"Welcome to UrfEarth!"

I finally got the game's scene background tiles to properly evict when unseen, and to scroll. In a 1024×768 window, the game is now playably fast in Opera (the FPS changed from ~4 to ~16), and Mozilla Firefox's FPS jumped from ~10 fps (after a gradual slowdown) to ~23 (with consistency). Now I just have to scroll sessile creatures with the scene (again) and deal with the small IE-now-runs-at-~40-FPS-in-that-same-window-size-instead-of-~60 and background-now-looks-slightly-waffley problems. The former, at least, stops once the background stops moving; the latter depends on client-area size and background position.

"Kick! Punch! It's all in the mind."

I didn't do much with the game yesterday (tried to dispose of unseen background tiles...failed thus far). I was writing up a big ol' alternate proprietary license that I may or may not allow for those who want to distribute the game and don't care for the AGPL3 (it's less than half the length of the AGPL3, at least for now, but is more or less finished and incorporates some terms from it by reference), and reserved that planned name I talked about in the last post with notlong.

Question and answer authority.

I updated the game's FAQ, which (like the game) is unreleased and nowhere near ready for prime time. I also got the tiler to tile stuff, but I still need to evict unseen tiles from the document tree and to add tiles and non-tile decorations (rivers, contours, etc.) besides a default grass tile I wrote up in Notepad.

I think I am fairly close to revealing the name of the game. The currently planned name is an 8-letter word that returns no Google results, is easily pronounced like a pair of English words, will also be the name of the game's fictional world, and is not "Vralanea". First I may decide to claim it as a domain name; I'm not yet sure which top-level domains I'll use, or if I'll use more than one. I will almost certainly not use .com, even if the name is available there; I may use .net, .org, or (slightly more likely, because the US legal system has disturbed me lately) some non-US domain. I'm also pondering whether to solicit outside help to make a matching logo.

I'm all tied up with many places to go.

I added some tassels and bands and such to Vralanea's hot pants because I only today realized they were too close to the ones on that one picture of Lindsay Lohan with Hot Tamales for my comfort. (I wasn't even looking at the picture as I drew Vral!) I'm still doing the code organization and tiles; it'll be a while.

"Stop repeating me." "Stop repeating me."

I started coding a tiling system for stuff like grass for the stage backgrounds. For now, each tile will be 250×250; the game board is 1000×1000 and the untiled background I was trying before this was 1000×8000, so at most 20 will appear at one time. The others, along with non-tile stuff like rivers or big rocks, will probably be added in with DOM magic on a given refresh event as they get close.

A spread gun by any other name would smell as painful.

I moved the fire loop from its own timer to the same "refresh" CustomEvent I set up to time the fade effect. I was also paging through the English Wiktionary to think up names for the weapons and dream attacks of Vralanea and the next character that I hope to draw. Each character will have a starter weapon of one of the four elements (earth, fire, air, water); four more elemental weapons (one of which is the same element as the starter, but more powerful) that must be forged; and a dream weapon of an entirely different element that also must be forged.

Vralanea's starter, as her portrait suggests, is a staff of fire. It would blast a spread of flames somewhat like my Provisional Purple Test Creature (but with better art and with actual fire-element damage, I hope). I'll call that one Faucibruciata ("jaws"+"burnt", or "Burntjaws"). The next four are Sabbiaelica ("Sandhelix"), Ventatanavetta ("Gustshuttle")*, Cremisifuria ("Crimsonfury", the fire upgrade), and Arcobentonica ("Benthicarc"). I've already named her dream weapon but I'll let you find that name by getting it (or viewing the source), if I can develop the game that far.

*My favorite name, because the components are anagrams and I had a slightly obscure sense of "shuttle" in mind.

The attract mode is now diamondsa witch select screen!

Now the transitions are really working well. The fix set back the whole code cleanup thing, and the game still has an odd tendency to want to play every music track I've tried to play in prior scenes every time I load a new one, but it all works now, and the correct track ultimately plays by itself. As the "curtain" (a white square) fades out (and, though I haven't tested it, in) you'd be able to move your character with the mouse, but not fire. The game now assumes DOM Level 3, not 2, due to use of CustomEvents.

So far, IE9 runs the game the fastest, followed by Firefox 11 and Opera 11.61 (which basically makes it a slideshow once the 8000×1000 scrolling stage is swapped in, so maybe I'll try breaking the thing into cute little bite size tiles). I can't really compare IE10 to them because even though it supports filters (yay!) I can't see the graphics in full speed—I got Windows 8 working on VirtualBox for a bit, with Guest Additions even, but then it got all fritzy again so I rolled the system back to a pre-Additions snapshot, and if you think I'm moving my already shaky physical system to a non-release Windows (complete with all that Metro stuff) then you ought to promote yourself to Senior Vice President of Acting a Fool.

"Shine get!"

I got the at-least-mostly-browser-independent fade transition to work...sort of. Now IE 9, Firefox 11 Windows, and Opera 11.61 show it properly, but I'm tracking down a bug in which the transition thingy decides to keep reloading the as-yet-unfinished post-loader attract mode (which is currently just a red screen with a "start" link on it because I don't yet have mad animation skills) at a slightly-increasingly frenzied pace.

First, I'll update the Arch Linux side of my system (I'm on the Windows side as I post this) and do some other stuff. Oh, and the first boss of my game will be called Lorttenpalt. It's an intended anagram of "patent troll" and I hope to make it a mass of eye cannon things. (Think the intro boss or the eye bosses from The Guardian Legend, or Vitreous from A Link to the Past, except that I want to make the whole mass walk around on something of a giant enemy crab too.)

Light at the end of the tutorial.

While I was cleaning up the code I decided to add a fade-to-white transition between stages. It only seems to show up in Firefox but does not break others. IE9, IE10 (when the *ick* Consumer Preview actually works in my VirtualBox and doesn't freak out as it's been doing up to now) and Opera seem to optimize away the forceRedraws involved)

Next I want to try to add game events to the document or its documentElement instead of having to use my own cobbled-together system for user-defined events. If I can do that, maybe I can use those to get every browser to transition correctly.

I'm I'm seeing seeing double. double.

So yesterday I got the creatures and their HP gauges to move together. Yay. Now I want to start better organizing the code. It's already separated into files for general game entities, specific entities (bullets and creatures, and maybe non-destructible scenery stuff to put in front of the backgrounds because I think I'll cover the destructibles by making them creatures), hit-testing, sounds (oy)...but not separated enough. A lot of it is duplicate code, and some more of it feels like duplicate code but is probably not.

Some code in the game-engine load progress bar (not a true preloader yet, just a thinger that ticks ahead whenever an engine or actual-game-driver script announces its own presence) also assumes it's on an SVG page; I want that code to just run more generally so you can plug it into an HTML text span or widget property or element's width attribute or whatever you'd like. Hopefully I can muster enough care to try to fix some of that in the next...week-ish? *shrugs*

Something about rollin' down a street, and also gin and laying back.

Earlier in the day, I made 0 HP creatures die, except when they'd rather stab at thee from Hell's heart with a "last breath" action of some sort. I guess I'll use that mechanism to let players continue on death.

Not too long ago I also managed to get something of a scrolling stage system working.

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Pew. Pewpew. Boom. Ow. (splat). 0xC0000005.

So ~100 minutes ago, after I got my new memory, I got my Provisional Purple Test Creature's bullets to damage my Provisional Purple Test Enemy Creature. Now I need to make the Game Engine Gods kill creatures with 0 or less HP.

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Pewpewpew. Pew. Pewpew. Eeeeeooooo. Boom.

Roughly 40 minutes ago, I got hit tests working. Now I need to make bullets damage creatures, and creatures move, and a bunch of other stuff, and this pile of source code on my computer may even begin to entertain me.

.erif fo yruf gnillor eht htiw sthgif ohw ralohcs-hctiw A

No hitbox work today; I didn't feel like doing much with the actual game. I remember giving up about the time that I had to consider hitboxes, when I tried to make a shooter game in C++ and SDL (the fact that I also had to worry about things like cross-platform compatibility and how to draw 2D stuff in OpenGL, when SVG kinda sorta handles that, did not help)...the joys of failure.

I quickly did a rear view of Vralanea—pretty much horizontal-flipped the original, changed some z positions, tweaked a few paths (especially the shoes and the top of the hot pants...what, you've never seen women in hot pants?) and changed or removed a few gradients. I could've omitted that last step if I wanted her to have two busts, which I guess some men would've liked.

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A witch-scholar who fights with the rolling fury of fire.

I got my game's engine to start making hitboxes. They don't (yet) generate collisions, nor do they expand to specific creature sizes or such.

However, I think the witch portrait that follows is much closer to finished, so if you're a professional artist or art critic, just close the browser window now if you don't wish to hate me forever. (A more serious fair warning: an even longer post than my penultimate, complete with headings even, but one that I think is very necessary to explain the portrait's roots and jot down some of my own life so I don't forget it, follows first.)

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Out of commission, somewhat.

I've been working on a portrait-picture-avatar thing for my game's player-selection screen, but in the past few days I've been getting a few more blue screens than the usual once-every-month-ish. Memtest86+ found errors around the 5900th MiB within a minute or two (among other errors, and even more errors and a freeze if I set my memory to the rated speed and timings manually instead of using the board's automatic settings), so I fairly quickly ordered some new memory. Until that arrives, I'll be mostly using my Kubuntu live CD, instead of my Windows 7 and (more recent) Arch Linux installs*, so I don't put my hard drives in (too much) danger.

With luck, I will start working on the hit boxes soon instead of getting stuck on that portrait of the determined-looking-and-kinda-hot-witch-that-actually-looks-kinda-like-a-witch-unlike-the-other-three-witches.

*I've been using Linux more often because where both ActiveX and NPAPI versions of Flash crash on Windows fairly often, Flash on Linux seems to crash less often (if at all) so I get more game time on Armor Games and the like. I still prefer Windows 7 for other reasons (easier to set up as I want it, et cetera) and believe it was worth the money I spent on it.

“Forward...”

I am still working on the game I mentioned last Early Afternoon Local Time Before Leap Day. The game (to quote another part of the FAQ I wrote so far)...

is an arcade-style, vertically-scrolling shoot 'em up implemented in SVG 1.1, XHTML 1.0, CSS 2.1, and ECMAScript 5 (a standardized version of JavaScript). It requires a browser (or some other agent) with support of those languages, as well as DOM Level 2 Core, HTML, and Events, to run. A pointing device (mouse, trackball, touchpad, etc.) is almost certainly needed to play, and a keyboard might be as well. It plays music and other sounds with XHTML objects, if supported by the agent, but sound is not necessary to play."

(What is perhaps my longest Blogger post ever follows. In short, the game is nowhere near complete or ready, and I haven't released any source or playable part of it.)

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