Hazman's Corner

OK, so first point, I've thought of a name for it, secondly, I have a work-in-progress demo.
http://www.byond.com/members/Hazman/files/Shooter/ shooter.zip

I've decided to call it Frenetik: Wargrounds. If it's reasonably popular, I may work on a couple of single-player storyline based games. That way I can really glitz it up without having to worry about network lag and add more cool stuff. Anyway, back to the demo.

A hub entry can be found at http://www.byond.com/games/Hazman/FrenetikWargrounds

Controls:
WASD: Move
F: Fire
1-9: Select item of equipment (shown at bottom of window)
G: Switch fire modes (Burst/Semi for guns with burst)
Space: Aim (sort of 'zooms in' so you can see further ahead)

Brief guide:
When you login, a window appears asking what equipment you want. Click on a primary weapon (and a secondary if you want one) and if you have points left, a grenade or two, and click 'OK' to enter the game. There's a short count down before you spawn. Then, run around shooting stuff. Press a number key to select a different piece of equipment (1 for primary weapon, 2 for secondary, 3-9 for grenades).

Your health is the green bar at the bottom of the screen, the number of bullets you have left is displayed as the stack of bullets on the main view. The interface isn't quite finished yet so ther're a lot of blank panels.
Anyway, to host you'll need to open up the options & messages window and do it from there. There may be some lag due to the bullet flingy thing, I'm planning on allowing you to disable it.
Anyway, have a test of it and tell me what you think. Please post any bugs you find and I'll update this post to show them and tick them off as I fix them.

Current Issues:

• The picture of the player on the equipment screen disappears when a grenade is selected
• Only one magazine is supplied for each weapon
• Sidestepping does not move the camera (Next release)
• Keys with spaces are not displayed correctly in the label on the equip screen (Next release)
• The camera is not smooth enough
• Clicking the health bar causes lines to appear on it (next release)
• Switching weapons does not update the camera position (next release)
• Runtime errors were being caused by equipping grenades and using empty weapons. (next release)
• Grenades can be thrown off of the map (Next release)

Current nefarious plans

• Allow players to vary lengths of grenade throws
• Allow players to customise appearance using clothing etc.
• Allow said clothing to be 'earned' by playing lots or winning it as prizes
• Have mapping competitions to get good maps
• Have lots of game modes to keep things interesting
• Have central tracking server showing player statistics

One of my friends showed me this website recently. It's basically a website for ordering stuff straight from factory, and you can get some pretty decent discounts if you buy in quantity or in bulk. I made an order for a 2GB USB stick and some other random stuff (a USB hub, some screen cloths etc) and it only came to $28 including postage to the UK (standard postage is free to anywhere).
The stuff takes a while to arrive but it's so cheap that if you aren't in a hurry it's a good place to get stuff.
They also sell stuff like 'high'-power (as in >50mW) lasers and butane lighters and stuff. They also do some DS homebrew stuff if you're into that sort of thing. Have a look: http://www.dealextreme.com/default.dx/r.97746404.

Progress has been pretty slow so far, mostly because I want to redraw the character base and I find it very difficult to draw people decently. So far I've got a couple of frames done, one to show the counter-terrorist character and 3 to show the equipment system.

[EDIT] Better image of peoples
(They're standing kinda funny because they're meant to be holding guns.)
The first guy (or maybe the second) is your standard character. You can unlock new stuff to equip your guy with by playing for longer although none of the unlockable equipment actually does anything, it's just cosmetic. I'm looking at customisability all the way down to choosing the individual strap and lense colours for the goggles. Now I've just got to draw a gazillion frames of animation, walking, pistol holding, walking with pistol etc. and then I can move onto modifying all of the 30+ weapon icons! Yay!

No, I haven't got a release already, but hopefully it won't be long since the game is based on an existing system. I actually checked how much of the original TitanNet I've stripped out of the game, code wise I've removed about 8000 lines which represents just over 40% of the original game. Total byte count has also dropped by about the same proportion.
This includes all of the existing weapons, however, and given that I want to re-do a lot of the graphics I'm not sure if I'll also re-do the weapons. Damage calculations also need changing to give a better spread of damage (at one point in TitanNet's development, one or two rounds from anything would bring you down).
With regards to game modes, I'm thinking your classic game modes - Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag etc. but also things like Bomb Diffusal and maybe one or two Assault style maps.

I may be holding a map contest with prizes at some point, I'll release the mapping resources once I've actually got some. Not sure how I'll handle it since I want a lot of maps (I can't afford to give out a membership for every map I use), maybe require each entry to consist of a number of maps and take the sum or average of the scores of those maps.

I'm also looking at a Counter Strike-esque system of buying weapons, except instead of building up money over the course of the game, the host specifies a maximum spend for each player and they kit themselves out appropriately. Extra equipment will include stuff like grenades, armour, night vision, etc.

So yeh, I'm pretty bored at the moment with regards to programming. So I've decided to put it up the community as to what I work on next.

My current Delphi project is vectorgraphic Asteroids, which is working pretty well but I have some wierd errors which I can't trace. I've got ship movement random asteroid generation and a toroidal (wrap-around) game field but the wierd errors are holding me back a bit.
For a while I was thinking of building an interface to the Irrlicht 3d library for BYOND using the new call() features. I had a couple of procedures written (windows could be created, titles could be edited, text could be written to the screen as GUI objects) but I didn't really have time to go very far with it. Also, the 3d stuff only works on the host's machine which is a bit rubbish, but I guess you could still link it up as a multiplayer game using persistant world.Export connections or an external network lib.
My newest idea is to write an interface lib for Indy Sockets, particularly their HTTP socket object, so that game worlds could host websites for stats, player info, server info or whatever. The websites could contain stats or whatever and I might even have a go at linking it in to the key system. I have a feeling that actually detecting and processing connections would be a bit tricky but meh, I'm sure I'd find a way. I've worked with Indy Sockets before (see Servify) so I know my way roughly around their HTTP web host object.

For the external libraries, if people insisted I'd probably release the source code to a trusted member of the community for checking that I'm not opening a massive backdoor in your server or something. You trust me though, right?

Anyway, the last two options are actual BYOND games.

One of the first BYOND games I did any work on was called 'The Outlands' and I wanted it to be basically your run-of-the-mill fantasy-medieval RPG game thing. I've since had some awesome ideas for things like magic and combat, not to mention skills, guilds etc. so I think I could do a good job on that.

My last option is to build the TitanNet combat system into an actual action game rather than an action-RPG. It'd be something like Counter Strike or Battlefield except obviously on a 2d field rather than a 3d one. The combat was one of the most fun parts of TitanNet so building it into its own game would make alot of sense.