Blog for J Sears at GarageGames.com

persistance is rewarding

J Sears — 2008-01-25T00:36:47+00:00

No I didn't finally manage to make something with TGE. But in my mind I have something much better. I got a job with a major game maker!

After I got out of the Navy I started applying to Turbine, makers of LotR online, D&D online and Asheron's call. That was over a year and a half ago. I have only started on my computer programming degree a few months ago so I didn't apply to any programming spots. But besides that I applied for almost every single job that became available. And time after time I got the response back the position has been filled.

Well I never stopped I kept trying even when I had lost hope of ever getting a job there because I wanted to be in the game industry more than any other profession out there. And finally one day I opened my e-mail and there was one titled "Interview with Turbine!". I couldn't believe it, I went in for the interview not knowing at all how to prepare for this type. I've played all their games, I've played thousands of games. So I just went for it the best I could. A couple days later I had an offer. I still can't believe I made it.

So to end this little story I start on the 4th as a QA guy at a company I hugely respect in a field I'm dying to be in. Finally life is good.

My thoughts, and my farewell

J Sears — 2007-08-28T01:29:06+00:00

I've had TGE for several years now, also have TGB and some content packs. But I think at this point I've decided it was complete money wasted for me. I had some fun with TGB but most of the projects I was really interested in would be better off in java or activeX etc. One example would be the card game in my previous blogs. TGB was just overkill for this simple of a game.

But I think I am done working with all the products for at least a long time if not permanently. I'm sure I will still check the forums a bit. I find the discussion in game ideas and industry to be pretty interesting some times. On my way out I'd like to vent a few things.

First I do agree you can make games with TGE if you have the skills. I did not and was hoping to learn them with this engine. I found the learning curve with the lack of documentation and the resources all being several versions old so frustrating it made learning extra difficult.
I also find it baffling that they never directly incorporated some of the resources directly into the engine. I know, not everyone will need every feature so why put it in. Ok that's fine but not everyone will need a crossbow and an orc but those are in there. Also there are certain things, the vast majority will use.

Melee, yes that old arguement, what was the last FPS you played that had no melee in it? Even doom had melee. When was the last time you played an rpg without melee? Far more games will need some form of melee then not need it. There are many other examples like this for other resources.
Why not embrace something like the modernization kit, it makes the engine look so much nicer (which is needed at this point).

Also the community, there are plenty of people that help, but most just pick others apart. The same person who will complain that there's not enough people making games, not enough people putting in the effort etc. Will then turn and pick someone apart who is working hard to make a game, because he doesn't think it's interesting enough. Well great you don't like that type of game don't go play it, but if you don't have comments that are actually going to help someone then just shut up. (ya you know who you are)

Now I understand how a lot of people come into this product and get disappointed fast. They think with no skills, no training they're going to make the next WoW. I feel bad for those people, but there will always be dreamers. I wasn't one of those people. I bought this with the whole goal of learning the parts of game creation and maybe making several small projects eventually come to life. I never figured I'd make tons of money, or any money for that matter, with this engine. Learning with this engine is just too difficult.
I think one of the last straws for me was when for years people have been complaining about the documentation. Several reasons were given, we're working on other documentation right now (yes TGB is well documented, but it's also insanely easier to work with then TGE if all your doing is scripting a little 2d game), if the community is so concerned why don't they make some new documentation (well maybe if some of the money went to the community it would be their job but alas that's not how it works), the list goes on. And anytime people tried to have a reasonable, non flaming, discussion about it the threads were locked. Afraid of bad publicity maybe? Why promote the community as a big selling point and then block any conversations that make you nervous?

But what finally burned was that now they setup a school for people to pay to learn the product they already learned, as opposed to making better documentation. Yes we paid for the game now let us pay in installments for an instruction manual, I know I'd buy any other product in the world knowing that going in.

I'm sure this will get deleted before too many get to read it, despite being a paying customer and using no profanity in the blog. But I had to get that out there. As for me, now that I've been out of the Navy for a year and a half it's time for me to get a degree at night while working during the day (so no real time for game making anyways). I'm going to be working on a programming degree from UMass, it may not be game programming but I'm trying to be realistic in where I can get a job.
I truly don't mind sitting in front of a computer all day, and I like programming so it should fit well. I hope in my spare time to start learning more about game making, mostly focused in directx. I have a book on intro to directx game programming and the directx sdk is very usefull, lots of good tutorials and examples in there.
I pick directx because I feel it is a great tool for game creation and to be honest I've never cared about cross platform tools. I want to create games for windows. Now that Mac makes computers that run Windows so well all the more reason.

So like I said I will be checking in on the general forums from time to time to see any good discussions going on, I hope all the users good luck and that hopefully they'll be able to create a game with the money they've spent.

Flames can begin below

some progress on cards

J Sears — 2007-05-23T04:08:23+00:00

Well I haven't gotten as much time put into my card game lately, but the time I did spend on it I've learned a lot. I used to think Guis were a tough part to make but I've learned how quick and easy they can be now which is great.

I've also learned some with photoshop an dillustrator, I've always been good at drawing on paper but it's a big change to use one of those programs. At first everything being on layers kind of bothered me but I see how powerfull that can be now.

So really most of what I've accomplished lately in small amounts of time was some art and worked on some menus for the game and that's about it. I know someone reading this would say "Your making a card game in TGB how long could that possibly take" And yes I know it can be done fast and I could have a full playable version (minus the multiplayer part that I've been figuring out in my head) in a couple hours. The thing is I'm trying to make it perfect and I want a very strong interface and plenty of options. I want there to be a reason to play a card game as a download since most of them can be easily done in flash.

So for the first time in a blog I'm going to post some art, I made a whole deck of cards I'm going to post one of each suit and what I call a green LED which goes into the bid selection gui I'm working on, I have a red one which is the same thing so I won't show it. Right now my table top image is pretty big so I won't post it until I shrink down a copy but it's what I'm most proud of (still needs a little work) the felt part was made from scratch and the only part that wasn't from scratch was the wood texture image.

[IMG]http://i207.photobucket.com/albums/bb227/NoWorriesXxX/greenLED.png[/IMG]

[IMG]http://i207.photobucket.com/albums/bb227/NoWorriesXxX/FourS.png[/IMG]

[IMG]http://i207.photobucket.com/albums/bb227/NoWorriesXxX/ThreeH.png[/IMG]

[IMG]http://i207.photobucket.com/albums/bb227/NoWorriesXxX/TwoD.png[/IMG]

[IMG]http://i207.photobucket.com/albums/bb227/NoWorriesXxX/AceC.png[/IMG]

tried to come up with a unique style for the cards, wanted it to be kind of like a hand drawn look but cleaned up. Also still need to make jokers and the backs of the cards.

teaching my computer to play cards

J Sears — 2007-04-23T21:41:16+00:00

I finally decided to get back to work on a project I'd like to really see put out there. It's a different card game then most people are familiar with and I've put what I consider some improvements into it. I will put the rules in a future post when I get closer to finished.

So far I've been focusing on the single player aspect of the game, getting the gameplay to work and getting some decent AI in place. The gameplay is running very smoothly. The AI surprises me sometimes because in order to keep from writing a million lines of script to get it to play perfect cards (which also may not be fun for beginner players if the AI was just stomping them down) I sat around for a few days and wrote down how I think when bidding on the hand and when playing through the hand.
The trickier thing about this card game is the amount of cards delt out each time is different and the Trump suit is different each time, sometimes there is no trump and sometimes the trump is dealer's choice (if your familiar with Up and Down the River or F**k the Dealer you'll be familiar with the concept with the exception of dealers choice for trump). It actually made me wish some times I was writing AI for spades since in that one there's always the same amount of cards and with all the cards being out there you can say simply bet on any Aces bet on some Ks etc etc.

So I took my thoughts and tried to figure out some nice and hopefully easy ways to do AI (I use AI in the sense that most people do on here in that it doesn't actually think it just goes through all the ifs, cases, elses etc to find the right choice). I came up with some good rules to help define how to make their choices and broke it up between bidding and playing. On the biding it takes into consideration which position it's in (first middle last), if with his bid the number of bids will be more equal to or less then the amount of hands for the round (for middle position I figure out what the average share of the bids should be his and work off that so for instance 3 players 9 cards his average share would be 3 and then I adjust based on bid total so far etc). It then counts how many bids would be possible in a perfect situation based on his cards and adjusts based on the parts listed above.
I realised early on that the first few hands don't fall into the general rules of all the other hands so I wrote specific script for hands 1 and 2 and then from hands 3 on it uses the general rules. It's interesting really because all the script for hand 2 is longer then hand 3+ since it's so specific to all the possibilities.

Then I went into the playing part which took a lot more lines of script then the bidding. It doesn't have a specific rule for any hands like the bid does and uses the very long script based first off position then off over, even or under bid, then if he has his bid or not and then specifics.
I found the fact that there are special cards in this, I had to have specific script for the case that one of those cards is ever played by someone else. Luckily there's only a couple types of special cards.

So I wrote all this over a couple days and though man this is so generalized that it's never going to play well. Since for a human every time you bid,play a card so many thoughts go into which card to play based off everyone's bid, everyone's score and which cards have been already played, etc.
But to my surprise after running it a few times (to keep taking the way too many bugs out) it plays pretty good, and that's with me cheating because I have it set up so I can see what cards the computer players have so I can see if I agree with their choices.

Currently it's working for a 3 player game, but it won't take much adjustment for a 4, 5 ,6 person game since position 3 will become last position for any game, and most of the current position 3 or 2 script depending on the situation will copy right into the middle position section.

Eventually I think I might add card tracking into the AI so that it knows that if an A was already played it's safe to play the K now etc. I think that is perfectly fair since humans do that anyways and it will make for tighter competition. I might add that in as just a choice between beginner AI or advanced so people can play at their own level.

Now I know most of that is pretty boring but I'm happy about it. Right now I'm going to switch my focus onto making the game more pretty/closer to it's final look. Currently it's a black background and the cards are just there, there's no animation for dealing or playing a card they just pop to their new positions. I wasn't worried about those things yet since I wanted to get the gameplay down so now it's onto that.

The animations I think will be a little bit of a pain because I will want the cards to get delt from the center and go to each player and then show them getting a stack of cards and then the cards flip over for the human play once he has them all. Currently the cards already get sorted by suit on deal so that's already taken care of.
I also have to get a nice looking GUI going and some better graphics overall. Currently the gui is just the grey pulldown menu for choosing your bid and it looks very crappy.

Finally once I get single player working with 3-6 players and have it looking nice/close to finished look. I am going to add the multiplayer part. Which I'm hoping won't be that much work but we'll see. I want the person's card to always be bottom middle of the screen for every person playing so I think that will be the trickiest part.

I'm hoping some people will be interested in this when it's done. I don't think card games on the computer are exactly a big market (unless it's poker). I checked yahoo games and msn games to see how many people were online playing cards and between spades, hearts and bridge between both sites there was about 14000 people online at one time so that is promising but those are also about as well known as you can get for card games.

I'd also like to thank the people who have helped me in the forums on this, there have been many but David Higgins has popped up almost everytime I've had a question and always had a good answer.

I'm not dead

J Sears — 2007-01-03T18:27:14+00:00

I know most people don't even know who I am but I post a lot on other's blogs and occasionally in the forums.
I had been working on a card game on tgb and while I was working on the mulitplayer aspect something occured to me, that the card game was so simple that tgb wasn't the right choice for it. Now that wasn't time wasted since I do have ideas for tgb and tge and it helped me learn the scripting a good amount. But if I wanted this card game to get a decent amount of users it would probably be better to just put it in a Java applet and make it so people can play it right in their browser. So I have some java applet learning to do.
So in the meantime I have been trying to learn 3d modelling for 2 reasons. First is obviously that most games use lots of 3d models now so if I can even make basic ones that export into torque then I'll be able to help show my ideas better when working on something. Second is I can draw very well but when it comes to making 2d graphics on a computer I can't come close to anything decent with a mouse so I figured I could use 3d graphics to get my 2d images I need and that will make them look incredible too (if I do a good job).
I've had some progress in this area I decided to start off with a car, and instead of being smart to start off with a complex realistic car. I tried blender for a while and just could not get the interface and program to work with me the way I wanted and was getting frustrated like crazy. So I read around and searched around and am currently trying gamespace lite which so far is working faster and easier for me then blender was, one feature I love over blender is when you click mirror it automatically copies and mirrors the image right next to the original and then it's basically one more click to make them both a solid object. If I can produce a good car and some other objets in gamespace lite I'll purchase the full version which isn't a bad price.

So during this time I was thinking about what makes a game last forever as opposed to becoming a big hit for a month and then getting tossed in the closet. The basic answer for modern day gaming is mulitplayer. The biggest hits made multiplayer fun, besides the obvious mmorpg success like WoW let's look at another example. Halo 2, this game has been out for a while and it's player base is still huge. The gameplay itself is far from anything new and it's not even that great there's plenty of complaints from the community on parts that are bugged, or aspects that are ridiculously cheap. But the player base remains huge why is that? Well from a conversation with my cousin (we play 360 games online together) it became pretty obvious, it's ease of mulitplayer use. Most console games try and use the PC multiplayer concept people create game rooms with their chosen settings the players get a list of games and click to join one and stay in it till they get bored and dig through the list with trial and error to find another decent game.
Halo 2 on the other hand most everyone does ranked matches and it has I think 10 categories to choose from. Then to keep things fair it chooses the map the settings and who is teamed with who. So although you get maps you don't like it's much better because everyone is forced to play every type of map and balance their skills as opposed to playing dust2 or office on CSS all day every day and only being good on that map.
Also halo 2 has the best function for console muliplayer that I have not found in any other muliplayer console game yet despite how old halo is. They allow you to make a party, so for instance my cousin and I do double team mode as a party, so it's a mix of 2 v 2 maps at styles of play and it keeps us together in a lobby in between each game so that it forces our accounts to travel together keeping multiplayer so simple. they have this set up for any size party up to their max game size.
Now let's compare the alternative for example we love rainbow six gameplay but the multiplayer setup is the same old same old, you get a list of games (which all share the same name so you have to look at the tiny text of who created the game to find the difference) and try a game out the settings aren't told to you before you enter so you take the long load time to enter check the settings, nope don't like them leave reload the list of games try another until you find one decent. Now you have to invite the other person while there's still an open spot. Now you've played one match and the creater of the game decides he wants a different game style you don't want, well time to leave and reload (and the load times in rainbow six are decently long) in another room. That is going to get old fast and we will be back to halo 2 where we don't like the actual gameplay very much and there are a lot of cheats but the multiplayer format is so easy we just sit back and keep hitting launch and it does the rest.

So I guess the long rant is companies should learn from what other companies do right and apply it as opposed to going back to a method they've been doing for 10 years straight. Also this is a personal opinion that although large battle games are fun like rainbow six allows 8 v 8 realistic battle. There is also the problem at that size of who you get matched with, if you have one buddy online that means you have 6 people you don't know, if the other team is a clan of 8 that all play together all the time this game is not going to go well. Most people do not have 7 other people on xbox at any time to form a good team (for pc games that's all the way up to 32 v 32 on some games now). Now these games are needed and everyone loves big battles. But I think more games should offer a level of the game which is 2v2 or 4v4 for tighter closer groups of players to have fun. That's personal opinion but I think that's also what helped halo 2 stay so big, a couple college roommates could play on two tvs against 2 other guys and that makes it fun and more companion oriented.

Just some thoughts I had while thinking about what a perfect game would be, but I am pretty positive that the biggest hit or miss effect in modern times is how fun multiplayer is in any given games.

Hopefully in a few days I'll have a pretty completed car to show a screen shot of too

oh ya and if anyone knows any great 2v2-4v4 multiplayer games that run on the 360 (so xbox and xbox 360) that have a decent size user base feel free to let me know

time to learn networking

J Sears — 2006-12-06T08:28:30+00:00

Well I sat down and busted out enough scripting to have my card game work pretty well all on one machine, there were a couple small things to add but I saw those parts being very different in networking mode so no point in wasting my time on them yet. So currently the game is set up to be able to play up to 6 players, high card for dealer on start, shuffle and deal out the cards each hand (didn't add the player making his big yet, very simple to do but wanted to wait for network) players play their cards in turn order high card/trump card/special card wins that trick then they lead off that goes till all cards are gone, game compares each players hand score to their bid score and updates their overall score and then shuffles and deals again and it's all working all the card rules are working and the board clearing is working well. So now I need to learn how to get this to network the way I want

The unfortunate part is I want to do something I haven't found and tgb references on. For the most part it seems the networking part of TGB is very under documented. I understand real time networking isn't possible but that near real time is without any code changes (due to that one little demo game someone put out). So that means my idea should work but I don't know how to start it yet.

Here is my dream that I hope to make happen. When the player launches the game it connects to the master server (later on when I figure out how to make AI play this card game good there will be an option for single player) and upon connecting to the master server it loads up a screen of a chat room and enters the person in that chat. So of course the person can chat there then probably on the side of that there will be a window with tables (in the MSN zone style games I believe) where people can sit down at a table and when enough people sit that game launches so the screen changes to in that game and they start playing.

I haven't been able to find any good guides on doing much of any of that, so I will try to learn it over the next few days and try to get it going somehow. In the meantime I may start working on some of my awful graphics skills to set up some guis to give an idea of how it should look and if they're too ugly find someone who is willing to spend a little time making good ones.

my basic thought flow so far seems like most of this networking shouldn't be toooo bad
-auto connect to masterserver on load
- on connect place person's name in box that lists people there
- bottom of chat box has a text field box for person to type in when they hit enter or click send it sends it
to master server and master server updates everyone's chat box
- person clicks on one of the table's and sends a message to server saying they took that spot
- server checks to make sure spot is still open and is so puts a marker there, sends update on that
window to all connected
- when given table reaches set amount (first person to sit down would specify 3-6 players) server sends
message to all those machines updates image on the games window to everyone else as in progress

Now what I don't know at all yet is how to set each one of those games as a seperate game on the master server, hopefully it would be as easy as an array but have to learn more to know. So it all seems possible just have to figure it out.

back on a decent pace

J Sears — 2006-12-05T07:23:08+00:00

Today was my first day really getting some time back in on my card game. I had a bunch of other stuff to do today and didn't get as much time as I wanted but still made some decent progress.

Things accomplished.
stepped it up from the single player progress to anywhere from 2-6 (although 3-6 is really the amount
allowed in final game)
card sorting so much as you'd hold cards in real life seperated by suit and then in order by value
this does it automatically for all players
turn rotation
deal one card out to each player at initial game start and use high card to determine dealer
Added rules about which cards can be played(not fully tested yet)

I think that's it which is disappointing I felt like I got more done. But I noticed things to fix which is always good too.

Turn rotation was obviously pretty easy to put in, initial deal for high card wasn't bad either and worked on first attempt (always uplifting) Rules and number of players was not to hard either. Card sorting was not hard with the exception I had a sneaky typo that through me off for a lot longer then it should. I kept looking at my code and thinking this should work perfectly, and I had spent time thinking about how to do it to make sure it would go in easy. Problem was I was using a for loop in a for loop one used i one used j and sure enough I had the wrong one typed in in one spot. Worst part is I've made that mistake before will make sure to use much differing letters next time.

Things next on the list, I currently have all the cards preloaded in with TGB with all their values set to ease my scripting so I just move and mount them where needed. Right now I don't have any code to unmount and move the cards back off screen (would use delete obviously if I was spawning objects in each time) I hadn't spent much time on this since it didn't interfere really with my current stage of progress but now is an important step, I don't see it being too hard. Once that is in I can fully test my game rules and will play through a game of 3 people real quick to make sure.
Next will be to add bid making prehand and scoring post hand. If I get through all that tomorrow then I think it's time to learn some networking.

Oh ya and I find it interesting that I haven't found a way to find what object is attached to the current object, you can find what it's mounted to with getparentinfo or whatever it's called but I can only see a command to get a true false if an object is mounted. in the new change blog there was a command called get attachedobject I think but I don't know if that's what I need either, instead I add a dynamic field to an object when something gets mounted to it that references that object.

back at it

J Sears — 2006-12-04T08:36:42+00:00

Well I had to take some time away from my card game due to holidays and working hard on a website I have been trying to launch (it has nothing to do with programming or games so I won't put a shamless plug in for it here) but now I'm ready to get back at it, thanks to david and tom I got usemouseobjects working in my game and got it to choose the top card in the stack as opposed to the bottom thanks to someone letting my know about pickpoint() which wasn't how I'd hoped to do things but it works just fine.

Now I'm at the point I have to figure out exactly how I'm going to make this game. I know all the rules to the game so that's not hard the problem is the method to program it. It's a 3-6 player card game that will be networked. (I eventually hope to set it up as a master server with a chat room that all the players enter then form up into games from there, I have server spots to host this permanently from so should be neat)

I do eventually hope to add AI players but that is the last thing. So how do I program it to check everything I can't ask 5 random people to connect up with me everytime I want to test out new steps and bug fixes. So I was thinking at first making it 6 players on one comp that take their turns and then when it's all bug free try to switch that over into networked code. I don't know if that's the most efficient way to do it though. Also with networked I want the person at the comp to always be the bottom set of cards but I'm hoping this will be easy as assigning player 1 -6 to all connected then put all the dealt out cards assigned to a player 1 - 6 simset and putting for each player his cards at the bottom of the screen and then rotating the numbers from his spot around. Sounds easy to write it out just hope it will be that easy.

So current steps I will be working on tomorrow hopefully. I have a deal currently to one player and have mouseobjects on so that when he double clicks a card it moves to center, so now I want to deal out one extra card to set the trump suit and then script in the rules and a second player deal with turn taking. And script in that the second player to go has to play a valid card and the turn is assigned by who wins the hand. All that should keep me busy for the day I think

Future steps:
Make it playable for 6 players
Setup Score keeping
Setup Network play
Make a main lobby for the network play (including all the gui involved for that)
Finish up some new graphics needed for this game, might have to hire someone for that my skills are BAD

those steps each include a lot of parts to them so I have my work cut out but hopefully I'll make a big leap tomorrow now that I'm back at it

not a good scripting day

J Sears — 2006-11-23T05:46:52+00:00

Well I decided to put freecell on hold for a little bit now that I had learned a bunch and decided to work on the card game I really wanted to get out there. It's a version of a card game some people know but doesn't seem to get played a lot. Thing is anytime I've sen someone play this version of it they've loved it so I figured I'd make it and make it so people can play it online and get it out there.
So I got started using some of the functions I had made up in my freecell program and all was going well got my shuffle going and just for the hell of it have it shuffle the deck 3 times even though 1 shuffle should make a completly random deck. I then made it deal out to just one player (figure I'll get as much of this going on one machine before attempting to work in the netcode) and the deal works just fine.

So now I went to add my mouse code but this time I wanted to use object mouse callbacks instead of scene window call backs. I figure object callback should ease up the code a bit instead of having to search all object under the mouse click everytime. But the thing is I can not get the object mouse callback to work at ALL!!

function t2dSceneObject::onMouseDown( %this, %mod, %worldPos, %mouseClicks )

I couldn't even get an echo to work in this function, I enabled all objects in my scene to use mouse events and nothing. I tried changing t2dSceneObject to card and having all the cards in scene have the class cards but nothing. This drove me insane and I asked for help on the irc chat and nothing. I guess I'll give up and just use the scenewindow mouse events because it should not take several hours to get a object mouse event to work.

Got some good parts of FreeCell finished

J Sears — 2006-11-21T06:11:43+00:00

Well for the possibly 3 people that read my blog I added this part as a remark to my last post. After struggling early on the other day with how to best create games for FreeCell I ended up with a random shuffler as I call it. I made an array with all the cards in it (specifically their image map names in it) I then used a random number call and a for loop to shuffle the cards in the array. I called that array in another for loop to make one long string out of it and then wrote that string to a file. Since I was going to write a lot of these (eventually plan on getting to 2 million) I added a readfile check that stores each line in a variable called holder which I compare to the current string if none of them match I write the new string and then make another random game.

After getting this programmed and testing it a few ways I let it loose. The screen stayed black. I figured I had messed up so I forced windows to close the program and checked my levels.cs and it already had a thousand or so levels in it and I realised that since I had that stuff as the first part of my program nothing else would show till it was done so I cleared those levels and gave it a fresh start. About 25 minutes into it TGB finally had enough and closed on error, I figure the way I programmed it must be leaving something in memory each cycle so it finally ran out. I checked the file and I ended up with 37501 unique games one per line. Not as many as I'd hoped but certainly enough to do for now.

Now I had to write code to read the file and set up the game. This was actually tougher then I thought it would be. Well it wasn't actually tough but my idiot self coding through it too fast in excitement from my level creations mistyped a couple small things that didn't show up as errors and took me a while to notice. My array for instance that kept track of where to mount the next card was called columns[] but when I put it in the loop that took apart the level string and mounted the cards I called it column[] thus creating 2 different arrays so my game was not ending up right. Then when I was sure I had it all worked out no cards were showing up I realised I had to move where I called the function down further in game.cs. So all that wasted some time but was a good learning experience on keeping good track of names and planning ahead on certain things.

I also added right mouse to show what card was stacked under other cards like microsoft freecell has. Was simple enough brought the object to layer 0 on right mouse down return it to it's previous layer on right mouse up.

Then having those levels I needed someway to access them until I made my full blown start up gui so I added a popup window that loads first you enter level number and it loads the level, also pretty easy and was looking forward to more gui experience since I think being able to make good guis can incredibly mean the difference between a good 2d game and a bad one so need all the practice I can get.

Fixed a couple small bugs I had made in my earlier parts of the program that finally surfaced and I think that covers the day. My current goal is to work on the ability to move columns of correct cards at a time which is more involved the more I think about it so I will try it one step at a time with first step being keeping track of open free cells and open columns (a column will allow for double the amount of freecells + 1 to be moved due to the nature of freecell).

Possible addition I am thinking of adding to my code is a double click on a card will move it to a freecell, since I don't think there is a double click function already in TGB and I don't yet want to mess with source code I will probably have to make it as something of on first mousedown start a timer and set a variable of first click to true then on second mouse down check to see if first click is true and if timer is <x. Actually that sounds pretty easy so back to a little more work for tonight.

Oh ya and I wanted to add a multiplayer feature to my game to get some work with the net code aspect, and I'm starting to really wonder how that will work since I use a few globals to do my code. Could result in some unfortunate code rewrites