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| A gauntlet-like game for Linux Stay tuned for developments
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August 8, 2008
Now have a Makefile that should work in *NIX environments. It assumes you have already installed the SDL, SDL_mixer and SDL_image libraries and that the sdl-config program is in your $PATH. It also appears that I may have another memory leak when exiting the program, so I need to look into that some more. That does not affect the play of the game at all.
July 10, 2008
Fixed the door problem.
July 10, 2008
Fixed a few bugs I found. I think my friend Justin Smith will be creating some original background music for the game. One problem I've noticed is that after a door is opened sometimes I can't seem to navigate the player through it. Maybe Piedmont is too fat...
July 8, 2008
Added a bunch of miscellaneous screens (intro screen, help screen, new level screen, etc), Piedmont is no longer invulnerable and can die. This is pretty much the alpha release. All the major code is there and working I think. The two level maps that come with the game are crap. I made an awesome level editor, but never put the time or thought into make some nice levels, just a couple for testing purposes. That needs work. Also need to create a *NIX Makefile. But the source is all there along with a Windows binary.
July 7, 2008
Getting closer... I finally tracked down the memory leak and fixed that (I wasn't properly cleaning up some items at the end). Also can now load level files as required, so once done with say level 1, it will automatically load level 2. Science and Technology at work for you!
July 3, 2008
More progress! Enemy movement is pretty much done methinks. They still have basic tracking, but hopefully should be able to do a little bit better. Player can attack and kill enemies (enemies can attack player too, but currently they have no effect). Monster generators were coded to spawn new enemies. Pause functionality (P button) was added. Some more sound effects were added for attacks. Not too much left to go.
June 25, 2008
So progress has slowed a little as I've been given more work to do at um... work. That said, I've worked out most of the bugs for animating the enemy sprites. They have a basic "player tracking" ability, but it still needs some slight work. The big thing I need to do next is add the player/enemy attack gameplay. Hopefully that won't be too tough. After that the game should be almost complete, although I still need to look at the level interaction (like how to load new level maps).
May 22, 2008
I've been able to sneak some work in on the program over the past two weeks. It's been part clean up and part new functionality. I have to admit my data structures and logic design is probably inefficient and sloppy, but that's what you get when it's your first time designing a video game and you're doing it all by yourself. Anyway, I added some DOxygen HTML documentation. It's not the best since I have not converted any of my comments to the DOxygen format yet. The game play is a little better now. Paul can interact with alot of the other items, open doors, etc, but the big challenge now is adding the animation and AI for the enemies. I haven't done any of that yet, but I must say that I'm getting a much better feel for the program overall as I do more work on it, so I have high hopes it won't be too hard.
May 8, 2008
Well, it's taken me about 8 years, but I've finally gotten back to some progress on Project Piedmont. I think a lot of the motivation has been because of my job at Tyler Technologies. I have more free time than I care to admit and all the rewriting I've done has been while at work. Bad me. Seriously though it's good to get back to some real programming. I haven't really touched C++ for well... 8 years. It's been a while and I'm as rusty as ever.
I started by rewriting the mapeditor. I began that in March and decided to try using the Dev-Cpp C++ IDE for Windows. My previous work for both the game and mapeditor were entirely done in Linux with VI and GCC. Dev-Cpp still uses GCC under the covers. It was pretty easy to setup and works quite nicely. Anyway, the GraphApp library used for the mapeditor had also been updated and was no longer compatible with my original code. That's what really got me going. So probably a couple weeks later I'd finished up the mapeditor rewrite, cleaning up some errors and adding some new features (minimap navigator). It's actually kinda slick, but I'm biased.
Next I took a cautious look at the game code. First things first, since I was working in Windows I needed a copy of libmikmod for Windows. Well, I could neither find a windows library or compile a copy of libmikmod, so I decided to see what other libraries were out there that could play .mod files. DUMB looked like a good canidate and after a week or two of working with it and SDL Audio, I finally got it to play a mod file. It was also about this time that I also realized (DUH!) that the SDL_Mixer library had support built in for playing .mod files. Well, I dumped DUMB because using SDL_Mixer would be much much easier. From there I started to slowly move some of my old code to the new project. It was slow going at first, but after a few weeks I'm back to the point that I left off 8 years ago. So, now I just need to start adding new functionality. Hooray!
January 14, 2001
Now you can compile without needing the libmikmod libraries if you can't use or don't want sound support. I've been off in Australia for 3 weeks, so not much has been done recently. I updated the screenshots for the game and now you can actually see more of what it'll look like, although the temporary background maps and associated tiles are kinda ugly. There is an onscreen display and level 1 objects are now being drawn. Everything for the game is basically there now, I just need to write the code to make it all interact/update correctly and make some enemy AI.
November 8, 2000
One of my problems with this is that this is the first C++ coding I've done in several years and I'm so very rusty. This is also the largest program I've ever done by myself. Anyway, I've fixed most of the memory problem (see directly below), but still need to learn that I need to pass data/classes to other class functions, not just instantiate a pointer to the screen class in every class. The cool news is that you can now properly scroll about the map background and there is even some music playing along. I've also begun created many of the classes I'll need for the different level 1 items, although they are pretty much empty classes at the moment, but that was a step I was kinda always putting off because there are quite a few of them (albeit all very similar in nature).
November 6, 2000
I'm doing something insane wrong. The game is using up around 20MB of memory when it runs and it's very dependent on the size of the map that it loads. I need to look at this closer and figure out the problem, although I already have an idea of what it is. Anyway, I'm now able to load map levels (the background tile portion anyway, I'm skipping the level 1 tiles at the moment) and display the map on the screen and scroll it around using the arrow keys. It took a while to figure out how to scroll the current window of the map so that the character would always be centered on the screen unless coming to the edge of a map. It's coming together a bit more now. The code is still horrendous because I'm doing this all with practically no forethought, coding and adding/changing things as I go and realize I need things. Next step I guess is to work on getting the level two tiles onto the screen.
October 9, 2000
I've slowed down a bit, but now there are menu and sound classes. Instead of using the SDL audio API, I decided to use libmikmod (see links) because it seems to have a better interface and can play both modules and mono WAV samples, which should provide the background music and the sound effects. Right now the game looks nice as it opens up to a functioning menu, but once you leave that, well..... that's all there is so far. The big thing that needs to be done is the actual loading of the level/map data (creating classes and such to do that) and making the main game loop. Of course now that I've got sound, I need to make up some sound effects and background music too.
September 26, 2000
I'm back from summer vacation in the US and actually motivated. The map level format has been pretty much set and the map/level editor has been updated to read/write these formats. The tilefile format has also been improved (for good?), so that now different level 1 objects can have different properties. Work on the game has begun in earnest and this time it's being done in C++. Since I haven't worked with classes since my COS 221 class five years ago, this will be a challenge in itself. I spent about 5 hours today just trying to get a good makefile working. So there are now downloads for both the map editor and the actual game, although the game is far far far from being at all playable. I have also increased the tile set slightly, but it needs many many more tiles, particularly good background tiles.
May 25, 2000
A pretty good copy (minus code commenting) of the level editor is done, which also means that a format for the map level files has been established and can be used with the game.
May 20, 2000
Images for several of the characters (ICky, Robo-Gahris, BJorT and most of Piedmont) are done. The movements are broken up into 8 directions (N,S,E,W and the in-between values) and each direction has 3 frames. Piedmont, being the main character, will have both images for walking and for attacking in each of the 8 directions, but other characters will only have walking images in the directions. A working level map editor is just about complete. Once we have worked out the final specifications of our map files, that can be finished up. It makes the creation of level maps very easy. Actual work on the game code is ....well....non-existant. I blame Frank, who is obviously more interested in money than in this project. A voodoo curse upon him!
October 8, 1999
Webpage created.