Welcome to blog two! (with screenies!!!)

In the beginning...

So I finally got a hold of TGB and the fun has begun!

So far I wouldn't say I've gotten much done thats concretely for any specific project. Though the more I explore and learn the harder its becoming to NOT go off on project tangents. It reminds me of the different ways things can be done with no one right way being the "correct" way. For example, overall I find I want to explore the underlying organization of the class hierarchies and how they relate with a hope and belief that when I understand that then I'll be in a better position to know how to execute any ideas I have. However, while just straight out examination of the list and noting what is related to what has served to familiarize me with some of the mechanics presented in examples, it requires a significant amount of focus and attention to correlate and memorize the huge amount of commands and names in the hopes that something will spark with familiarity. With the real problem being I have no fundamental frame of reference to base all those references on. The intellectual in me keeps gravitating to this path of learning, while the other path that tends to contrast the previous method is of course whats suggested by many, which is to just go through the tutorials and become familiar with them. Obviously in the end its a matter of bouncing back and forth between using the tutorials to gain an initial frame of reference which I can then go back to the references and start making sense of them. This is why its so important for some that there are a ton of tutorials to begin with so they can get that initial frame of reference. The other though I have is maybe a little more discouraging which is that I still don't know squat and I won't know squat till I can get my hands on how examples of specific game mechanics I desire to explore and hopefully improve are actually executed. For me I keep hoping I can somehow reverse engineer game mechanics but the more I try to get specific I realize it just doesn't work that way. What that does give me though, is it does allow me to know what I'm looking for when I start exploring how things are done so I never see it as a completely foolhardy method to go by. The actual progress is far more chaotic then the implied structure of all this describes but I understand thats how it usually is when anything new and unfamiliar is engaged. The long road of familiarity and understanding usually is spent bouncing around in confusion (and frustration unfortunately) while hopefully moving in a forwardly direction. As long as I remember that then I'm at peace and not in pieces.

I guess what I really wanted to say from all that long windedness is #$%@ this is as slow as I thought it was going to be. Its OK though, I knew it would be and I have learned quite a bit in the process which I AM really happy about. So I'll chat a bit about those things as it allows me to post a few screenies of what I have been about, cause we all know that bloggies with screenies does pleeasies.

...There were Jaggies...

So as my first something to do I really wanted to play around with bringing in images and get familiar with that process so I created a few spaceship images from designs I had around for a while and started to figure out how to best present those and see if I would be happy with the quality.



At first there was the inevitable issue with jaggies and how to manage those. So as the image above illustrates, my first ship attempt on the left had the common scourge of pixel art. Though they could be interpreted as a symptom of the SMOOTH filter mode setting I knew better and drew my ship in a larger 124x124 format then the 60x60 pix of the original and then reduced it down in TGB which worked very well as shown with the ship on the right.

Another thing I tried at first was mounting the camera to the player and having a few more ship graphics without the SMOOTH filter mode since I originally though it was the SMOOTH that was the cause but without that setting the ships jiggled ( I'm assuming because of the raw pixels being shown) while moving around with the camera and so I knew GG wouldn't make a filter mode that couldn't be used yet had to be at the same time. Which lead me to what I suspected already from previous experience which was tightening up the method for creating the graphics before bringing them into TGB. Overall it was a nice warm up excersize to start out with and got me thinking pipeline methodology.

...and Behaviors...

Another thing I got into was playing around with the behaviors and how to assign them.

Which didn't take long at all. Here I have my nice little group of targets floating around randomly while always facing the players.



And then they were fruitful and multiplied...



all with the power of behaviors.

It really was eye opening to see how quickly and easy it was to change object behaviors using behaviors. In fact I'm still trying to find the catch cause its just WAY too easy!!!

...and TorqueScript...

Soon after I played around with the behaviors, I started to open them up and stare at all the blasphemous lettering that constituted some kind of willynilly structure which somehow a computer understood but my mighty intellect rejected as rocket science. Being, of course, a mighty intellectual I was soon bantering around terms like hypername taggidaggles, metafunctional optidynamic fields, cosmilogical influx arrays, ping-pong mallocical class instant refractions. Which of course meant absolutely nothing to torquescript at all. Sooo after that I started to print out and read some of the ACTUAL operators, constants, and other stuff that would work and try to learn how they where being used.

So after a few days ( and a headache or two from straining my brain) of staring at different behavior scripts and a looking up names and their references, I became familiar enough to follow along and get a basic feel for where things where being done and what to expect where. It actually took less time then I expected considering how often I tend to think of it as being some kind of ancient cryptic voodoo that will require years of research to even gleam any basic ray of knowledge from.

...and Ewiee Goowiees...

So from there I wanted to understand how the GUI system worked and how to relate that to what I was learning.

Now, I consider myself...OK never mind I'll stop calling attention to my obvious intellectual prowess...like...I just...um, did...but anyway of course I get a tad frustrated when I can't figure something out right away and react in a perfectly natural and healthy manner. Which is of course to curse, scream and beat anything within my arms reach while cursing everything having to do with whatever trivial piece of information my mind has failed to discern withing a three point two nanosecond time period.

And by the way just for general knowledge, when your in the GUI Builder in TGB 1.7.2 you need to use the Toggle Palette button to open the palette that you then can drag items from to the currently open window. Its amazing how a single piece of information can turn all the tutorials for GUI creation into an amazing wealth of factual bliss rather then a throbbing mass of universal hatred of all things GUI. Just...you know...FYI. Tee hee!

Once that bit of information was understood though I was able to play around with GUIs more to my liking and also able to practice my scripting as well!



...and um...stuff...and things...yea...

I did try messing with particles with mixed results, I was having problems with it being corrupted in some manner which I learned on the forum was a known potential problem that GG was frustrated with because they couldn't reproduce the bug. Given how touchie creating particles can be it was hard to understand if it was an actual bug or just a misplaced number in a table somewhere. Needless to say I decided to hold off on particles for a while yet since they appear to be rather deep in their implementation. I also think its best to use a separate scene to create and edit them so as not to possibly mess with a level thats being worked on. They shall be conquered eventually though!!!

Overall I would say that the one thing that I keep running into the most is my own prejudgments of how I think something is going to work and then how much easier it can actually be in practice. So along the way I'm learning to try and think more simple when attacking a problem. That isn't to say I expect everything to be like that, I expect many of my ideas to require some creative and intensive use of the language to get going. Given enough practice and familiarity and knowledge of how things are done and whats available I expect I'll be able to slowly bring into focus the larger fuzzy picture.

I'm still working toward some kind of shooter to start with though I'm a little dismayed at how many are out there but I remind myself that its just a starting point and not to expect everything at once and how even if someone does something similar what I'm doing will still reflect my own vision which still should make it worth while. From there I'm thinking some kind of RPGish space shooter hybrid would go next. Those two ideas could be stretched out for a long while before moving to 3D.Which is good since I still have much to learn and build upon.