What I did Last Week #2 (week ending 1/23/2011)

[PyTom]

As a suggestion for this thread, let's post it on Late Sunday/Early Monday, and cover the week leading up to the Sunday. This way, everyone posts at about the same time - while the weekend's tasks are done. Of course, it's no big deal to post late - you rebel, you.

As a reminder to everyone, the motto here is Be Specific. We want to know what's going on, not just raw counts.

Ren'Py

Last week was spent finishing up some of the last if the 6.12 TODO list, and getting ready to begin the release campaign. This mostly meant going through the list of minor bugs, both ones reported here in the forum, and ones reported in the bug tracker, and either fixing them, or realizing that they've been fixed already. Right now, there aren't any outstanding reported "little" bugs - bugs that I can fix without a rewrite of _something_.

I put together a new build system, so that I can now type one command (./build_all.py) and have Ren'Py built for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This involves three computers (all on my desk, but still), and a bit of networking. It would have been easier if Windows had a halfway decent ssh server - but that doesn't seem to be the case. (The problem I encountered was that when I log in with a key, Windows doesn't get a password - and so the process doesn't have access to network drives, despite my being logged in on the console.)

I merged renpy-dev with renpy-mainline, so 6.12 is now the "official" Ren'Py. I'm going to try to work in feature branches in the future, rather than having one development branch that's hard to reconcile with mainline.

I added the missing "spacing" property to sides and grids.

I tweaked the order in which the per_interact method on displayables called. This method (which isn't part of a public API) is called to set up displayables to be displayed. For example, this ensures that a DynamicDisplayable is run at least once per interaction, in case the function returns a different result due to the data being changed. Previously, a parent's per_interact was called before the child's - which means that we could have a problem where the parent didn't update itself to reflect the child's change. Now, the method is called in the other order, and so works more sensibly.

Ren'Py now treats filenames as case-insensitive. While it irks me, I think that this will lead to more games runnable on Linux, which is a good thing. Probably the real motivation was that it wound up being nearly as easy to correct the problem as it would have been to report it in lint.

Found out that mugenjohncel hid a message in the flags in the concert image on the demo game. I haven't fixed that yet, so it still irks me, as it's one more thing on my todo list. And now I have to audit the rest of the art he's done for me.

Started off the release campaign. The first step here is to test Ren'Py on the various platforms. Linux worked without major problems, which is a good sign, given that large portions of the graphics code were rewritten. At the same time, it's to be expected, as I'd been using -dev to play games for a few months.

Android had a couple of problems with the more complex game. The first was that the fast implementation of dissolve produced terrible results on complex scenes. The usual method of rendering (glCopyTex2D) was too slow on Android, probably due to format conversion. Using framebuffer objects speeds things up substantially, and I think that using larger textures for RTT should put this one to rest.

The other big android issue was a texture glitch, where one could see older images. It turned out that it was caused by a render-to-texture image (which is RGB) being re-used as a texture loaded from memory (which is RGBA). Fixed it, and the glitch went away.

Misc

Announced the Ren'Py Facebook Page. For better or for worse, social media is where some people are, so it makes sense to engage with it to the extent it doesn't take too much of my time. I've been using ping.fm to post updates to Twitter and the Facebook Page, which means I don't have to do it twice.

[DaFool]

Generally, mostly managerial / non-technical work.

-[] contacted me out of the blue and was in project-making mood. I referred him to try out Recettear and at least one of the Atelier games, since in my opinion you can't do better than either of these if you're talking about the item shop simulation genre. You have to give something that neither of these games already provided.

-The magic formula of how to make non-choppy high-definition 2D animations that's not low-res pixel-art was answered when somebody in tigsource linked to a database that contained rips of spritesheets from Muramasa and Odin Sphere. Jaw dropped to the floor. However, will not be able to utilize their most awesome technique since their skeletal technique is hard to achieve in isometric perspective. Maybe for my next project. In the meantime we'll have have to make do with choppy prerendered animations.

- got an idea for a smaller spin-off game that's a hybrid of reverse tower defense and squad command. I have no clue how I would program it though, since it's a real-time event trigger based gameplay system. Probably will make it in 3D when the time comes.

- updated Dropbox so I can see the current state of [] (the project that I started on early 2008 and just finished the art for in the middle of 2010). Still waiting for an email reply since [] wanted another Skype session.

- 3D artist had a followup question which I didn't get to answer immediately because I spent the whole day at Honda servicing my car. Thank goodness the warranty is about to expire so I can take it to a cheaper mechanic next time. Sometimes its the cheaper artists that are the most reliable -- he'll definitely get the bulk of my work.

- followed up on another concept artist... yay I got a response.

A little introduction:

I'm not working on any pure visual novels. To this day I have exactly ZERO wordcount (Not counting expressions of "Testing battle 1").

Despite mostly waiting for the art and game engines, as an Art Director I'm still responsible for making sure all art are unified and fit the overall style. So often I have to fire up Photoshop and Blender as well.

My "Brutally Efficient Production Technique" came about because I wanted a methodology to make 'big' games without spending years on them, risking burnout and technology / stylistic changes that come about because of something sitting in the oven for too long:

Design World and general story outline -> Commission all art assets according to budget -> adjust art asset list based on feedback from artists (cut down if overbudget or artist doesn't have enough time) -> (simultaneous) preliminary gameplay prototypes as the assets stream in -> (when all assets complete) make game (out of multiple games possible) using those assets.

Since I own the rights, it's easy to release as freeware or go commercial or take to a publisher or port or do whatever I want with the property without having to seek consensus. The main problem with many Japanese franchises not being released in the west is the headache in chasing after various parties and licensing whatever small contribution they made -- sure they get things done better because everybody pitches in, but I think the main reason western franchises spread faster is because they already figured out IP ownership way beforehand.

[Verity]

Got my VN idea approved for my research project in AI and gaming (woot woot); started talking to the people in psych department about methods of modeling relationships, trust and affiliation. Also started revising a bit of script that I started writing earlier and did a bit of character redesigning.

[papillon]

A week is a long time when running at full-speed, it's hard to remember it all!

Most recently, went over the whole plot so far and changed the way the Weird and Cute stats worked. You can't earn those directly by grinding like you can with most other stats, you can only achieve them through items or through things that happen in events. The natural limit to the number of appropriate events for this purpose meant that even if you were trying REALLY hard to be cute you'd still probably have less than 20 cute points, so all the places where points could be scored now give far more points than they did previously and the difference between characters is more apparent. Dungeon minimaps show directions on them now, and we just remembered to sanity check PC name entry to prevent blank names...

Plotwise, we've pushed up to the Christmas break, which is where decisions have to be made about which character you're most interested in; from this point on, things will move in a bit more of a "character path" direction instead of free-roaming events. There are still plenty of events that can occur to anyone, and there are some characters whose relationships are not so cut-and-dried, so there's still going to be some stress in the new year if multiple people have claims on your attention. But this is a spot where I need to stop updating the playable story at breakneck speed and lay out timing for all the romance arcs and major event interactions before allowing people to go any further.

Some of the events that have occurred in the run-up to christmas include unexpected snow, snowman-building gone wrong, disturbing encounters with bunny rabbits, and Cut And Paste 101. No mistletoe, though - you'll have to wait until later to try and steal a kiss.

Currently trying to track why one user says the game exe launches and then immediately closes without doing anything...

[kinougames]

---Pixel art. Lots and lots of pixel art.
---Concept art commissions we received.
---More high res art. Lots of that.
---Finishing up our own game engine.
---Completed logo video.

[Samu-kun]

Boring as hell week. All I did was just program the sprites, music, and sound effects into the script. To think that I have to do this for the next couple of weeks! >_<

I'm falling behind schedule because the work's so boring and I get distracted so easily. Ay...

[Twisted-Eva]

All I can say is that I finished one character sprite set, implemented an "Affection Points" page (so the player can keep track of how many affection points), and changed all the variable names so the property binding can be easier to implement because of easier memorization of names.

[El Presidente]

Worked on my framework, menus, object classes, eventhandling etc.. soon time to put in some actual content

[SusanTheCat]

Did preliminary sketches for Lesson 2 - Graphics. Making sure that Gimp will do what I want it to. (it did)

Prepared the Quarterly Bonus for 350+ agents.

Got addicted to Minecraft. (bye bye Sunday afternoon and evening)

Almost finished knitting two socks at once using two circular needles. Just have the cuff to go.

Susan

[Aleema]

Can't say I got much done last week. It was a terrible week for me and I didn't want to do anything, at all. Now that time has past, I've proven to myself that returning to what is normal for me is helping me move past it, and I feel relatively normal, in that I function and stuff. So I've been keeping myself busy with Ren'Py and my game, so I have to thank PyTom for making it simply as a therapeutic device for me.

I do have progress to show, so, here it is:

- I started working on the new mini-games. My first ambitious attempt was to make a match-3 game. It actually went rather well. After two two-hour sessions, I had a grid of tiles that could be any size that could swap tiles, see if 3 or more tiles around it matched, and made them disappear from the grid. I had a problem in getting the script that checks surrondingly tiles to properly go up the tile's grapevine to see if any out-branching matching tile existed. I thought I fixed it, but I guess there was one error or something, because it never caught the branches going right. Everything else it captured! I assume this is a grid problem, since my right-branching code it correct. Something about 4 rows/cols is throwing off my script, which I originally wrote for 3 rows/cols and then upgraded it. Anyway, the accompanying visual aid:

I guess if I worked on it for a while, I could get it to work. But my biggest fear is how to make games start without 3 tile matches already lined up. I guess I could do it, but it seems convoluted to have to check all surrounding tiles for matches before placing a random tile to fill the grid. Maybe I'll go the route where it's not Match-3, but it's a game of trying to eliminate ALL the blocks to 0, and it checks if there are any moves left before giving a score by how many blocks left on the screen. I actually like that game better. Match 3 is just a digital form of fidgeting. With gems.
Realistically, though, I'm probably just going to do a matching game. You know, where you have a grid of cards and you have to match the pairs, flipping only one over to see what it is at a time. It'll make it a timed game, since I'm not going to wait for you to match ALL the cards before moving on each. I would hate it if a developer did that to me.

- Rebuilt my game screens in screen language. They're a mess that I plan to make look pretty later. Just need them to function. I'm getting a better hang of it, but it still knocks me off my feet by how much stuff didn't make it over to SL. Basic positioning properties are apparently on a "need to have" basis where if an immediate use for it doesn't come to mind, it doesn't exist. I am happy to have full control over the layouts of the screens, which allowed me to do nifty frames around the save/load screen shots that I had to precisely calculate and line up (with much failing) before on imagemaps. The result looked GREAT. Removed those silly numbers before save slots (I get why they're there, I like them, it just throws off my layout) and in general, I'm way more pleased with how save slots look. And I made sure to include a screenshot this time, because my original plan of just knowing what your game was from the band name and last date played was awful while testing, because it was just the same default name for all my save slots. xD My navigation imagemap fudged when I translated it over to SL for the nav screen (after I updated the coordinates for the new x,y,h,w syntax) because I had a transparency in my ground which was clearly being doubled/overlapped for certain areas. So I had to include the solid background in the ground as well to prevent this. Hopefully that's not too big a file. Visual aid:

Lastly, while rebuilding my preference screen to regular bars and buttons, I found that there was no hover effect for bars. And now I miss that! Maybe it's there and I just don't know the keywords? Maybe I need to go "selected_hover "image.png""? That would be awesome, because I miss that rollover effect I used to have. I also noticed the same thumb problem I've been battling since day one with Ren'Py's ui.bar. It overlaps the bar's filled value and makes this nasty overlap on that part of the bar graphic, so that if there's any part of the bar that's transparent, it gets doubled up and looks awful. So I've been avoiding any bars with transparencies which is hard to do, mind you! BUT, to my wonderful surprise, there's this magic new property called thumb shadow, that if I set to 0, makes it go away. I was ... stunned. And I found my new best friend.

- Got a lot of art from Lorey and from Starling, who is doing the chibis. Visual aid:

In order: Dominic, Pete, Karmen. Agents for their different record labels. And some other sprites I'm not showing off.

- Revealed Seth. He got a good reception.

- Thinking about changing my "company" name from "Aleema Presents" to something that doesn't have "aleema" in it. It's not my name, but it feels self-centered when this game is very much not just me. So far, the best contender is "Happy Backwards" as our new group name.

- Wrote. Weird, I know. Going to need Mikisweety to make sure my stuff isn't crap, though. Wrote, and scripted some scenes. Meaning, I had fun making sound effects. I'm getting closer to releasing an updated demo, which is really putting the fire under me to get things I've been putting off done. Meaning, making expressions and updating character art. I finally made Joel and Natasha's expressions last night. I put in Beau's new suit, so now he actually looks like a hotel manager which is awesome.

I also put in Dallas' new flashback sprite, with all it's expressions, which took a while, since I was also updating his base sprite, too. I was fixing the shading job, because he honestly was my worst color. I STILL have no idea how to color his hair in my style. It went from this to that:

Thanks to tips from LinWest (make zigzags on his clothes since it's leather, ease off on the crescent shadow on his face, etc) Still looks like crap, though, right? >_< I suck at this coloring thing.

- nmontes, a really surprisingly awesome guy, wrote the game a song called Post Mortem that rocked my socks off. It's 6 minutes of death metal goodness, and he even had optional vocals to go along with it! As he said, his voice was made to scare off little children. xD It's a GREAT SONG, and I am honored to have it in my game. Thank you, nmontes.

Ahh, there's probably other stuff, other people to thank, etc. But this post is long enough.


~~~
Oh yeah!
LAST WEEK'S POLL RESULTS:
How do you like to advance the text?
Clicking the mouse: 52.2%
Spacebar: 28.3%
Enter button: 19.6%
External controller/gamepad: 0%

Basically, it would be very rare to find someone using the Joystick capabilities of the game, but I'm not going to remove it, because it's there and can be used. Half prefer the keyboard, half prefer just clicking through all that text! Between the keyboards, they didn't especially favor the Enter or Spacebar, though the Spacebar technically won. I personally use the Enter button on the num pad because it's close to the mouse. I switch off to the space bar every so often.
~~~

Got addicted to Minecraft. (bye bye Sunday afternoon and evening)

Uh oh. Seek help now! Uninstall! It will consume you in ways you never thought you would be consumed!!
JUST SAY NO!

[PyTom]

- Rebuilt my game screens in screen language. They're a mess that I plan to make look pretty later. Just need them to function. I'm getting a better hang of it, but it still knocks me off my feet by how much stuff didn't make it over to SL. Basic positioning properties are apparently on a "need to have" basis where if an immediate use for it doesn't come to mind, it doesn't exist.

With a couple of minor mistakes (spacing for grids and sides), the big different between SL and the ui functions was that the UI functions only accept properties that can actually control the look of the screen. Ui functions accept every style property, and ignore the vast majority of them.

Lastly, while rebuilding my preference screen to regular bars and buttons, I found that there was no hover effect for bars. And now I miss that! Maybe it's there and I just don't know the keywords? Maybe I need to go "selected_hover "image.png""?

It should be hover_left_bar, selected_hover_left_bar, hover_right_bar, and selected_hover_right_bar.

[sheetcakeghost]

LAST WEEK'S POLL RESULTS:
How do you like to advance the text?
Clicking the mouse: 52.2%
Spacebar: 28.3%
Enter button: 19.6%
External controller/gamepad: 0%

Basically, it would be very rare to find someone using the Joystick capabilities of the game, but I'm not going to remove it, because it's there and can be used. Half prefer the keyboard, half prefer just clicking through all that text! Between the keyboards, they didn't especially favor the Enter or Spacebar, though the Spacebar technically won. I personally use the Enter button on the num pad because it's close to the mouse. I switch off to the space bar every so often.

I like being able to hold down the space bar to speed through text myself. However, since you're including a skip button, that extra feature is not really necessary.

[Aleema]

With a couple of minor mistakes (spacing for grids and sides), the big different between SL and the ui functions was that the UI functions only accept properties that can actually control the look of the screen. Ui functions accept every style property, and ignore the vast majority of them.

lmao, that's cruel. But very much how HTML works if I remember my learning experience there, too.
I guess running into the walls is beating the bad programming out of me, eh?
Thanks for the help on the hover effects for the bars. That was pretty nifty in the original imagemap layouts. The more things can react to the mouse, the bettah!
This does give me flashbacks to the terror that is naming any file with "auto ... %s" though. I'm probably going to stick to just individually defining everything so I don't have to type "_selected_insensitive" for every button I make. You know Macs get about 36 characters before crap starts breakin', right!? =P Kidding ...

@Sen: The CRTL key is the skippin' key! I see what you mean about having "advance text" and "skip" in one easy place. Some people would hate that though. To each their own~

[PyTom]

Oh, that'll be fixed in 6.12. There's going to be a function that maps the value of auto and the desired state to a filename. You can redefine that to do what you want.

[Aleema]

Oh, that'll be fixed in 6.12. There's going to be a function that maps the value of auto and the desired state to a filename. You can redefine that to do what you want.

I could kiss you.