So i herd u liek mudkipz?

World AIDS day! Remember kids, always use protection!


Village Wars open alpha testing later to celebrate! At least, if I can add in some new attacks in time, and optimize my fire system.

Yesterday, on my snow day, I wrote my own custom map saving/loading system. Pretty good challenge, I think I might actually be over my fear/misunderstanding of the text procs! Either way, my system isn't exactly a .dmm reader/writer, although I did take the generic principles from it.

I will now divulge how I did this...

Saving:
1) Looped through everything of type W, X, Y, and Z (without modifying some things these are areas, turfs, objs, and mobs) and generated a key for them (four separate keys for every type, which can also keep down file size in some situations while increasing it in others).

2) Loop through all the tiles in the world, find something of said type with a combination of locate() and range(), (so I can grab areas and turfs, too, without typecasting, which I can't do here) and then turn it into text with the key.

3) Save the key, the world.maxx, world.maxy, world.maxz vars, and the strings of text obtained in step #2.

Loading:

1) Load the string and gather the key from it.

2) Grab the strings that contain the positions of the objects.

3) Set the dimensions of the map

4) Loop through every "word" in the string obtained in #2, then position the object with the algorithm below that could use improving. I wrote it at about 12:30 last night, and I'm still very tired from getting only a little bit of sleep last night, so if anyone could redo it for me it would be appreciated (I'm positive the modulus operator will be involved).




Oh yeah, I'm not releasing it, by the way. It still needs some improvement before I would consider releasing it (I tried getting it to save a 50,000 tile map as a test, and it took over 300 CPU because of the map's size). It works excellently in small projects, though, which is why I'm going to be using it for Village Wars.

Looks like these posts are going to become commonplace until winter is over! I have another snow day today, along with a coup le inches of snow. At this rate, I'm going to be in school until mid July...


I also think I'm going to tackle my map saving/loading for Village Wars. I'm thinking I'll make a custom map saving/loading system similar to .dmm, but smaller (of course, I would be throwing some features out the window, but I shouldn't need them anyway).

From the Classified Ads section of the developer's forum:

Project Name: Village Wars

Description: Village Wars is a team based action game in which you and your team mates fight against the enemy team in a variety of modes: All out Battle (a mixture of Genocide and Village Raze), Genocide (defeat all the enemies), Village Raze (demolish all the enemy buildings), and Capture the Flag. It takes full advantage of BYOND 430's new features, and allows the players to choose their own stats and attacks within limits. There will be a myriad of attacks ranging from shields to some epic speed slashing attacks. There are some more features, including village god attacks, being considered at the moment.

Project Goal: Freeware, with possible subscriber features down the road. Note that if the second direction is taken, it will not give subscribers an unfair advantage.

Skills Needed: Skilled pixel artist that can create anything from turfs to mobs to Zombie Jesus/Giant Monster things to large buildings.

Compensation: If subscriber access is added, you will make an even cut in the profits and you will be awarded with subscriber access.

Team Members (Optional): Currently, I'm the only person working on this as programmer.

Previous Work (Optional):

• hub://Jeff8500/BattlefortheSandwich (made in one day)


• hub://Jeff8500/XtremeSubmarineRacing (made in one week)


• hub://Jeff8500/WW1.5 (my first strategy game, made mostly in about two weeks even though I had a month for the contest)


• hub://Jeff8500/CollapsingBuildingsLibrary (collapsing buildings system that is being used in this project)

Contact Information:
AIM: Jefft3hh4x
MSN: Jefftehh4x@aim.com
Email: Don't bother, use the BYOND pager instead

The only two attack ideas I've gotten so far are IceWarriorX's awesome slash attack idea (which I made into two attacks!) and someone's rock throw idea. You guys really upset me.

So, who cares to prove me wrong?





I predict this post will get more than 5 nays by tomorrow.