A real update

I have not updated for awhile so I thought I’d post about… something.

The reason there have not been many updates is that I have slowed down in my programming of the game. Finding a good yet simple fighting system is not that easy. I ended up deciding to borrow the one from RPG Maker XP. But that is a lot of stats for each monster to keep track of. So I ended up starting another program entirely that will be used to help build the monster file. That was going fine till I simply got distracted by something else and never quite got around to it. I still do intend on finishing it though.

So, what else will I talk about? well random geekery I guess.

I once again have been surfing around for windows 7/ Vista gadgets for my desktop, and I found a Pandora one!

I assume you know what Pandora is, but just in case, it is a website that plays music it thinks you will like based off of songs you tell it to. Its not perfect, but it does work pretty well. only about 1 in 20 of the songs end up being duds for me. Luckily that is why they have the thumbs up and thumbs down on the bottom. Songs thumbed down do not get played again, ever.

This handy gadget allows you to listen to it on your desktop without visiting the website. It also does not have the annoying full video ads that pop up ever so often.

Also found a good Twitter gadget.

 

 

Now to talk about Christmas.

We being poor and busy with the moving, we have not really have the resources to buy each other gifts. But Dad and Grandma Dixie gave us money for our gifts so we were able to buy things for our selves.

I bought…

• Games via PSN
• PixelJunk Shooter
• A basic shooter control wise…
• But hugely different physics wise.
• Uses fluid physics, water and lava that flow, gas as well
• Elements  that interact with each other for puzzle solving.
• Little Big Planet: Pirates of the Caribbean Level Pack
• Fight the Kraken!
• Wipeout HD Fury add-on
• Not much to say, more of the same. but that is simply more AWESOME so I can live with that.
• Holy Invasion of Privacy Badman: What Did I Do to Deserve this?
• A very quirky PSP game that everyone should own.
• Comics, Also via PSN
• Atomic Robo 2
• What's not to love about this series?
• NeoZoic 2-3
• Its supposedly about what would happen if the meteorite that killed the dinosaurs missed earth and instead hit the moon
• Apparently the result would be that the dinosaurs would not really evolve that much and humans would develop normally as well.
• Lots of human against T-rex, sorry I mean Tigras, action.
• Marvel’s Runaways 1-2
• You may have noticed that this is the only comic that I bought the first issue on, that is because Marvel is the only company that does not offer its first issue for free on PSN
• Also the only ones to charge more than $0.99 an issue
• That said… Awesome series so far, if I did not run out of money I probably would have bout the other issues
• A 20$ set of ear buds since my last pair died recently.

Testing something

Ok, tests complete… apparently my issues uploading images to blogger directly with windows live have magically fixed themselves, go figure.

FML

So it seems that Westwood online is being sued for fraud…

I am beginning to wonder if god hates me.

They purposely mislead students about many things… some of which upon reading the lawsuit I am being screwed over with as well.

• Poor quality of teachers – can vouch for that
• Essentially force you to use Sallie Mae loans, whom are being sued in a different case for discrimination
• Flat out lies about how well their credits transfer to other colleges, very few will accept them
• Deliberately mislead people about how they will try very hard to help you find a job. I have received no assistance of any kind, neither have most people.
• Degrees from them are essentially worthless.

So yeah…. I am not enrolling for next term there…

Battle system confusion

I am still at a loss of which battle system I am going to use… I was thinking of originally using a heavily simplified version of Gurps 4.0, but this raises a problem. The amount of starting points.

Heroic (100-200 points): People at the
realistic pinnacle of physical, mental, or
social achievement; e.g., Navy SEALs,
world-class scientists, and millionaires.

You see that is a rather large amount of points for the player to try to spend in character creation via text commands.

I suppose I could set it to do it in a hybrid set up of first you use the standard menu system to choose the stat to modify then you type in the number that you wish to insert into there

Another theory is pre built characters.

Also I could scale them down a tad

Competent (50-75 points): Athletes, cops,
wealthy gentry . . . anyone who would have
a clear edge over “average” people on an
adventure.

In the end I am not even sure if I will use this system…

New RPG

So now that school is over, I am recoding a new RPG from the ground up, focusing specifically on the features that I could not do last time.

First up I have been coding the inventory system. The problem is that I do not know how to make classes or dynamic arrays.

That means all lists of items have to have a set size before hand and must be made entirely of the same type of data.

So first step to solve that is simply a limited inventory. That is simple enough on its own. Now the problem of different data types was dealt with in an interesting way…

Code Snippet

1. struct inventoryItem{
2.     itemType item_Type; //This will be used to determine which array the item is located
3.     int indexValue; //This is used to determined which element in the array it is
4.     bool isHere; //This is used mainly in the player's inventory, if it is false, Then it is treated as an empty slot
5. };

The main inventory is instead a list of this single data type.

This data type basically serves as a reference to the actual item.

item_Type labels what type of item it is thus which of the master lists its located in.

indexValue is where in the master list it is located.

Example: when item_Type = WEAPON, and indexValue = 3. The program will know it refers to the item located WEAPON_INDEX[3]

This is still far from perfect, I have yet to choose a method to handle items being equipped by the player.

I also have yet to set up the monster list or data types, to be fair I am going to wait on that till I determine just what the battle system will be like, what stats will be used, what formulas…

Feel free to offer suggestions on that.

Finals Project

I recently finished CS206 on Westwood Online. I had to scale way back from the original vision of said program. This was to be a simple text-based RPG.

In all reality the end result was indeed a textbased RPG, just not a very good one. As you can see from the original flowcharts it was sort of the text based equivalent of Diablo.

page 1

page 2

The end result was very far from what was listed here.

The project somehow managed to get a 599 out of 600 despite being coded in a rather messy and inconsistent manner.

for example:

 

versus later in the same program…

Code Snippet

1. //user Variable Data
2. string playerName;
3. int playerLevel = 1;
4. playClass playerClass;
5. playRace playerRace;
6. int playerSTR=0;
7. int playerINT=0;
8. int playerDEX=0;
9. int maxHP;
10. int playerHP;
11. int potionCount;
12. int playerGold;
13. int playerXP;
14. int xpLevel;
15. int playerLocation=0;
16. bool mainGameLoop = true;
17. const int MONSTERCOUNT = 6;

Code Snippet

1. struct monsterStruct
2. {
3.     string monstername;
4.     int hitpoints;
5.     int attack;
6.     int xpValue;
7.     int goldValue;
8. };

The bottom struct is a lot cleaner, and ties all the necessary data into one variable.

I’d show you my menu code, but all mortal men who lay eyes upon that mess will surely go mad!

what I can also show you though is my loadMonsters function.

Code Snippet

1. void loadMonsters()
2. {
3.     int i;
4.     string strTest;
5.     ifstream monsterFile;
6.     monsterFile.open("Monsters.txt");
7.     for(i=0; i<MONSTERCOUNT;i++){
8.         getline(monsterFile,monsters[i].monstername);
9.         monsterFile >> monsters[i].hitpoints;
10.         monsterFile >> monsters[i].attack;
11.         monsterFile >> monsters[i].xpValue;
12.         monsterFile >> monsters[i].goldValue;
13.         getline (monsterFile,strTest);// Why did this fix the glitch????????
14.     }
15.     monsterFile.close();
16. }

you may notice the second getline on the bottom… what data is it reading into strTest? NOTHING. for some reason on the next loop the getline was reading an empty string, but by placing that one down there, it somehow fixes it and makes sure on the next iteration of the loop the data is read properly, how? I have no idea but hey, it worked!

You can download the source code which requires visual studio 2008. You can also download the Release Version which should work on all windows PCs.

Introduction

Hello everyone!

You are probably wondering what the heck this account is all about when I already have a live journal.

Well the truth of the matter is that live journal via windows live writer only worked with some features.

Also I figured I could keep this blog separate for my programming hobby.

Expect to see some rather nerdy stuff in here in the near future!