Metagame Reboot - YOUR PARTICIPATION IS REQUIRED!

[mattk210]

what's your convention for variable naming? You seem to use leading underscores for class properties. Would it be better to not use the underscore for public properties, in accordance with flixel naming conventions? I tried to conform with the conventions you seem to use, but I may have slipped up somewhere (I usually put curlybraces on the same line as the code, if I did that, sorry...) And yes, github or something is a good idea.

I rewrote some of the movement code to make it more physical (using acceleration instead of velocity for jumps, etc.), turned some explicit values into constants (like jump duration) and simplified some stuff. As a result of this the feel is different, I didn't tweak it to be the same as before but I figure that's OK because we haven't fully decided on stuff like jumpheight yet anyway. I made my modifications before you uploaded your latest source so I seem to have lost the bounce-off walls thing. I could go back and add it, but what's it for?

Also I added rudimentary crouching.

edit: the flixel collision code is not particularly good, with the static crouching sprite you can notice quite a lot of intersections that should be resolved before rendering. Maybe I'll do a little work on that.

[Geti]

The bounce-off-walls thing is just to make the movement more kinetic, but we can experiment with things like that later.
I'll set up github either today at school if I have time or after school, got to run.
On variables, yeah I should probably drop the underscoring on publics, but a lot of the vars/consts don't even need to be public anyway. Sort that out soon, jump on irc when you can

[ℎalifax]

I honestly wish I could understand what you guys are talking about.

[Geti]

Github is UP!
http://github.com/Geti/Metagame
http://github.com/Geti/Metagame
http://github.com/Geti/Metagame

Righto, lets get merged etc. It's got my source from last night, not your latest one, sadly, so, uh, get on that :P

I honestly wish I could understand what you guys are talking about.

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/actionscrip ... _tips.html
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/actionscript/ (especially http://tv.adobe.com/show/actionscript-1 ... ug-winnie/)
and then for flixel
http://flashgamedojo.com/wiki/index.php ... ory:Flixel
good luck :)

edit: I'm thinking it could be a good idea to migrate the current com.game.Metagame package to something more along the lines of Metagame, for directory simplification. It's just an artefact left over from using one of adamatomic's bases anyway.

[mattk210]

OK i signed up to Github under the name mattk210. Do you need to invite me to the project or something?

What I'm planning on working towards:

• examine flixel integration and collision functions and maybe make improvements
• finishing crouching
• experimenting with movement techniques

[Geti]

OK i signed up to Github under the name mattk210. Do you need to invite me to the project or something?

Done!

Also, you might want to have a look at FlxObject's Patchily added "HitSide()". It could be what's causing the odd collisions on the left side of the player <_<

[mattk210]

OK, I added some player.as changes. I am unable to change FlxGame.as though, I just need to set FlxG.elapsed to 1 in update(). I am also unable to change the player sprite file (I have a crouched sprite). And, I'm unable to change the Metagame.swf file.

[Geti]

Typing quickly, I'm on the phone, but what do you mean "cannot change"? like, don't have permissions?
I'll do the pull now in any case, worst comes to worst pastebin it and I'll make the commit O_o

edit: just built it, and I'm assuming a lot of those changes that "didn't work" are pretty necessary, as the player does all sorts of bizarre things now, and floats about with the elegance of a wet sock on a stick :P

[mattk210]

er ok I just edited flxGame.as then with no problems, it was probably my fault somehow. I still don't know how to edit the player sprite though, but it should hopefully build without that. Am I supposed to have some sort of git client or something? I've never done this stuff before, I just clicked the edit button on the pages I could.

I don't know why it would be doing "bizzare things" though, it should just be more sluggish and the sprite would disappear when you crouch.

[Geti]

Yeah, go grab git for your OS :P It'll make all of this much simpler :) It takes a bit of time to set up, but its worth it to be able to do

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git pull

and that net you the latest changes. The thing I had the most trouble with was ssh, tell me if you're having trouble with that.

[mattk210]

I tried to make a commit in git (as a test), it seemed to tell me it worked but obviously there's nothing been changed. I'm pretty sure I'm doing something wrong. I basically followed this then I "cloned" metagame then i did git add and git commit. Help!

[Geti]

If you're not getting ssh issues I'll skip that part.
Make sure you have the repo set up like so (make sure you cd to the metagame root directory)

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git remote add origin [email protected]:Geti/Metagame.git

and then before touching anything else (backup any changes you've made) do

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git pull origin master

, type in your passphrase and you're set. Then put your other changes back (likely the data objects etc) and do

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git add ./
git commit -m 'comment here'

and you should have both synced up with the repo and committed the changes.
Hope that helps :)

EDIT: oh yeah, you should also have your user set up, in case you haven't here's how:

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git config --global github.user <username>
git config --global github.token <go get your token from account settings and put it here>

if you want your name to appear on your commits, do

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git config --global user.name "your name here"

[Donfuy]

You guys are indescribable amounts of awesome.

[mattk210]

If you're not getting ssh issues I'll skip that part.
Make sure you have the repo set up like so (make sure you cd to the metagame root directory)

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git remote add origin [email protected]:Geti/Metagame.git

I get fatal: remote origin already exists.

It seems like it's all set up. I can commit etc and git seems to think it's all working (if I "reset --hard" it goes back to my last commit as if it worked), but it's not syncing with github. I'm probably missing something really fundamental.

[Geti]

Some art, cause I felt like drawing:

an example of what I'm thinking for an island. This one would be classed as "Forest+Tech+Dirt", with some beach assets used as well.
The first drawing is a feel scribble, the second one is how one layer of screens would be set up. note the large wall in the middle screens, making it seem normal to the player that they cant walk forward or backward in that area.

working.jpg (124.08 KiB) Viewed 3987 times

have you done all the user stuff, and performed "git pull --rebase" beforehand?
http://smalltalk.gnu.org/tags/git could help with basic usage.

edit: oh yeah, cheers donfuy :D

[mattk210]

i like the first drawing. Are the actual graphics going to be in that style? It would work well I think.

edit: OK i pushed a new version. I think I finally understand Git! Thanks Geti! Haven't changed much though. I didn't update metagame.zip at all. If I'm doing something wrong, tell me because I've never done anything like this before.

[Geti]

Oh, whoops :P Glad you got it working, I should've picked up on that.

The problem with the graphics being like they are in the first one is that it'd make editing a map nigh on impossible to do in-game. It'll more likely be something along the lines of the second one, with simple lines around the exposed edges on the tiles.
I'm currently thinking 5 layers of drawing would be good, FGDecor, GameObjects, Tiles, BGDecor, BGTiles. BGTiles would be a set 12 or so tiles for each zone type that could be edited separately from the collision tiles, which would allow more organic shapes to be produced (there would be at least 45 degree slopes in each set) and would make the levels more interesting. Decor is something I'll add in later, but it's basically hand drawn inert "mood" assets, like trees and rocks and extra tile texture that could be moved around grid-independent to decorate the levels. just some thoughts.

[mattk210]

hmm fair enough, sounds like a good plan.

I discovered that the reason collision was funky was because it was getting called before integration in playstate.as. It needs to get called after so it can correct any overlap integration has caused. I moved the whole "super.update()" before collision but I now realize that maybe the rendering stuff in there really does need to get called last. I'll look into it tonight.

(by the way is there a way I can amend my commit on git rather than making a new one for such a small thing? I tried commit --amend but it didn't seem to do anything.)

[Geti]

Doesn't matter, just commit whenever. It's not like a commit means anything "big". Also yeah, rendering really should be called after the logic has been completed..

[Universezero]

Oh yeah, what's the game going to be called? Because if you wanted I could start working on some branding.

[mattk210]

I won't post here about changes I make unless I want to discuss them, so watch github if you want to follow, everyone. Should we use github's "wiki" feature?

As for a name uhh how about "trashcan trooper"?

[Geti]

I was just thinking "Rubbish" would be a good name, but that's up for debate.

Using the wiki feature would be awesome.
I didn't commit all the changes I made tonight because there's a huge bug that's preventing it from coming together while not throwing any errors <_< knowing me it's likely just a missing ;, but I'll hold onto it until I've got it figured out.
In any case, I noticed a bug with the flixel console, it reads 0fps and gives incorrect timing on the stages of logic, perhaps look into that? :P

[mattk210]

yes, that's a likely side effect of obliterating all timing-based processes. I'll put it on my to-do list. I didn't even know there was a console, I'd been compiling in debug mode.

[Universezero]

Heh, I like it. Here's a concept for ya.

[ℎalifax]

I second the name Rubbish. Simple, gets the point across.

UZ, good art but perhaps a little too grimy. We want a roughtouch feel, but we want to keep some semblance of neatness about.