Turning Off Player Input

In the last post I talked about how thanks to the data first design idea how easy it was to add in "on_enter" and "on_exit" logic when the player enters and exits a room. Well after I posted that a situation came up where I really wanted to turn off the players input while a bit of logic ran and then turn it back on when it was done.

Again this entirely new feature was implemented in a couple of minutes. To do this I added in a simple bool variable called "player_input" at the root of my data format. Then I added two new functions to my "system" functions called called "input_on" and "input_off" where I set the "player_input" to either True or False.

Next I added the "player_input" variable to my if statements where I check for input. There are only 9 spots I check for input 3 for rooms, 3 for actors and 3 for objects. The inputs there are normal "mouse_down", "mouse_over" and "mouse_down" checks. So again in a matter of minutes I had implemented another finished feature, exposed it through the tools and had it an in-game example running perfectly.

I think the thing that I did the most out of this entire approach of data first is that the engine side code is so simple and small that bugs have remained very small. Most of the bugs I have hit have all been very minor and so far content only.

Comments

Level Buddy | Blender Addon

An old-school CSG inspired level editor add-on for Blender 3D. The add-on is still very much a work in progress but fairly solid for blocking spaces super quickly. Just because graphic fidelity has gotten insanely good and hyper detailed doesn't mean we shouldn't look back how older games were put together, at least that is my opinion. One thing I always come back to is how quickly the tools in the first 2 versions of Unreal Ed 2 and Doom level editors allowed anyone to block out a level, iterate on feedback or try an idea out. So I just took some time to put together a similar pipeline right in my 3d package of choice. I wanted to keep it simple and quick to try out level design ideas. You can use it for simple white boxing of your level, break it up into multiple static meshes and import them into your game engine of choice or you can use that as your starting point to start more detailed modeling ....

Mega Cow | Video Game Mockup

We All Have Crazy Game Ideas...This Is Just One Of My Own Yup its a giant mutant cow... Using Inkscape I made this game mockup after watching some MST3K late one night. I thought it would be fun to play a game where you were the giant creature causing all of the destruction. That is the reason the giant cow is on the right of the screen instead of the left. The player would move through the level from the right to the left, the opposite of pretty much every scrolling game... looks good in my head but might not work in actual game play. Below are some images showing the progression from rough sketch to final mock-up.

Rocky Terrain | Blender Internal Rendering

I saw a really awesome render of some rocks the other day and was inspired to see if I could recreate a version of my own of some rocky terrain so I made this little scene. The scene was modled, rendered and composited in Blender 3D . It is a very simple scene and made just for fun in a couple of hours. The rocks are all subsurface cube objects that I run a noise displacement map on using the world coordinates. This allowed me to just make instances of the cube and drag them around the scene to get different rock shapes. Some of the rocks needed to be scaled to get some more size variation but that is pretty much the only thing that is different about them other then their positions. It was actually really fun to just move the cube around the scene and watch these random rock shapes form. After the layout was done I added in some particle grass to break the ground up. Not enough time was spent on the grass so it looks pretty bad ...

atomic monster

Search This Blog