Blog for Manjit Bedi at GarageGames.com

Making an arcade style high score name entry screen

Manjit Bedi — 2007-06-13T14:54:37+00:00

The game I am working on will ultimately be in an arcade cabinet and using a joystick and buttons.

I have spent the last day and then some tinkering with making a name entry screen. The idea is something very classic in design. I thought it was about time that I gave something back to the TGB community. :-)

Here is what I mocked up some far:

This is really just something functional, it is bound to get some graphical flourishes later.

Basically, what I did was create a series of text objects and then when the level is loaded; I stored the objects in an array. I keep a position for the 'cursor' which is x, y pair which I use to get the text objects from the array. I have move maps set up for the direcitonal arrow key and when the space bar is pressed.

	%this.letters[0, 0] = letter11;
	%this.letters[1, 0] = letter12;	
	%this.letters[2, 0] = letter13;
	%this.letters[3, 0] = letter14;	

       etc....

	// update position of cursor
	%letterObj = %this.letters[%this.cursorPosX, %this.cursorPosY];	
	echo("move cursor to" SPC %letterObj.getName() SPC "with position" SPC %letterObj.getPosition() SPC "letter" SPC %letterObj.text);
	%pos = %letterObj.getPosition();
	$cursor.setPosition(%pos);
	
	// Now for some fun, display the letter in the name text object.
	if(%letterObj.getName() !$= "delLetter" && %letterObj.getName() !$= "endName" )
	{
		%character = %letterObj.text;
		%this.nameLetters[%this.lettersUsed] = %character;
		HighScoreName.text = %this.nameLetters[0] @ %this.nameLetters[1] @ %this.nameLetters[2] @ %this.nameLetters[3] @ %this.nameLetters[4] @ %this.nameLetters[5];
	}

      etc...

There are two special text objects: one for deleting the last letter and the other for ending the high score entry. I check the name of the text object to see it is one of them.

/*
	Given the current cursor position use the letter.
*/
function  nameEntryClass::selectLetter(%this)
{
	%letterObj = %this.letters[%this.cursorPosX, %this.cursorPosY];

	if(%letterObj.getName() $= "endName")
	{
		// store the name in a global and switch to the high score table 
	}
	else if(%letterObj.getName() $= "delLetter") 
	{
		if(%this.lettersUsed > 0)
		{
			%this.nameLetters[%this.lettersUsed] = "-";
			%this.lettersUsed--;
			HighScoreName.text = %this.nameLetters[0] @ %this.nameLetters[1] @ %this.nameLetters[2] @ %this.nameLetters[3] @ %this.nameLetters[4] @ %this.nameLetters[5];						
		}
	}
	else if(%this.lettersUsed < 6)
	{
		%this.lettersUsed++;

		%character = %letterObj.text;
		%this.nameLetters[%this.lettersUsed] = %character;
		HighScoreName.text = %this.nameLetters[0] @ %this.nameLetters[1] @ %this.nameLetters[2] @ %this.nameLetters[3] @ %this.nameLetters[4] @ %this.nameLetters[5];			
	}
}

And here is the code:

TGB high score script
Level file download

Note: I make reference to an image map for the cursor and background shapes. Everything else are just text
objects.

Next steps - getting TGB into an arcade cabinet

Manjit Bedi — 2007-05-23T13:08:43+00:00

Sometime, I need to progress one of the key requirements for this project.

The game is to go into an arcade cabinet. The game is going to be an art piece for a contemporary artist.

I am currently doing my development work using TGB 1.1.3 on a Mac Powerbook. So far so good.

But when I need to start doing some testing with the USB controls I do wonder if I will need to get the game working on Windows based system.

It seems there are few other people out there who have been using arcade cabinets and running Torque based games. Any caveats?

M.

Experimenting with weapon collision and using mounted objects

Manjit Bedi — 2007-04-21T09:46:37+00:00

I have finally got something work after pondering it for some time over the last few days.

The main character uses a weapon to 'swat' the bad guys in the game. In this particular scenario, the player is armed with a shovel. I was trying to think of how to imeplement it.

What I did was:

1) create a weapon object that is just using a transparent bitmap and mounted the object to the player
on a link point.
2) the weapon object script sets the collision states to false when the level is loaded
3) set the frame callback to true for the animation of the player when he is swinging the shovel down
4) the frame callback rountine turns on the weapon collision on a frame and then a few frames later
turns the collision off. The result the collision only is happening when the player is in the middle of the animation wih the frame down.

function player::onFrameChange(%this, %frameIndex)
{
	if(%frameIndex == 2)
	{
		echo ("shovel blade collision on");
		$weapon.setCollisionActive(true, true);
	}
	else if(%frameIndex == 4)
	{
		echo ("shovel blade collision off");	
		$weapon.setCollisionActive(false, false);	
	}
}