My Summer Project

[NightrainSrt4]

Worked on the character tab today. Got the UI for the 4 sets of perks/specialization put in. Colors will be edited later.

The thought process is to have perks for four different specialties: Melee, Magic, Ranged, and Mining.

This will allow the player to specialize a bit. For example, a perk in the mining section that gives you a chance to get two blocks from each mine. Put one point in, you get a 25% chance to get two blocks. Two points in, 50%, etc. Or, maybe you want to put all your points into things that help melee combat: Increased attack speed, increased health, etc.

Making twenty 16x16 icons will be fun. The tool tip box will tell you information about the perk when you hover over its icon. Once you've leveled up, I'll have a plus sign, or some other indicator over perks that can still have points put into them, to let the player know they have points they can spend. I'll have some sort of system set so you can respec, but putting points into anything won't make or break a game.

And to clarify, not all these will open when you hit the inventory button. I'll have a key set to open everything, but also a key for each so you can open only that which you want to see (character sheet, inventory, crafting menu, etc).

[SXRguyinMA]

looking good!

[NightrainSrt4]

Thanks. Pushed onward again today. Got the tabbed interface for the crafting items in place.

You select the tab for the subtype you want to craft: Blocks, Miscellaneous, Consumables, Mining, Weapons, or Armor.

Then, within that is a set of tabs. These tabs will be unlocked by finding crafting books, probably locked away in each dungeon. I'll most likely use this as a method of keeping balance. That way the player, even if they have materials they shouldn't have, won't know how to make the high level items until they complete the high level content.

You click the numbered tab of the tier you want, and within that tab is a set of items belonging to that tier. Hover over the item, and it shows its description in the tooltip box. Click the item, and it places that item in the bottom left container, with the necessary ingredients in the four slots to the left. Any unused ingredient slots will be grayed out. If you have the necessary ingredients in your bag, then all you have to do to create the item is click the item in the lower left. The same method I used for picking up multiple items out of your inventory applies here, so you can craft multiple of one item easily.

I just realized I hard capped myself to 160 items per item group. If I run out of spots for items, I will drop the bottom right item slot, and add left / right arrow icons so move between pages within the tab, increasing the amount of available items for crafting.

Ignore the repeated placeholder icons. They won't be drawn into the picture like this, the game code will handle that.

[AmEv]

Lookin' good!

[NightrainSrt4]

Thanks. I've just got to finish up the character sheet (HP, Mana, Level, Exp to Level, etc), create the perk icons, and make the Left / Right arrows for the crafting page, and I can get this all programmed into the game.

Add that point I can add support for multiple resolutions. I'm not making unique art for each resolution, at least not now. What I'm going to do is center the UI horizontally in the center of the screen for each resolution.

Also, The two shades of brown you see will be converted to black in the actual files the game reads. Each image will be broken into three images. One for static colors e.g. the black borders, the gray, the offwhite, and anything else that needs to stay the same. One for the darker shade of brown, and one for the lighter shade of brown. The last two will be converted to black as mentioned.

What this will do is allow me to have a user defined option, so instead of the base UI color being brown, the user can define those two colors to anything they want. The game will then overwrite the black with the user defined color. If this works how I think it will, I can easily apply it to the player character as well.

[TheMainMan]

I am super pumped for the TBCS exclusive beta, lol! I know that might be some time off but it's been awesome watching this evolve. You've put a lot more thought and customization options into this that a lot of major titles from large game studios. For someone who has 16:10 19" monitors, hearing that you've put thought into resolutions makes me happy, as many games haven't. There's nothing worse than not being able to play a game because the menu is off the screen.

Thanks for sharing all your hard work on this with us, it's looking great!

[AmEv]

I am super pumped for the TBCS exclusive beta, lol!

[NightrainSrt4]

Thanks. I want to get on with some other parts of the game, so I don't want to custom make the art / ui for each resolution, or even aspect ratio, at the moment.

The plan is to base everything off 800x600. The user defines their resolution in the options. The options save, the game applies the resolution. 800x600 is the smallest I am going to go. Now, for higher resolutions you get to see more of the world at once, it won't scale everything up (If you choose fullscreen while choosing a lower resolution than your native, it will scale. So if you want a bit more on the screen, but also want things a little bigger, you can do that too).

To get all the UI into the center of the screen, I am going to calculate an xoffset based on half the difference between the 800 wide and the chosen resolution. This will allow me to center the resolution in the middle of the screen, but keep it at the top. Applying the xoffset variable to my existing UI code should allow all the ui stuff to keep working, while giving an acceptable fix for larger resolutions.

Down the road I may redraw the UI for different aspect ratios. 16:10 would get a wider ui than the 4:3. But, that will be further down the road. I can't let feature creep start working its magic on something like options right now. Too much to get done and while everyone wants all the options in the world, there is far more important things to get in at the moment.

[AmEv]

We're waiting patiently.


You don't have any public deadlines.

[NightrainSrt4]

If I didn't have college classes to worry about finishing up for graduation, health problems, life, etc, then I could give a date.

Maybe in a couple months I can have an early alpha up. I still have so much art to do. Get this in. Then finish up the attack system. Then I have to write AI for the enemies. The basic follow AI I showed in an earlier video won't cut it.