8/13/2016 Player stops moving automatically when talking to NPCs. Events trigger when you walk into space designated for them (!)
2:37 PM 8/13/2016 Teleport works; added "turn" cutscene script and made it actually work. Teleport blocks make you turn around and walk a few steps if you decide to not take them, meaning you can get spat out into a wall if you approach them from specific directions. I think it's amusing so I'm leaving it in.
2:48 PM 8/13/2016 Event spaces don't work when you interact with them; now you actually have to walk into one to trigger it.
2:53 PM 8/13/2016 Events no longer get triggered if you leave one that is the same as the last one you entered.
5:33 PM 8/13/2016 Can change the UI color(s), plus the brightness of the autotexture.
12:03 AM 8/18/2016 Added an editor so Pokémon base stats can be changed on-the-fly; also changed the way stats are calculated
4:50 PM 8/18/2016 Database editor: Pokémon main, TMs, Egg Moves, linked alternate forms (missing only Level Moves and Evolutions)
3:07 AM 8/24/2016 Database editor: finished Pokémon tab, including Evolutions and everything. Re-arranged some parts so they fit on the screen a little more nicely, especially so that the base stat bar graph has a little more space.
2:23 PM 8/26/2016 Default shader now lets you mess with the rbg color values. It's actually kind of a bad idea to do so, but whatever.
4:19 AM 8/27/2016 Database editor: Items tab and most of the Moves tab; consolidated all of the move flags into a single unsigned int with lots of bitwise arithmetic and stuff
11:57 PM 8/29/2016 Made a structure for BattleEffects for things like Moves, Abilities and Items. Filled them in, although all of their scripts are set to null and half of them don't even have names yet because there are just too many of them.
12:21 AM 9/1/2016 Database editor: Abilities, Items and Moves all filled in; buttons for editing MoveEffect information work properly.
1:58 AM 9/1/2016 Database editor: Pokémon evolutions have been simplified. They don't crash. Lots of code is commented it out and some of the text displays incorrectly, though.
2:34 PM 9/3/2016 Game data is now a global variable instead of attached to the World object, so they should perform a little better now.
11:26 PM 9/3/2016 Database editor: Trainer Classes (why did I make this a tab in the editor, again?)
11:42 PM 9/3/2016 Game stops taking input and shows a message over the HUD when the game window loses focus. The GMS manual says window_has_focus() is only valid for HTML5, Windows 8 and Tizen. Lies.
11:50 PM 9/3/2016 Database editor: Removed the Egg Group, Trainer Class and Type tabs. Honestly don't know why they were there in the first place, since I'm not doing this for mod support or anything.
12:50 AM 9/4/2016 Object editor: Can edit individual bits in the objects' collision masks. Had to change the way the game looks at collision masks in general, though.
7:28 PM 9/4/2016 Code for saving/loading Abilities to file again (not actually implemented); color-coding in Object\Collisions tab
8:02 PM 9/10/2016 Save/Load: works; reprogrammed the way most Items work
11:10 PM 9/10/2016 Added "Collectors' Cards," they sit there and rotate but don't do anything (the goal is to make them like the wizard cards in Harry Potter)
1:37 AM 9/12/2016 Implemented particle effects as "aster" models instead of actual particles, since they look way better. Cards get "collected," despawn and explode into said particles when you pick them up. Some other minor fixes.
2:13 PM 9/13/2016 Achievement book, sort of.
1:47 AM 9/14/2016 Most functionality of the achievement book, a few fixes related to cards, added triggers for achievements in various places in the game, fixed a few things that would have broken the YYC
7:31 PM 9/15/2016 Better water, plus reflections, plus a slight performance increase (how often do you get to say that all at the same time?)
12:06 AM 9/16/2016 Water now can be collided with (within the game grid). Some other minor fixes.
7:28 PM 9/16/2016 Merged Entities with Characters and a couple other things with each other. Less redundant code. Model Templates also run on less code.
1:02 AM 9/17/2016 Background music works. Each area has a set of background music types that it can play (for both day and night). When one song stops, another starts. Can be stopped for cutscenes and stuff. Not sure how it'll work with a "radio" object, though.
8:42 PM 9/20/2016 Added a default weather control script. There's a 1 in 16 chance of creating normal rain. Weather cycles every 10 minutes by default (or every time you enter an area).
9:36 PM 9/20/2016 Added push notifications. They appear when you pick up ground items or collector cards instead of the message boxes. I think that looks a bit better in 3D. Also, yet another mechanic totally not also stolen from Skyrim.
3:56 PM 9/22/2016 Added random encounter space. Makes crunching sounds and sprinkles particles all over the place when you walk through it. Volume of both of those is determined by your movement speed. Also there's a random encounter countdown but it doesn't do anything yet.
6:28 PM 9/22/2016 Random encounters are generated based on the encounters defined for them in const_environment
12:12 PM 9/24/2016 Can change maps. Contents of previous map get deleted, new map loads. Can't load from a file yet, though.
7:04 PM 9/24/2016 Title screen: camera. Does nothing else, though.
9:12 PM 9/24/2016 Title screen: menu. navigation and Quit works.
9:15 AM 9/25/2016 Changed the way Fog works so that it appears on the title screen. Changed the way it's initalized, too, so the default fog distance can be changed relatively easily.
11:46 PM 9/25/2016 Only cells, entities, etc. within sight of the camera are rendered. Can boost performance immensely.
9:36 AM 9/26/2016 Object editor: fixed data scripts so that they show up again (broke by merging all of the different entity types together), fixed the NPC setup, fixed the "select base NPC" option in NPC data script
9:50 PM 9/27/2016 A bunch of miscellaneous fixes related to thinking about finally releasing a playable version of this game, such as:
- Route sign text is drawn through code instead of contained in the model
- Fixed bottom of palm trees on the texture sheet
- Added music
- Music starts and stops correctly when the same song repeats itself (although it would be nice to be able to avoid repeating music at all in the future)
- Music only cued to change when
- Some route icons
- Probably a few other things
Between you and me, this is actually slogging along faster than I thought. Will probably mash together a bunch more map cells in the next few weeks and see what happens from there.
Attaching YouTube videos this time 'cause I have more of them than screenshots and I'm being too lazy to take any.
Playing with fountains
Water effects
Haven't been doing this so far but I might start if I remember, but lines of code is an interesting (if not perfectly accurate) way to measure the growth of a project.
Current lines of code: 21905
Not sure how much all of the code for hundreds of move effects, item effects, ability effects, etc. will take up (on top of the battle programming/AI that's bound to take up a ridiculous number of code) but I guess for now I'll stick with my old estimate of 100,000 lines by the time this is finished. We'll see.