Blade Edge

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

While I can’t really talk about it yet, starting tomorrow I will be in charge of a new venture by the Game Institute. While I’ve been involved with GI since they started back in early ’01, this is my first paid position with them. Obviously it has to do with online learning, but that’s about all I can say right now. However I think it’s something a lot of people here at GDNet will be interested in, as well as the rest of the game development community. Hopefully I’ll be able to announce something by mid-Dec, I definitely plan on launching this new venture at the start of the new year. So stay tuned!!

In other news I got my bike back from the shop today with its brand new front tire. I got on the thing and almost tipped over. I had totally lost feel for a proper front tire. My old one was so bald that I had to manhandle the steering forks into every turn. If I were to do that now I wouldn’t just tip over, I’d freakin flip over. It’s so responsive again, I can actually just lean into turns and let the bike steer itself around corners once more. Ahhhh feels good to be riding properly again

Anyways tonight I started working on the map editor GUI. This went a lot faster now that I’ve gotten the hang of things a bit more with regards to the T2D GUI editor, controls and properties. I also had to convert another 20 or so button assets to the T2D button image format (breaking the templates used for my engine into 4 separate images), but again my experience from the past few days made that process take only about 45mins tops (cut, paste, save – cut, paste, save – cut, paste, save – ughhhh :P) However I got the entire GUI set up control-wise with one exception: In my engine I was using a text object to caption the buttons to cut down on art assets. Well if I do a bitmap button in T2D and try to put a text object over it, you can’t click on the button. DOH! So I have to ask over at the GG boards how to go about getting around this. That’s why you don’t see any text on any of those buttons in the screeshot at the bottom.

I also discovered and squashed two minor bugs. The Return button in the settings menu was calling the load function for the main menu rather than the unload function for itself, and so the volume and mute sprite objects were appearing when the Min Conquest menu was loaded afterwards since they weren’t deleted. And then I made a small typo when creating the eval() statement to delete the player planet sprites when the Mini Conquest menu is unloaded – so those weren’t getting deleted either 😛 But it’s all better now. Everything DELETED!!!

Lastly, I got an answer from Matt “King Tut” Langley for my question about getting the size of records in a TorqueDB database

function TorqueDB::getPropertyCount(%className)
{
   %class = TorqueDB.returnClass(%className);
   %num = $subTagCount[%class];

   return %num;
}

function TorqueDB::getRecordCount(%className)
{
   %class = TorqueDB.returnClass(%className);
   %num = $mainValueArray.contents[%class];

   return %num;
}

So if you’re using TorqueDB, there you go. Now I’ve set the Mini Conquest menu up to dynamically check the size of records so that I can add/remove records in the database and not have to edit any code in order to keep the menus from breaking by going over bounds in record queries. Yay I feel a lot better now.

Okay it’s getting early erm… I mean late again. I should probably get to bed soon. Here are some new screenshots to keep you all happy. I realized in the main menu that the buttons were a few pixels too high – they should center on that black strip and Credits button was cutting off the bottom of that red planet.

k, night gdnetland