Friday 17 July 2015

Painting the future

First things first, I currently have three open issues in the Github-page. 2 of them are trivial to fix, I'll probably start with them friday evening, but the memory leak will be slightly more interesting to solve. Were I leaking file handle or even naked pointers, they'd be easy to fix with a bit of macrology. No such luck though. I have a hunch I'm doing something incredibly stupid with STM. Memory-usage rises like hell when manipulating the state of the map. I thought STM-primitives carried their history all the time, but it seems I'm wrong. And I'm happy about that. In general case such behaviour would explode the already ridiculous RAM usage of JVM.

Sometimes I wonder if I romanticize the sixth-generation and older video game consoles a bit too much

Anyway, let's assume I'll get those bugs fixed on friday evening. That leaves me ˜48 hours to create new things. I should use them wisely.

First I have to parametrize hit-layer's tiles' size. I'm not certain, with the whopping 0 users this editor has, that 50px*50px isn't too big rectangle for controlling the places player can or cannot step on. I have a feeling though that it is. Thus, in the next version, hit-layer's tile-size can be anything, as long as (= h w).

In case I get really experimental, I'll parametrize the regular layers' tile-size too. It will have to be a different param though. (not= hitlayer-tile-w layer-tile-w) can be true.

Like I've spoken in the past, this map-editor will not be only a map-editor when I have realized my vision. I have this vision of a unity-like 2d-games editor with the added benefit of being Lisp all the way down, at least till you find pieces of crusty Java-machinery. So this editor will gain a possibility to load characters. They should probably be loaded as children of the Map-struct. These characters can be then moved and rotated around by either a script or a player. Animation subsystem should be easy to write.

The way I've imagined scripting to work will be different to Unity's kind. Scripts do not live in the file system. Instead they are in the same image as maps, characters, and other objects I haven't yet come up with. When editor loads an image (yes, henceforth the .memap-files editor produces are called images) it opens up an nrepl-server for scripting both the game and the engine. It also opens another server for my own protocol that dumps the image's script-files to the Emacs minor mode. This minor mode overrides find-file (C-x C-f) and save-buffer (C-x C-s) to communicate with this fileserver instead of operating system's.

Game is running in the background, rendering the scene, animations, scripts and updating AI and physics if I'll ever implement such luxury. User can edit maps and character-animations in the editor window. They can peek and poke the state of the game in REPL. On top of the game's namespaces, also editor's namespaces are open for customizing. Considering that by default Clojure's compiler (or whatever component Leiningen calls when uberjarring) keeps as much code inside a jar noncompiled as possible, it shouldn't be hard to provide the editor's sources too to Emacs through the aforementioned protocol. It should be a setting defaulted to off though, because unless user is sure to know what they want to create, they probably don't want to customize the editor.

So what am I to implement? Loading of animations (or static characters), decide what interesting properties I'm going to base my interpration of animations on (initial-frame-index, amount of sprites in a spritesheet, is-playing?, location and angle probably), and some sort of selection-rotating-and-moving tool for them. Some context-specific views on editor's sidebar would be nice too. Maybe a listbox where user could open certain frames to the pxart-editor? And replacing the animation sequence with another spritesheet without scrapping rest of the character's properties should be supported too.

Once characters can be loaded, scripted, and they can react and interact with the map, I'll probably have another go at game-design (instead of game-devtool-design). I'm a little on the fence on what I'll actually put into to game. Last October's spec on the game mechanics should be mostly applicable. Story will cause me most pain. On the other hand, the old, finnish manuscript found somewhere in merpg.webs.com is shit. On the other hand, it's my best finished game-manuscript (as opposed to a book-manuscript), and if Nintendo dares to save a princess in every other Zelda and Mario (a hyperbole, I know), I can use this as a source. I'll sell a better story to my next game then.

But, before I can take any stress of what I've written, I want to make a pxart-application (with possible dropbox-bindings) to Android! I've done it before, somewhere in Memapper's history you might even find the code for it, so it shouldn't be a long project. Hardest part will probably be finding how one commanded Android's 2D-rendering from Clojure again.

But now I'm off to sauna. Hack merrily!

No comments:

Post a Comment