#seedbird.e

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040 // I am not dead. Just lazy.

Ed.Note: I am not going to lie to you. I recently started a Twitter account and it has been taking up a lot of my time and it is easier to maintain than Tumblr, and I became entirely sidetracked with it. I had actually written this post in December of last year, then saved it as a draft intending to get more images ready for it. 

I forgot and only remembered now, so here they are! Again, sorry for the long delay. u_u;

So I have spent the past few months working alternatingly on a project for/with one of my fantastic girlfriends, making art slides for her project called "Skeleton Planet." These slides have been fun to do, with the mixed challenge/handicap of a four-colour monochrome palette and fixed image size. Here are some of them:

Admittedly, these art pieces have not taken up too much of my time in contrast to the length of time it has been since my last update. The other work I have been alternating back and forth with have been my original project (derailed months ago by the stupid jaywalking game; both still incomplete), a grid maker tool that should help me lay out doodles for landscapes (finished!) and pixel dailies submissions that tend to take a day or two to make (I will show you those later~).

The work I have done on the original project has centered mainly around a complex set piece in an even larger tile-based map for Opark Forest. The set piece has involved a great deal of animation for a number of materials I have never had to animate (properly) before, namely a canvas tent (in a breezy spot) and leaves on large trees (also in that windy location), and while it has required no new elements in terms of my engine (though a few have required revision), the map editor has so far been updated several times to correct flaws and improve its useability. The creation of the animated elements has been painstaking, though rewarding and I will reveal those later.

Matan kids on an incomplete fort!

Besides that, much of my time has gone to laying tiles and trying to make them look good next to one another. I have made a quick time-lapse thing using ASEprite to show the evolution of a part of this current map, although it is not particularly impressive.

Mazarre Ridge: Work-In-Progress. There are some colour palette issues in this .gif related to ASEprite’s palette quantizing that I could not avoid and sorry. :s

Now that you have seen it, maybe you would like to know a little about it? This is the 'Mazarre Ridge' area of Opark Forest. It is a rather unstable formation at the edge of Omalla continent's central plains that did not collapse (as the rest of the plains did) during the initial tectonic conditioning of the planet hundreds of years ago. The ridge is rocky and covered in a thin layer of soil created by the leaves and needles of the shrubs and large conifers the grow on top of it. The soil is quite good once you move away from the ridge where the wind prevents it from accumulating for long. There is a large lake not too far away, separating the ridge from the Matan Terraforming Platform. The terrain below the ridge is riddled with narrow caves and swallowholes that join and link together in Nigran Cavern beneath, and these holes are the primary reason why the road connecting Matan to the platform take the much longer route to the east of the lake, and why the area has only a narrow and seldom-used hiking trail connecting it to the town. The wind and steepness do not recommend it, either. Six years ago, Gustek Radomr constructed a small shack on one of the few stable outcroppings on the edge of the ridge for Celia Roscoe to play in; since then, Celia has expanded it slightly and maintains it to this day. It is quite difficult to reach.

Seedbird, in the woods on Mazarre Ridge.

Anyway, that is all for this update. I will try and be more diligent about adding more to this weblog but realistically, who knows-- I am not good at publicity. u_u;

I have made some new visual effects in the past couple of days. I hope to have a post ready soon, because I realize that it has been entirely too long. Here is a preview for you: a sort of shattered-funhouse-mirror effect for uneven reflective things!

Garbling a reflection was both harder and easier than I thought it would be.

Incidentally, if you were looking forward to more stupid-jaywalking-game updates, they will slow somewhat, but I would like to continue that project in the future. I just did not want to leave my main project on the back burner for any longer, so I picked it up again. The most recent thing I worked on for SJG was a code module that allowed me to make road layouts more easily from sets of locations and road-width data, rather than having to work out the carriageways on paper. The next element is other pedestrians, I think!

That is all for now! Talk to you next time! :y

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031 // Not Yet Dead

Before anything, an image, because it has been a very long time without one:

Seedbird, in Nigran Cavern's Depths. The ripple effects are new; I created and implemented them just yesterday!

Hello! Sorry for the long delay; I had been called out of town for all of June and July on family business, and, I suppose, for a long road trip of several thousand kilometers (each way!) with one of my beloved girlfriends. During this time, I was unable to post meaningfully, or work meaningfully, or I suppose really deal with life in general, which, for me, is something of an ordeal, meaningfully.

Kind of a few things happened, and this post is rather long, so I will break it here and you can read it at your leisure~

While I was out of town, I found my old laptop had developed some additional bluescreen-style problems, and I sought to retire it before it died entirely, which I did. Through the help of a friend, I was able to procure for myself a new laptop at a price I could afford, which, for various reasons, actually turned out to be more machine than I need-- a bit of fortune for me on a throughly-mixed-results 'vacation'. The adjustment to Windows Ten has been fairly smooth, although it still does a few things I do not entirely appreciate. Nothing truly problematic; mostly "Who thought this was a good idea and what could their rationale have possibly been?" moments and a bit of wonder why the default photo viewer becomes less and less capable with each new iteration. Reinstalling all of my favourite software took almost no time at all, though I discover things I am missing on a weekly basis. Completely resolvable problems, all.

This situation also allowed me to update my version of Python (a thing I ought to be doing more diligently anyway) and to update my version of Pygame from version 1.9.1 (released August, 2009) to 1.9.3 (released January of this year). There was a version 1.9.2 that I tried to download last year, but which created a number of strange problems for me so I rolled it back. I am pleased with this new version, though; there was a little retooling and a few mysteriousities, but they seem to have been mostly corrected. Being up-to-date is nice, and not just for practical reasons, but for self-satisfaction ones, too.

In any case, I am returned now and I hope to get things back on the rails with this project. The first challenge was settling a number of reasonable, less-reasonable, and outright-idiotic file structure issues I had casually created on my previous workstation, mostly to do with file paths being mapped to absolute, rather than relative, locations. In layman's terms, I had told my engine exactly where each file was on the hard drive, rather than where the files were relative to itself. The significance is that in the first case, for the program to work, each file must be in exactly the right folder, starting at "C:", and every file from the previous laptop must be replaced in that exact location. This, I tell you now, is stupid, and not a thing you should do if you ever plan on taking your programs off of the hardware you create them on. I recall the thought that it was a bad move at the time, even those years ago, but went and did it anyway. It took one or two days to reconfigure my map files so that they were able to draw assets from subfolders (directories contained by whatever folder the program itself is running from); I spent some of that time retooling the loader and editor to handle these new relative locations (directories 'visible' from the one the program is running from) as well. It was all dramatically less work than expected, and finally settling this bit of juvenilia* let me put at least that one element of shame to rest: a piss is removed from the ocean! >:D

Moving on, I returned to the matter of Matan Village, permanent address to many several. Originally, I had planned to draw the entire settlement, buildings, flora, citizens, and all. This, I have determined, is actually neither necessary nor even useful to the game: the town would be enormous by comparison to the other maps, the plot does not focus so heavily on the place, and the player would spend a lot of time walking through an area just to get to another, rather than to see the sights (though I would be flattered if they did) or to meaningfully advance the plot (though I could find a lot of ways to do this, it would not be the 'purest' solution). Instead, I have elected to change the structure of the town somewhat, hopefully in a way that is convenient to the player, practical to develop, consistent with the style of the game, and structurally not-jarring. I have a solution that I am confident can accomplish at least two and a half of these things, which I regard as "pretty good" and please look forward to it! <3

Besides all that, there have been several other modernizations of my old code, including some optimizations and restructuring of old methods and mathematics. One of the somewhat discreet and worrisome issues I have found with this new hardware is that it so broadly outperforms my old machine that I can no longer tell easily when my code is badly inefficient, because this new hardware is perfectly capable of powering through my shitty programming, even with Python's relative (perhaps "objectively") weak performance in graphics processing taken as a handicap. Granted, my old machine was substantially below-average in terms of its processing power: it was an old model when I got it in 2013, and by the time it retired, its thermal problems had become so severe that I was only able to run it comfortably in 'Battery Saving' mode. I was able to maintain thirty(ish) frames-per-second most of the time, though occasionally there were functions it struggled with. No longer is this the case: old hill-climby, chuggy-struggling effects are taken as nothing. With an unlimited framerate, the game slows from 145fps to 102 (a steep decline but not one which would effect normal operation). Previously, this area would slow from 66fps to maybe 22 or 25. Be assured that this module is at the top of my "Do It Better" checklist-- it has to do with realtime image processing and possibly I will just learn how to do it in C and write an extension..? That stuff is entirely new ground for me, though, and I have plenty of things in front of me to do first. Just regaining my momentum is hard enough. :s

Anyway, that is about all I have to report for now. I hope to have more images and information to share soon; I shall try to get back on the wagon with my weekly updates as well and I do apologize for missing so many of them.

Thanks for reading all the way to the end! See you next week! :D

* Fun fact! I had originally typed this word as ‘juvenalia’, which looks correct but is not. The true word I was after was ‘juvenilia’, which refers to the (often embarrassing) work one does in their youth, rather than the former, with an ‘a’: a holiday in classical Rome.

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024 // ~ Wow! It’s Made! No.1: “Part of ???’s House”

So my health has not fully recovered and there are a couple of other projects I have going on. This is fine, I suppose, since things are improving. I did want to give you something, though, since it has been a while, and this is it! I have started working on the buildings of Matan Village, and this is one of them (or a part of one of them). This is a home! People will live in it! I will not tell you whose home it is just yet, because I want to keep a couple of surprises for later (and also it could change depending on whether or not I think of something better in the interim). Seedbird shown for scale. Obviously, I have not entirely finished it yet.

Anyway, there will only be a short post for this week (unless I get around to writing another-- unlikely, m’fraid), and I will tell you about my side projects later, because I do not have the time just at this moment (it involves Tkinter again).

So! Until next week~ :y

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018 // Loose Images No.4: Climbing!

I have been working on a few things this week, and one of them has been this: animation frames of Seedbird climbing, and sprites for the things she climbs! This gif is not super-impressive, I admit, but once I have it working on an actual map, it ought to be a lot more detailed and will make a lot more sense than a little girl climbing an infinite sequence of rope ladders in a weird, dimly-lit, lilac-gradient void.

This week has been very busy in other ways, too, and I did not get much of a chance to write a proper entry (as you may have presumed if you had been waiting for this week's post), and I apologize for its brevity. I hope the graphic will make up for it until I can do better next week! There should be a new map waiting for you! Or at least part of one.

See you next week!

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015 // Screen Capture No.3: Nigran Cavern Depths

Here are some more images from Nigran Cavern, this time a bit farther in. This is not the final version of the lighting, but the way the tileset and props and effects have worked out pleases me and that counts for something for sure!

The first video is from the edge of an immense underground trench created when an ancient underground magma dome drained during the bulk continental adjustments during Luan II's initial terraforming phase. How will you cross this bottomless(ish) abyss?

Large rock towers remain where huge fountains of magma vented back into the emptying dome as it drained, slowly hardening as the flow calmed, then breaking and eroding as water ebbed and flowed from the chamber after seasonal rainfalls became the new reality for the once-barren planet. Is there any way for a visitor to see one up close? (Watch me draw one in fast motion in post 002!)

Seedbird waits next to a small underground lake in an upper chamber of the cavern in this gif-format recording. Lakes like these accumulate runoff entering through swallowholes and seepage through cracks in sturdier layers of rock above, which then drains through pores and cracks in the lakebed or spills over into shallow streams that escape through holes in the walls. Sometimes, water cannot easily escape and it fills entire chambers with clear, slightly acidic water running hundreds of meters deep!

Be wary, as the rock around lakes can crack and weaken as the weight of the water places stress on it or etches more soluble veins of material away, weakening the floor.

There are plenty of hazards in this cavern and probably you should not be in there at all, but know at least that you would not be the first person to fall in and get stuck. Explore the caves and see what you can find!

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014 // Screen Capture No.2: "Welcome to Nigran Cavern!”

Better late than never! As promised, here are a few screen captures from the "Nigran Cavern” region of maps. They even have motion for you! Hot damn! :y

The first MP4-format video shows a pair of rock arches weaving between waterfalls, pouring in from the Opark countryside above. (Sorry for the graininess; I have yet to get video compression worked out in an elegant way...)

The second gif-format animation shows the vista from the mouth of Nigran Cavern as it connects to the scarp running through Opark Forest. I am not completely sold on the colouring in this view just yet, so please expect it to change at least once or twice...

In both maps, all of the sprites and static artwork you see was made in ASEprite. Animated effects like the sunbeams and waterfalls are generated on-the-spot, in code, using NumPy, which I regard for various reasons as the best mistake I probably could have made here. (I will explain why in a future post! <3)

The Nigran underground region will probably consist of six or eight maps when it is complete. I plan on putting some good stuff down there for you, too!

I have really enjoyed working on Nigran Cavern so far; I learned a lot of different ways to use a tileset (more on this in future posts), found some new ways to use old effects, and created some new effects with applications in other regions.

I will very probably get into the details of these effects later, and how they have been used, but I will save this for a follow-up post actually showing off the material itself. For now, please enjoy this completely optional and technically-questionable expository moment:

Nigran Cavern is a system of dolomite solution chambers and corridors stretching thousands of miles in all directions beneath Luan II’s Beylan region, and into other adjacent cavern networks in neighbouring regions. The caverns, like many others worldwide, were created as the GEOMATs lifted the Omalla landmass and other continents above their resting depths in Luan II’s then-shallow oceans, causing their original watertables to flow outward. Carbon and sulfur acids produced by settled organic cycles in the biosphere and introduced artificially to accelerate the creation of soils through weathering and erosion leached into the caverns through cracks in hardier rock and sinkholes and dissolved the more soluble materials beneath. Eventually, these cracks formed large underground cisterns and rivers, absorbing water from the surface watertable and from creeks flowing into ‘swallowhole’ sinkholes.

Because the underground geology of Luan II is relatively new, sophisticated patterns of stalagmites and stalactites are rarely seen-- the chambers shown, though they vary in age, are all less than four centuries old. Some features are less the result of dissolution or erosion and more the remnants of Luan II’s far more ancient lava-extrusion processes; others may have been created by seismic forces as recently as months ago. The GEOMAT terraforming process creates new and unique phenomena on each planet that undergoes it!

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nb00 // Delayed, due to illness.

I know that I had promised you some sweet caves this week but I have found myself in the unenviable position of being both busy with “life” (so-called) as well as finding myself a tad infirm.

Taken together, little fun has been had.

As a way of saying "I’m sorry,” here is a screen capture from the Opark Forest Wreck Site featuring some of the new flora featured recently. I redid the sky and the midground, and some other things. There are several updates and revisions compared to the version in the Tumblr-theme-title-backdrop version posted at the top of the main page (and possibly this page as well).

I had intended to save this for a bit later, but I had intended to do a lot of other things which did not happen.

Anyway, here is my apology; I hope you will find it acceptable:

Next week will be better. Next week is always better.

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009 // Tech Demo No.0(i): `SpriteLite`! A simple collision-reaction sprite-like object type.

Before the library closed for the Giftsmas holiday, I made this new class of spritelike object, called a SpriteLite. Unlike my regular 'heavy' sprite class, SpriteLites cannot change their positions once they are set. Like regular sprites, they have animation cycles, but because they are immobile, they can only react to external influences. Because SpriteLites cannot move, they are much simpler to animate and update in terms of both artwork and software.

In the gif images, my first animated SpriteLite, a cluster of tall grass, responds to being stepped on in various ways: if a regular-type sprite approaches from the left, the grass is animated to bend to the right. Conversely, pressure from the right triggers the leftward-bending animation. If nothing is touching it, it can either cycle through a sequence of idle frames (this one does), or stand completely idle on one specific frame of animation. This one has nine unique frames of animation, distributed across three different animation sequences (bend left, bend right, and idle).

The class is equipped to do a variety of other things, like respond to scripted and remote triggers, play specific sequences of frames in a directional 'wave' triggered by a global timer (if that doesn't make sense now, there will be a recording of it later~), and possibly behave differently depending on the parameters of the sprite(s) standing over them (I may or may not make SpriteLites this sophisticated). They will automatically generate flipped geometry and revise their animation sequences according to their new "right" and "left" directions so that they continue to respond to directional effects correctly. I can apply colour gels to them simply by adding new values on map generation. I'm sorta proud of this thing, you know, even though it is not much to look at?

I originally created SpriteLites because my normal sprite class (the Seedbird you see is one) is both unnecessarily complex* for this application, and is very difficult to apply en masse (or 'to spam', as the kids say). In order to create a less-processor-hungry, more-purpose-appropriate sprite class, I decided to make this new thing using old image processing functions, but forewent all of the crazy-quilt madness of a sprite that has to move. "There's no point in putting tires on an island," after all.

Working on this has given me some new ideas for how I could (will) eventually revise the current sprite class, that it may not suck quite so hard in the future. Birds! Stone! Double homicide! :y

I will do my best to post some more images from SpriteLites soon. Please look forward to it!

*  The ordinary sprite class was one of the first things I made in Python, and I have been mooshing new features into it ever since. As code goes, it is a supremely ugly baby. They say that you should never write code as cleverly as possible, because debugging code requires you to be smarter than you were when you wrote it. This is the silver lining to the atrocity-of-bad-engineering cloud past!me has bequeathed to my future. (Like hell if Imma fix it right now. >:I)