Review: Final Fantasy XIII

Posted by Alamar in Reviews, Video Game on April 30, 2010

The game’s been out a while, and I haven’t written anything in ages. Guess I’d better get with the program. I did finish it, though, which is amazing considering how little time I’ve had of late. So, here’s my take on the somewhat controversial Square-Enix title. Beware, for there may be minor spoilers sprinkled in here, although I’ll try to avoid them as best I can.

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Entity Creation

Posted by Alamar in FF Development Log on February 20, 2010

Good news tonight.  I managed to get some simple entity classes up and import, along with a definition. My art is terrible, but fortunately I haven’t written the code for tiles to display entities yet, so no need to see it!  The code correctly creates and spawns entities at the edge of the map, with an inefficient but effective anti-collision algorithm.  For the first time in quite a while I feel close to something releasable.

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Entity classes

Posted by Alamar in FF Development Log on February 11, 2010

I haven’t posted in this category for a while because I haven’t made too much progress.  I’ve had to step back from coding due to running into an efficiency problem in handling the Entity classes, and I’ve been working on ways around it. I think I have a workable, if not ideal solution, so I’ll probably tinker with the code this weekend some more. I doubt it will get finished this weekend, though.

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Retro Gaming: AD&D 1st Edition, Part 2

Posted by Alamar in Roleplaying on February 6, 2010

Last article I covered the stuff in the Player’s Handbook of 1st Edition AD&D.  That was just to get the ball rolling.  This past Friday, less than an hour ago in fact, my group and I just finished up the first session of the adventure.  It’s going to take several sessions, since we’re running online and that slows things down a lot, but I’ll be writing about it for as long as we continue.  The first installment is a nice showcase of just how rough they had it back then.

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Downloads broken

Posted by Alamar in Site News on February 3, 2010

Yes, I know the download page is broken. I’ll fix it this evening.

EDIT: Fixed Downloads page, I think, but lost my count. I could recover it, but it’s not that important to me.

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Retro Gaming: AD&D 1st Edition, Part 1

Posted by Alamar in Roleplaying on February 2, 2010

And now for something completely different.

In an effort to show some friends how gaming’s come along in the decades since the formative years, I’m doing some retro games. First among these is my first game, AD&D 1st Edition. Not Basic D&D, though I played some of that… AD&D. This is what I cut my teeth on, so there’s a strong nostalgia factor, but now that I’m older I can understand the rules a little more easily. For Part 1 of this series, I’ll be talking about how 1st Edition is different from ‘modern’ D&D(referring to both version 3.X and 4th) and how my own game will be set up. Future installments will cover summaries of the game sessions, both to relate interesting game stories and commentary on how the game system affected play. Read the rest of this entry »

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State of the Game

Posted by Alamar in FF Development Log on January 29, 2010

I was away from internet this past weekend, so I didn’t get to update then. On the upside, I took my laptop with me and did a little work. The new object model is in, and it’s much much simpler and more moddable. I think I cut down the number of lines of code significantly. Also implemented a logging function so that I can track bugs more easily.

In case you haven’t guessed, the last two months have been ‘busy’ as in ‘hellish.’

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Werk

Posted by Alamar in FF Development Log on January 18, 2010

It’s still crazy here, both with work on my ‘real job’ and my grandfather, who is in the hospital. Guess is he won’t last the week, so don’t expect regular development for another few weeks.

I freely admit that my new computer and a ton of Sword of the Stars may be contributing to this slowness.

However!  Lest I lose sight of my goal completely, I endeavored to do a little work on Fantasy Frontier again.  Mostly, I rewrote some loading code and wrote some config file classes, eliminating my need for a third party library that was giving me linker headaches.  Progress, right?

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I’m still here

Posted by Alamar in Site News on December 24, 2009

I haven’t updated in a while, since I’ve been busy with work and some RL concerns(mostly private matters).  As of now I’m laid up in bed recovering from an appendectomy, so I might be able to do a little tinkering. Sadly, this is my laptop, so I may not be working on Fantasy Frontier for another week or two.  On the upside, I have been working with Grey Lotus.  Also, I have another game idea that I think is somewhat unique, and I should be able to use a lot of the code from Fantasy Frontier to make it, especially the rendering engine. Since the rendering engine is the one part of FF that’s actually /finished/, this is a good thing!

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Terrain Generation

Posted by Alamar in FF Development Log on September 20, 2009

Well that was a pain.

If you’re wondering why it took so long to do terrain generation, it’s because I had to rewrite the entire section about four times.   A lot of algorithms look fine on paper, but in practice they don’t do so well for making a good landscape. I’m still not 100% happy with the way it does things, but it’s close enough that I can use what I have and move on, to tweak it later.  This is especially true once I change some of the constants to config parameters so I won’t need to recompile.  Since I don’t have overworld or biome generation done(and might not this release at all), I’ll probably use a specification text file for the first alpha release.

Next week’s tasks will be minor things like rearranging the UI and adding various progress bars, maybe time progression.  Fairly simple tasks. After that comes the entity stuff, and that will be more difficult.

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