Stencyl jam #19 : RESET [your path]

mdotedot

  • Posts: 1654
EDIT: The final entry:

Here is the final version of the Jam Entry:



   Stencyl Jam 19 : Reset your Path


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This is the journal where I will post progress on the game

Regret  Reset your Path

I'm going to port my 2010 java 4k game to Stencyl and making some changes to the gameplay.

Screenshot of original game:

The original game didn't have a path - editing - mechanism that I will try to make to better suit the theme.




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Shoutout to Yoplalala for his awesome scaling/position utilities found here: http://community.stencyl.com/index.php/topic,46621.0.html

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« Last Edit: April 06, 2020, 06:38:17 pm by mdotedot »
Proud member of the League of Idiotic Stencylers! Doing things in Stencyl that probably shouldn't be done.

mdotedot

  • Posts: 1654


Play it, Sam



When working on my path editing I came across a wish to play notes. There are some MIDI HaXe libraries out there but at first glance none of them had regular notes.

So, I downloaded some piano notes and used audacity to export 56 audio files!! Since Stencyl requires both OGG and MP3 to run HTML5 .

Play the piano here (no sharp or flats , but you can export those notes yourself and put them in the source file if you want it)

Stencyl Piano File: http://photoquesting.com/stencyl/jam/19/SJ19_piano.stencyl

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Proud member of the League of Idiotic Stencylers! Doing things in Stencyl that probably shouldn't be done.

mdotedot

  • Posts: 1654
Done:
  • Dragging a path
  • Core play : RESET / adjust path
  • Calculate dead path
  • Playing the path 
  • Removing dead parts

Progress: http://photoquesting.com/stencyl/jam/19/sj19_1.mp4 with the piano keys on each move

ToDo:
  • Game objects like pushable things
  • port my java levels over to Stencyl
  • Polish into 3D using Away3D

Proud member of the League of Idiotic Stencylers! Doing things in Stencyl that probably shouldn't be done.

NerdinaNutshell

  • Posts: 251
Are you doing this in the latest release of Stencyl? From what I recall the “remove 3D” block doesn’t seem to work at all in the current version of Stencyl (tested this on my games and on demos).
*Puff*

mdotedot

  • Posts: 1654
Hello NerdinaNutshell,
I'm using the public Stencyl build. Last I've used it everything looked OK. The demonstration game uses remove 3D and that worked.
Proud member of the League of Idiotic Stencylers! Doing things in Stencyl that probably shouldn't be done.

mdotedot

  • Posts: 1654

When you love minimal music, like I do, you might enjoy the music that is produced by the paths : especially when you make a loop  :D




Game video :  http://photoquesting.com/stencyl/jam/19/SJ19_2.mp4

Done:
  • Ported all Java game code
  • Finish en Loading Levels
  • Some 3D conversion 

ToDo
  • 3D Buttons
  • StepCounter
  • Level selection menu / track levels done
  • 3D object recreation
  • 3D Movement / Switches
  • Directional 'tube' drawing
  • Mouse cursor
  • Work on more 3D stuff
  • OBJ file loading?!
  • More musical instruments?

Proud member of the League of Idiotic Stencylers! Doing things in Stencyl that probably shouldn't be done.

yoplalala

  • *
  • Posts: 1632
Thanks for the shoutout :)  Thanks also for all you awesome extensions :)

mdotedot

  • Posts: 1654
Just woke up. Have some things om my TODO list today:
* 3D Assets
* Title/Loading Screen
* Level Selection Screen
* Adjust some levels

I've converted a lot of sounds but it turns out the loading time increased too much and the symphony of the levels didn't make it any nicer.

Progress:
* Some Away3D Library stuff needed attending to last week. Nerdina reported a scene switching issue that took some time.
* When you have an OBJ that ColorMaterial in it, it wouldn't load (Took me day and a half)
* The Away3D resource loader pushed dependencies on a queue and thus resulted sometimes in combining things that didn't belong
Game Progress
* Dragging the path didn't feel good. Might revisit tablet/phone later, but for now it wil be desktop only
* Corner Path calculations (Took more time that I would have liked)
* There was a bug when an obstacle was gone AFTER you hit it, the pawn could walk again !

Nothing to show that wasn't already shown. Gotta work on them 3D assets now!!!

Hopefully the time remaining will make this into a real game.
Proud member of the League of Idiotic Stencylers! Doing things in Stencyl that probably shouldn't be done.

mdotedot

  • Posts: 1654

Here is the final version of the Jam Entry:



   Stencyl Jam 19 : Reset your Path


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I will write a post-mortum this week. Lots gone wrong!
Proud member of the League of Idiotic Stencylers! Doing things in Stencyl that probably shouldn't be done.

mdotedot

  • Posts: 1654
PostMortem : Reset your Path

As always : I need way more time to actually make something decent.
This game is barely playable on ' slow ' machines.


But ... I'm in these jams to stress/test my tools and extensions. Also I'm in the League of Idiotic Stencylers! Doing things in Stencyl that probably shouldn't be done.


   What did go right?   

loading OBJ files with only ColorMaterial materials

In the past I've used OBJ files with Textures, but I wanted to avoid texture loading.
I had to adjust the Away3D code to adjust for this. Since previously, only OBJ files that had textures worked.

Basically you have an .OBJ file with this
Code: [Select]
mtllib reset.mtl
You point to the textfile that has texture information in it. This file also needs to be on a web-based location!
Code: [Select]
o resetobject
If you have multiple OBJ files you need to be aware that this 'o' name is unique. Otherwise it will add all the OBJ files together.
(This took me a day of debugging)

Code: [Select]
usemtl color_name
This part is your material. Previously only texture references could be used.




   What did go wrong?   


Performance issues drawing path in 3D : this was fine on 2D
3D Tube drawing was a drain on the gameloop.

Drag&Drop game-mechanic
That mechanic worked nicely when it was 2D. But became unplayable on 3D.
I made it possible to single click on a path to edit it. But the direction changing code that was previously working fine made things way to responsive.
This leads to frustrating path creations that you did not intend.

I absolutely will re-visit this mechanism and hopefully also make a mobile/tablet movement capability


OBJ File loading on ItchIO : https://yourname.itch.io/yourgame/assets/data <- can't be used with HTTP Requests !

First I had the message 'Too much files in Zip' and after I used to include only 1x resources this message wend away.

The main problem was that the OBJParser that comes with Away3D is web-based. So you need your OBJ files to be on a network path.
Since you can't navigate from the host where your game is hosted : this means you can't load resources of a different website.
So I tried using ' visist URL ' block with the ' https://myname.itch.io/reset-your-path/assets/data '
That gives an error since apparently you cannot reference things on your own page !!!!




Scene Switching

This became apparent on the last day !!!
And was the most frustrating thing to work on. Since that last day was reserved for assets.

I rather would have worked on the 3d Path optimization but the 'loading screen' / level selection / game screen
lead to ghost object creating and removing. Finally I had something working from the load-screen to the level-selection
and then to the game-screen. But switching from game to levelscene gave problems when arriving in another game-screen.
So I opted to restart the game when you want to go to the levelselection screen.



   Post-Jam TODO   

* Away3D : scene switching & object loading
* Draw Mechanism allowing for keyboard and single click and drag&drop
* Tablet version



Proud member of the League of Idiotic Stencylers! Doing things in Stencyl that probably shouldn't be done.