Triple Triad Possible?


well the project name and whatnot is "Triple Triad X" - a kinda cheap combination of triple triad and gp2x :x i guess its subject to change XD but if i cant think of anything better i will stick with ttx.

been fighting with the winapi for hours and ready to commit computer genocide. sdl seems to be blocking some messages i want to get at and is refusing to give them up, I quit smoking today (see how long that lasts ><) so it chose totally the wrong day to mess with me >.>;;

*goes off to find a bat*
 
Haha, nice time to code, then. Congratulations on quitting? :p

Triple Triad X sounds nice too, an x in a name always sounds cool. :)
 
Great work with this game. When I was playing FF8, I was actually more bothered about missing a card than completing the game (which I still need to do :().
Somebody else has mentioned this, but some sort of card gallery would be excellent. It could be like a pokedex :).
You could load the gallery up and it goes to the first level of cards. The screen could show all of the cards that you have collected, with black spaces where you still have to collect a card. You could then move between levels using the L and R shoulder buttons.
When you do select a card, it could show a hi-res version to the left of the screen, with details to the right, such as the Name, Level, Type, and then a description of what the card represents .

Anyway, that's my ramblings over. It was just an idea I wanted to get out of my head which I got halfway through reading this thread.
 
well so many people seem to want the card gallery I guess I cant say no. Maybe i should tie the gallery to a player profile so the only cards viewable in the gallery are ones you've captured - another reason to play through and complete it all?

Eitherway, things like the gallery I put under the category "spit and polish" and they will be the last things to be added :)

Things are finally moving today after I managed to fix my problems with sdl and the winapi - damned thing was eating messages that belonged to my dialog boxes >.> I had to mod sdl and add two new functions to the api, SDL_RegisterUserDialog() and SDL_UnregisterUserDialog() so that sdl can keep track of any open user dialogs and pass on windows messages that belong to them.

now that is done and works I can finally type text into boxes which will allow me to add script data and stuff and i can start messing around with lua n what not. yay :p
 
whoops, I let this thing fall off the first page!

Had a brief scare yesterday when I got a phone call from the local surgery saying they were sending my mother to hospital via ambulance because her breathing got bad again - but apprantly its nothing to worry about and they just want to observe her for a while, she appears to be spending most of her time grumbling that she has to be there ;)

So anyway yeah i been working on the engine again. LUA is tightly knitted in now and i've been busy exposing a ton of usful functions that any would-be scripters might like. The rpg side of the game is actually becoming quite powerful, certainly much more powerful than I ever intended. At one point I almost forgot I was working on a card game O_O Need to make sure that I dont end up writing some turn based battle system whilst im half asleep and not really sure of who or where i am or what im doing xD

I could give screenshots but i wont yet as theres nothing really new to show. Everything that was working still is, I havnt heard back from the guy who mailed me about refurbishing my tilesets yet so that still looks the same and what not. So instead I guess I will give you my to-do list so you can guess at how close this is:

TO-DO:
expose lots more functions to lua (possiably needing to write some extra ones just for lua too - need to give scripters a chance to be creative)

add a very basic key-item inventory for the player (this is just so scripters can add a little more of the RP to the RPG aspect. beat someone, win an item to proove it, harder person is impressed and challenges you to a fight - open new area, etc)

leveling and points system - shouldnt be hard. win points for successfully beating an npc, certain amount of points let you level, spend points in shop on "goodies" - basically just two vars (nPoints and nLevel) and to develop a sensiable but not overly complex points awarding system for when you win a game

shop - i actually havnt written this yet. it will probably be one of the last things I do - its NOT hard to write at all but it could be akward to change if i do something drastic with decks or whatever in the future, thus i leave it until any said changes are complete.

editors - my new editing suite that i showed screenies of is currently working and what not, but not all the features etc are in yet. basically the editor is not as important as the engine is to me, i add features to the editor as i need them. however, for final release i obviously want everything done so this is on the to do list, but at the bottom.

add the rest of the rules to the actual triad engine. shouldnt be too complicated, i've been talking about it since like page 1 though - i just got caught up with the tileengine xD

add menu and profiles. not hard (though sometimes time consuming) but always ALWAYS the last thing I do when writing a game. some people get delusions of grandeur when they start writing games and for some reason they always write the intro and menu first. I guess because its generally the first thing you see when you play a game, but still - the amount of projects i've seen die which are basically just a menu is horrendous xD its bad practice, do it last - it just slows down dev time when you have to go through a menu and itnro every time you want to test some changes you have made. and you can never be sure of all the options you'll want in the menu until the engine is finished!

thats it for items "to do" - i will probably find theres more as i knock that list down a bit, but thats all i foresee so far.

bug fixing.

im only aware of 2 bugs in the engine so far (oh yes, you can bet theres more, but i only found 2 so far):

1) the text is screwy in the message boxes, or the message boxes are. The message box is supposed to resize itself depending on text width, but its randomly off on some messages, pfft. Might end up changing to bitmap fonts anyway.

2) input is still dodgey from the gp2x buttons. I cant explain it - ironically stick input is perfect but the buttons are being really tempermental. It generally ALWAYS skips the first line of text in a message box and then requires you to press a button long and hard to register to move to next message x_X i would say thats a bug in the actual text boxes.. but it works fine on win32!! *mutters* ohwell, i'll sort it before long.


EDIT:

fair to point out, this is my engine and all code-based to-do list. half of actual game development time is actually creating the content for the engine, not just writing the engine. when all this is done i will need to do that content creation. I have 1 base card deck which is fine and i wont need many more tiles made. Users making cards is great - but i consider that to be "addons" :p

No, when the engine is done I will be creating and designing maps with my friend and writing scripts. As i have a decent rpg engine now I may as well give you some sort of pokemon-like story to play along to "gotta be the master, catch em all *wiggles eyebrows" >.>;
I will give you screenshots when I have something "new" to show :) peace.
 
okay heres a nice fast update since the last post.

wine is flowing freely tonight so i'm making it now whilst im still semi able to type :)

Scripts are now fully intergrated! I tested a fully scripted npc earlier and there were a few bugs at first but with a lil help from the irc chappies they are all gone now and its working like a dream :)

So this basically makes NPC's dynamic. I'm leaving the ini code there for npc's that dont need to ever change n what not, but those who want to can script their own. Here is a sample script (this is the script i've been testing with and works fully) :

example script

its almost english readable so people not too coding savvy should still be able to manage it with a little bit of effort. Personally im not too fond of lua's syntax but I can see why it may be easier for people new to the concept of programming.

Im very happy thats working, big mile stone reached. But thats not all!

IRC brought to me another angel in disguise today, Khatovski approached me via PM to offer to do some sprite work for me. He's already been working away and heres some samples:

squall

this was a prototype, its been enlarged to see it easier. Its obviously squall from ff8. and heres a quick walking preview:

squall walk

which will look grand when set to the game's speed. He's a very fast worker and i'm impressed, big thanks for him helping out :)

will keep you all updated as more milestones are met with the engine :)
 
Very nice work Sephnroth ;)... and cool you found someone to draw your sprites ;D.

I would like to inform you that I currently got 94 ready-to-go images, where its only a matter of placing numbers and adding background/border/symbol which were previously created by myself.

I used lots of Warcraft pictures from the Sons of the storm (the Warcraft Art makers, its even legal to use it for non-commercial apps) and fanart. Right now I used color-only (mostly drawn/NON-3d-CG) pics but I got no usable colorpics left I could make cards off. If anyone knows a good Warcraft image archive please post it here or send me a PM... I need about 15 more cards.

Thanks
racoon
 
afraid no updates yet - a few people have pmed me to ask whats going on so let me update all here :)

This month seems to of seen be beaten up by germs n what not nonstop, im begining to think chemical war has started and we just havnt been told yet >>; I get mad toothache, i take pain killers to combat it and end up with stomach cramps due to the pain killer side effects, so i stop taking em and side effects eventually wear off but i get the pain back and when that finally goes I go to spend some time with a friend who came to visit and i ended up catching one helluva cold off of her!
Spent most of my time since moping around, sniffing, coughing and totally voicless x.x All in all its meant I really havnt done much at all to TTX, which im a bit disapointed at cuz i would of liked to of had something for the comeptition but oh well.

Eitherway, one thing I do promise you is i've already put too many hours into TTX to just drop it randomly. It will be finished. Just let me get back on my feet okay :) Sorry for the slacking lately, hopfully we will be back on track soon.
 
Thanks for the update :) .

I think you must be right about the chemical warfare. I had to take a day or so off work last week due to illness (feeling like I was constantly wasted), and now people at work are coming out with colds, etc. There must be a dozen people on this forum which has come down with illness.

It's a shame you never got to enter the coding competition. At least you don't have a deadline to meet now, which means you haven't had to rush anything and means you can have as much time as you want now.


Hope you get better soon.
 
Sephnroth posted on Feb 22 2006 at 03:07 PM said:
afraid no updates yet - a few people have pmed me to ask whats going on so let me update all here :)

This month seems to of seen be beaten up by germs n what not nonstop, im begining to think chemical war has started and we just havnt been told yet >>; I get mad toothache, i take pain killers to combat it and end up with stomach cramps due to the pain killer side effects, so i stop taking em and side effects eventually wear off but i get the pain back and when that finally goes I go to spend some time with a friend who came to visit and i ended up catching one helluva cold off of her!
Spent most of my time since moping around, sniffing, coughing and totally voicless x.x All in all its meant I really havnt done much at all to TTX, which im a bit disapointed at cuz i would of liked to of had something for the comeptition but oh well.

Eitherway, one thing I do promise you is i've already put too many hours into TTX to just drop it randomly. It will be finished. Just let me get back on my feet okay :) Sorry for the slacking lately, hopfully we will be back on track soon.

Well, you did quit smoking, might have some nasty side-effects. :)
 
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okay!

got some work done today and performed a test compile on my gp2x.

rewrite of the gui dialog functions is complete - it word wraps nicely now and instead of a plain colour background its now a gradient. the two colours it creates a gradient between are defined as variables in the code so when the game is released i can shove them both as settable into the options so you can recolour the chat gui and whatnot - just like you can in the final fantasy games.

I got LUA compiled for arm so scripting is working like a charm on the GP2X which is a nice big load off my mind. Got seperate libaries for windows and the gp2x now so i can just compile for whatever. Scripting is pretty much finished.

and earlier today i rewrote alot of the input functions to something alot more sensiable - before it just checked wether or not it was running on the gp2x or the pc and depending on which it either checked for a keyboard or button. Thats fine on paper, but boy was it ugly when it did it for every single time it wanted to check input!
Now it uses a much more sensiable system where it gathers input once per frame, the function which gathers it automatically checks for gp2x or pc there itself and it populates a data structure with simple elements like left, right and the rest of the code just checks those.

I dont know how.. but that rewrite of the input also fixed the dodgey input bug i was experiancing when playing on the gp2x, it now handles perfect and just like it does in windows! VERY happy about that.

Its not running at full speed though, thats something im certain of. Oh, its more than playable, but im sure its not obtaining full frame rate and i KNOW it can so im going to try and optimise things for the future. Probably about time i updated my HW sdl libs too.

Also, gave a little alpha out for the gp2x on the dev irc channel ;) so feeling a bit more confident about it all. Its getting there!

Peace.
 
nice! i'm glad you sorted out that input and compiling problem, kinda had me worried there :D

i'll work on my deck today if i finish a lot of work.
 
hey! sorry to keep you guys hanging!

The visit I told people about (at least i definatly did on irc) happened, my girlfriend came back to england for a week and has now had to go back to her parents in miami again - i had an amazing week but miss her lots, aww :( everybody now! "awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww"

Obviously I wasnt willing to work on anything over that week. Now im free again though and im juggling ttx and a review i need to do (already behind deadline) for some ps2 horror game. Engine wise theres not alot left to do in ttx so you can expect a windows, linux and gp2x beta soon (for real this time! no really!) - i even have my own linux box to compile the linux version for now :)

I still havnt fixed the stupid bug in the map renderering! I've put that on the back burner, will finish off the rest of the engine and then try and get that fixed for the beta release - will probably be bugging you irc guru's with that soon enough ;)

Anyway back to the grind for me. Thank you everyone for being so patient whilst I got a few life things done :) My promise to you is this: ttx is around 10k lines of code and still growing, I put in so much work to this that I can assure you theres no way I would just let it rot. Delays I can never help, but I promise I will never let it become vaporware :)

i'll keep you updated, ja ne

edit:

For those that were previously asking I have now decided to release ttx completly open source under gpl. TTX was *always* going to be free, the only thing that was making me think twice is my little sdl layer i wrote to make game programming easy as hell has potential to be sold (its based off thegamecreators darksdk and is the closest thing you will get of a port of darksdk to gp2x) which was a suggestion from the darksdk programmer himself. But after a few months thought I decided that selling it wouldnt really be in the spirit of the gp2x and it would have to be REALLY special for me to sell it. So instead it will all go open source, sdk included, with some sort of donation thing maybe when its done and that version of my sdk will always be availiable in source form for free - if i ever manage to mimic the 3d commands from darksdk then I may sell that instead if its worth it but check back in a year for that xD

Anyway, bottom line, free source for all.
 
sauce is tasty. especially sun dried tomato..

but yeah, with gcses and business, my deck is on the back backburner. sorry :(
 
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