(this got really long -- it really is a diary entry! Read on if you like long rambling diary entries.)

It happened, I got inspired to learn more OpenGL to handle the scrolling about the level, and spent all of the night on it. Getting it going was fast, but I'm still dealing with some problems. One of the reasons I went from Pygame to pyglet was to learn OpenGL in fact, but up to now I've only used the most basic functions, so this process has been really fun! Some of this stuff is like magic. At the same time it seems like everyone does their GL a little differently so to speak, so it's difficult to get a straight answer from any of the billions of forum posts and tutorials out there to fix a problem. Luckily there are billions of places to look, so with a little digging things get clearer.

The problems seem to be that the sprites are not being drawn to the 'right' place on the viewport. It's a little hard to explain (as I'm not really sure what's going on ;) ). I've set the view to follow the player sprite, and as I track the player.x variable for example to the left in the debug window, it does collide where it should on the x axis and stop moving. But in the viewport the object the player collides with is still a little farther to the left than where it should be.

A second problem is that I can't figure out how to center the view on the player sprite; it's always off to the side a bit. There must be somewhere I can set a point to be half the window width and height, so I just have to figure that out. For example, every on_draw() I call gluLookAt like this:

        gluLookAt(
            self.x, self.y, +1.0,
            self.x, self.y, -1.0,
            sin(self.angle), cos(self.angle), 0.0)

This is from tartley's excellent slideshow and demo code. Self.x and self.y eventually converge on the player's position, so when the player moves the view 'floats' following the sprite. Basically then gluLookAt's eye point and reference point is the player position. However I haven't successfully added the 'center' of the screen to gluLookAt...maybe this isn't the function to define the center?

A third problem is that one of the sprites (strangely just the sprite that is the ground) sometimes shows a flickering black line at its top border (in the field of the screen where you can see it basically, as the sides and bottom are the window border). This problem cropped up only when I started using OpenGL for the scrolling (it wasn't a problem when I was scrolling before with a homemade pair of offset variables applied to the world coordinates).

I feel pretty good that I can take care of these issues, and tomorrow night is the first night I have a full uninterrupted stretch to work, so I'm hoping to make some progress.

So, tomorrow, I'll just have to write a lot of zombie-logic scripts and get a demo level working so we can start balancing speeds and angles and stuff, but aside from that, everything that matters is essentially complete.

The scripting system is done, the artwork is done aside from a bit of last-minute polish work, all gameplay elements work, and there don't appear to be any bugs.

Oh. I might also get around to writing a main menu and intro sequence tomorrow. Voice work will probably wait 'til Thursday or Friday, though.

First screenshots will be available tomorrow, once we have a practical level in progress, rather than a stream of elements for debugging.

It's still missing it's giant feather antenna which is kind of the most important part... but it's coming along :)

No pictures today. Made a simple fractal system for making the individual rooms, but they're not guaranteed to be reachable, and they're not being drawn yet. Also moved the minimap into a small window onscreen, and made explored areas draw in green. Basically same shot as yesterday but smaller.

Well, now I'm behind schedule...
This was gonna be a big push day since I didn't have to work.
Instead I got working early and got nothing done, and by 10:30 I got busy away from teh computer, and then got some news and everything got nuts.
Finally got back to work probably at 3:30 or so, but only worked for maybe an hour or two, because one of teh cross beams in our garage shattered, so that was fun cleaning up.
Got the most done from 8-9:00 - in which I implemented all the shapes for the badguys and the colors.

Tomorrow I'll just have to get all the logic in for the badguys, and go from there.

Let's hope we make it :)

Pedoman is in love, but her woman doesn't like him.
She likes thinner, lighter guy, lighter as a feather.

But Pedoman is fat. He likes to eat a lot. So, he had this idea:
"If I eat lots of beans but lots lots of beans perhaps I can fart and fart and reduce weight by farting.
And she would love me because I will be light as a feather".

And this is just the beginning of this plataformer love story game.

Will Pedoman be able to conquer her love ?
Who knows...

I've got the basics of my entities built, as well as the layout of my main loop.

I'm planning to use arbitrarily-nested terrain pieces that are defined by bounding boxes. The extent that this will be done will (hopefully) supplant the need for a spatial hash.

Well, actually, I'm going to nest the terrain pieces to such an extend that they will effectively comprise a spatial hash anyway.

I've set up the entities to use groups of terrain pieces transparently.

Essentially, the collision offset calculated by a given terrain group will be figured recursively.

In addition, I've decided against the tiered environment I had planned for Rabbit Hunt. Instead, the terrain will be one long stretch, with multiple levels in only some areas.

It will be generated semi-randomly. There will be a set of pre-made segments of terrain which will be chosen randomly, and inserted as a strip of terrain.

Tomorrow, I will make some sprites, and then terrain, and then... A demo! 8-D

Heck, if I really put myself to it, I could finish most of it tomorrow. But that would be intense.

Er... I've been implicitly talking about LD alot... Sorry about that. ^_^;

It was kind of an eye-opening experience. I found out that I could do it. That was a weird feeling for me. To be able to accomplish that much that quickly.

I feel like I can do this. And rather quickly, no less.

This will be a good one, I think. :-D

---Akake

...is now displayed. Collision geometry is loaded in from SVG file and converted into Box2D shapes.
Our character now has a world to collide with :)

Not much done today. Between earning a living and honouring assorted prearranged evening commitments (and very delicious those commitments were), Operation Fox Assault was sorely neglected. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, however, I managed to implement the start of weaponry and equipment from a laptop in bed.

Tomorrow will probably involve a lot of fiddly detail work to hook all the bits together into a shape that makes sense.

hi,

here's a screeny from the beginnings of our game...