Project Blue Development Blog

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more on the contest/notreallyacontestcontest

here's a link to it: contest

at the end it'll be included in a bundle (which may cost money or whatever)

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so I decided to use std list which is a doubly linked list in order to organize graphics drawing. I also made a spriteZ which is a more advance version of sfml's sprite but just has a z value for depth/ordering with standard getters and setters.

the list currently works (I'm really happy that nothing is breaking :'D )

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so I entered this contest (not really a contest) that will make me try to complete this project within 2 months + 1 month for polish

I'll be doing this during the summer so it'll be interesting.

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So I got my desktop working with a new graphics card that works.

I managed to get sfml working on my desktop and have the files shared using dropbox. I linked the sfml libraries etc to drop box for the compiler but for some reason it kept failing to launch and some how I managed to fix it by installing sfml's files in the same local computer directory where I had it on my laptop.

so now any sfml project works(it was failing for new projects that weren't even in the dropbox folder)

Besides that I got some progress.

I learned how to use Classes in C++ finally so I made a player object which at the moment doesn't know it's own sprite (that's handled by main) but it has position variables and the like. and also knows how to draw itself

atm I have the main loop getPosition of the player object and draw a sprite at it's location although I did manage to get it to draw a rectangle if you call the draw method of the object by passing through a reference to the window.

After messing around with the resolution I changed it to 200x120 which is half the size of a 3ds top screen (incase I ever port it I'd just have to scale it by 2x) besides that in the pc version it'll be scaled 4x to 800x480 and in fulscreen I'll make it scaled 6x max at 1200x720

I also made my view focus the center on the player and made a simple grass tile and grid made out of hollow white outlined rectangle objects (literally just used a double for loop to change the rect's position and draw it multiple times and did the same with the tile)

also making a colour transparent is a little hard. you have to make a new one with a certain transparency value 'a' so for example the default blue color which is included as sf::Color::Blue you can use it but it won't be transparent and to make it used for transparent you have to extract all the components and then make the last alpha component whatever alpha value you want. but this is a pain. I may just make a simple method which takes in a Color Object and an int for the alpha and returns a Color Object that has that Color with the desired alpha.

anyway it all works nicely here is a screenshot of alpha 2

the character's sprite is temporarily samus's forward standing position from metroid fusion. I'll be changing this since it's only a temporary sprite.

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More experiments

made quick transparent sword that followed the mouse

it also rotates when I press the arrow keys

I even added a simple motion blur effect to it which is more noticable at faster rotation speeds

pretty neat

anyway besides me messing about with that in the single main class I'm learning how to make classes so I can instantiate objects which will be needed for later development. my main goal at this moment will be to create a temporary character sprite and make it able to move with the arrow keys.

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ok so good news

before when I made the screen twice as big and scaled up the view to fit into the screen the drawing of primitives like the circles was still drawn upscaled (meaning that you could see the inbetween pixels) this would mean that lines drawn would show up as 1 pixel thick instead of 2 which would be what I wanted.

So to get a retro effect which is basically drawing the image in a low res and then resizing them afterwards

I made one screen which would have the view in it where everything would be drawn normally. this would stay hidden in a window that is invisible. then I made a texture which is the same size as this window and transfer the contents of this window to the texture. after wards I would have a larger window (as big as however much I want to scale it so in this case 2x the normal size) and then scale the sprite in that window instead so the primitive drawing will not be upscaled.

you may be asking but what if I don't use primitives at all? well if you only used sprites and made sure they were always rounding the coordinates so there are no inbetweens then you'd be fine with just scaling the view in one window. however one thing I'm probably going to have is rotating sprites in my game and rotations are handled sorta like the primitives in that you'd see inbetween pixels.

btw the view is actually upscaling 4x and the regular is 2x (because I was already multiplying the view by 2x

so normal with rotation:

notice that each pixel is 2blocks width but this is supposed to be 4x the size so each block is supposed to be 4pixels big

now here it is with the other method which makes sure that there is no problems with upscaling

as you can see it's jagger and looks more oldschool at the low resolution but is still upscaled.

for newer games I wouldnt' recommend doing this but this is supposed to be retro looking in a way akin to how the ds's 2d screen would handle rotations on images I guess.

also the reason the other three dots are missing is because I was changing the code quickly to show the codeblocks sprites not the circles.

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got lots of nice work done.

can draw circles with dif colours and the thing in the center is the codeblocks IDE sprite that was there in the file when I made it. I loaded the Texture and made a sprite which I made the window draw using a view i made which actually is zoomed in by 2x to the top left corner of the screen :D

so much fun~ I can't wait to do more!

next I'll probably try figuring out how just sounds work (not music) and test that out as well as rotating sprites and other things such as objects and creating collections(lists) to handle drawing everything c:

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Got SFML 2.0 working in CodeBlocks

So apparently you are supposed to copy the dll files to the source directory of your project. In the tutorial it was put after the example code which is why I never got to it since I thought i did something wrong in the previous steps.

but anyway I've been messing with code and managed to get things drawn on the screen like circles and even managed to get music playing. Apparently I'll have to use ogg files or wav files for music and sound.

It's pretty neat.

Now that the environment is setup all I need to do now is make program design and then add the content per norm.

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so sfml 2.0 isn't quite out (apparently they are writing tutorials only) and the newest build of 2.0 is recommended rather than current stable build 1.6

the problem is that since sfml 2.0 isn't supported quite yet codeblocks's most updated mingw compiler 4.7 doesn't work nicely with it meaning I have to have 4.6 or lower. but apparently i can just recompile sfml (source code for this library is availible)

but that process will have to be done later.

I'll also be looking into sdl a little more since tbh if I cant get past sfml hurdles and actually manage to get code running in 2.0 then I'll need to switch. (on the other hand I was able to get 1.6 running but again people recommend 2.0 due to nasty bugs in 1.6)

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The IDE has been changed to Code Blocks instead of Eclipse. Apparently Eclipse is great for Java but the CDT version for C/C++ isn't so great. Also SFML has a tutorial for setting up projects in Code Blocks.

Code Blocks itself even has project templates for SDL and SFML which is great so that will be the IDE used in creating and testing the code for Project Blue.

So far I was able to get the Timer and Open window test code working so we're all good to go.

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This'll be what the screen looks like. 320,240 the camera will be centered on the character in this fashion

the grid will be tiles of 16x16 graphics and the player will occupy the space of 16x16 on the ground surface( the sprite will be taller than 16 pixels)

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Project Blue

Game: 

It'll be an bird eye view game similar to the appearance of your favourite rpgmaker games. however I will not be coding with rpgmaker due to the limitations of the software.

Points currently thought out

The main character will be female

it will be somewhat in the horror genre.

the window graphic dimensions will be 320,240 (for easier graphics design) and will be scaled maybe 2 or 3 x to make it not too tiny on someone's screen

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Coding Library Verdict

After about a day of research and advice from friends and acquaintances. The Library that will be used for the project will be:

SFML

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Intended coding environment: Eclipse on windows

Currently still deciding on whether to use SDL or SFML due to their pros and cons

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This blog was made to create a history of how Project Blue had become developed.