It’s not very complex and it doesn’t do any culling currently because I didn’t find that to be a problem given the ammount of terrain samples that I’m rendering. I generally spend most of my time on the game play first before tweaking the graphics engine.

Here is the code used for generating and rendering the terrain in the screenshots:

http://jrepp.com/code/Terrain.cs

The method used is as follows:

Given a grid of height samples

1. For some number N
2. Choose a random X,Y sample in the grid
3. Write a random value into the sample
4. Blend that sample with all adjacent samples recursively

The verts are colored to get the basic effect of having land and sea.

Overall it’s a pretty simple algorithm that produces fairly decent looking results.

Please let me know if you have any questions, I’ll be happy to answer them.

XNA BM Font rendering code

The movement relocation package was good, it took a whole lot of stress of of us and let me basically just hit the ground running at work. More than half our stuff is still in boxes but we don’t care since we’re moving into a house soon. We got a short-term lease on an apartment but we found a house in short order. The prices are really good here and I wasn’t expecting to find something so nice so fast but since it meets are needs we’re just going to move on it right away. We close at the end of Feb.

We had some problems with the movers.. the scratched the wood floor in our old house really bad and I can’t find my main windows source control server or networking hardware. Luckily I backed up all my subversion stuff on an external hard drive and burned to a CD. Hopefully the stuff is buried in some box somewhere in some corner of a closet.

My replacement dell laptop that I was sent already died. The diagnostics indicate the CPU is bad. I need to try calling them again to see what they can do. I was all ready to write a glowing review

As a result I’ve been working primary on OSX on a dual proc G5 which is fun but none of the XNA stuff is portable of course which completely sucks and reminds me of another reason not to like it. I’ve been playing with pygame a bit and that is interesting but startup time is really slow on the mac.. maybe I’ll post more about this in the future.

I just busted open the high score on the Astroids cabinet at work (97220) so I’m feeling pretty good about that and made my first major checkin on the MMO server side. I’ve already got some big stuff to work on so that has pretty much been guiding me deep into the bowels of every aspect of the game and server system. Hopefully at some point I’ll get access to a windows machine at home but it probably won’t be for at least another month. Combined with my hectic work schedule it’s going to be a bit before I can move any XNA stuff forward. If I can get my svn stuff imported to textdrive repositories I’ll probably begin porting rampart/beatbox to Mac.

Glitch Form and Movement Intro to Facts

Tell me what you think. I’ll have more up in the future and hopefully more finalized versions of these and some other tracks I haven’t exported to MP3 yet. I’m pretty fed up with the ADPCM encoding in XACT it doesn’t compress as well as MP3 does.

I have two other other tracks for under ground heroes and a bunch of sound effects that I whipped together using various samples and effects to get an approximation of what I wanted. They were using too much space so I went with a lower sample frequency and got rid of the stereo channel. I only kept the stereo channel in the music tracks but I compressed them using the max ADPCM compression allowed. The tracks sound okay on headphones and the sound effects are so short you hardly notice the bad quality. The sound and music is down to around 5mb now.

One of the problems I’ve been running into playing the game has been balance past the first 5-10 levels. As soon as I made the loot drops dungeon level appropriate the game became increasingly difficult.

 Since the primary goal is for this game to be fun to play I decided to go back to the drawing board and re-balance all the stat based stuff in the game. I have a new-found respect for the ammount of work that goes into this area of game development on the top teir RPGs, where you may have many hundreds of mobs and thousands of items.

 The various battle gameplay mechanics are having their algorithms tuned as well. For physical damage the system is basically layed out like this:

• Evasion calculation
• Parry calculation
• Damage jitter
• Main damage calculation
• Crit calculation
• Elemental modifiers

Some games have simplified this to where each type of item only boosts one or two player stats. This simplifies things for the player a bit as well because they can more clearly understand the trade-offs of equiping a certain item. At this point I think I will just be dropping one stat bonus from weapons (defense) which will change the way parry calculation is done.

So my general plan to fix this has been:

• Get all stats into a spreadsheet
• Break down player and mob stat progression into the sheet
• Translate the probability and damage calculation into the spreadsheet
• Use the empirical data that comes out of that to tune various pieces of equipment and level progression

Massimo and I were talking the other day too about the beastiary, I think there will be another meta-game created for that. Currently there is a fun meta-game in the llama store where you actually have to buy higher level gifts for your llama to unlock more carrying capacity and items. The current plan is to have an additional meta-game around the beastiary, if you kill a certain number of a given mob type there will be a unique drop based on that mobs equipment. Normally, the enemy weapons are not instanced in the player database but you can change this by hunting down these mobs.

One of the harder mobs that I’m working on is Zahhak who is a figure in Persian mythology. He has a unique weapon called the Usurper’s Blade. This is based on the story of how Zahhak came into his power. This weapon has a unique type of stat leeching and pretty good overall stats.

 Oh one little feature I added to the HUD is nice. You can see the health for any mobs you’re attack or are attacking you now. This was a great addition suggested by my friend Mike. Thanks Mike!

 At some point in the near future I think we’ll need to publish a limited Alpha for PC. We’ll also be alpha testing on our retail kits in a few days. After that we may open it up to more people. If you’re interested let me know.

The next day I start integrating this thing in. Massimo had a clear idea of what he wanted to build so I took his mock-up of the hud and built a simple layout engine with my bmfont code and some extra stuff to render it. Eventually battle was working and hey we had a fun little game. So I went off and wrote an effects/particle system and based on some input from people playing the game eventually wrote a inventory system and a store. Of course Massimo was coding like the crazy coder-monkey that he is. He’s written this cool dungeon generator complete with minimap and smooth scrolling.

So here’s some screenshots of the functional, and quite fun RPG Underground Heroes (UGH). If you have any questions feel free to post comments. As soon as we have our take home XNA builds we’ll be trying this out on our retail consoles.

I haven’t given up on the procedural shooter, I’m still brainstorming.

Console app test harness for the loot/battle engine:

In game with some barely visible particle effects and the finished HUD:

The inventory and store interface. No need for backpacks when you have a llama. Llama gifts are available in the store (This pick also shows a certain cheat that gives you all of the available equipment in the game):

• First off 62 build errors.
• Class documentation is still sparse. Things are worse now however as XNA is moving further from DX standards, you can’t simply turn to DX docs to fill in missing info.
• No more Surface class, new RenderTarget class, makes my RenderTarget wrapper obsolete. I’m trying to use the new built-in class but docs are bad and no idea yet how I’m supposed to instantiate the device memory for a custom render target.
• Application model has undergone overhaul
• Requires removal of old glue code.
• Public members and access of base Game class have been cleaned up.
• Refactor of code to support new events for resource cleanup.
• VertexBuffers and IndexBuffers require new simplified ResourceManagementMode enum versus DX style ResourcePool, seems like some control is now taken away from the user as far as memory control.
• Two hours of research and refactoring and render targets are fixed to use the new resolve methods. It’s an inversion of the previous model I had implemented and in some ways better.

I got my laptop back from Dell and it’s in worse shape than it was before. It still emits static sound from the speaker and now it crashes when I run 3d applications on it. They replaced the video card and speakers this time and maybe did a minimum of testing before sending it off. I’m going to have to send it back again.

At work we have a bit of downtime so I’m putting the finishing touches on a distributed networking layer that hopefully will become the basis of a lot of new tools and infrastructure.

Tuesday Children of Mana will be out so I feel obligated to pick that up. Apparently from what I’ve read it lacks some of the overarching story that made Secret of Mana so good but it makes up for it with some additions to the action aspect of the game. I’ve been playing through Dragon Quest Heroes, Nanostray and Meteos. I finally broke down and bought Meteos, it’s really a great value now at $20. I think Meteos in a lot of ways is much better than Lumines but you can easily see the similarities between them. The puzzle action in Meteos is fast and fun and keeps me coming back for more.

I also saw that FFXII advertised for $38 at Best Buy and that is another must have. Too many great games coming out this holiday and the PS2 and DS together are delivering a ton of great games.

On the 360 front I have been playing the new Spinter Cell, Gears of War (co-op on hardcord is the way to go!), Doom, Lumines and N3 continues to take up some cycles.

I want to get a comment feed on the front of this page and pull in some of the side bar content I had on my old blog but for now I’ll settle for just posting

When I was very young I did some coding in logo on an apple II. It has a very simple syntax and was fun to experiment with, a little turtle moved around the screen as you entered your program. As I was thinking about how to make procedural content for an action game I remembered those old times so I implemented a graphical editor for a simplified logo language interpreter. You use a 360 controller to alter the opcodes and operands and the scene updates in real-time.

I dropped the ziggyware font stuff from my project and went back to using BMFont from angelcode. The ziggyware stuff was pretty good but it lacked the precision I wanted and when I noticed that the XNA sprite batch stuff doesn’t batch the prim submission I was going to have to rewrite that anyways. It took me a little while to write the variable width rendering logic, kerning and line wrapping but now I have more control over the font layout and display. The textures generated from BMFont are very effeciently packed.

Watch out for the SpriteBatch it does not currently do any batching. Every call to draw a quad is a seperate batch. Check it out in PIX. It does however collect all the state changes into a state block but I’m not impressed. It’s really not hard to manage your own collection of quads in a buffer and generate them off the font information. I might share the BMFont renderer at some point. I’m still working on a level editor right now.