[Tam Toucan]

Day 54
Did I say four game input control systems? Of course I meant SIX!

Day 55
Six! Six! You mock me with six. I want EIGHT!

Day 56
Eight! Are mad? If it's not double figures before the sun has set I shall feed you to the chipmunks!

Day 57
Twelve you say? TWELVE!....Yeah ok.

Day 58
Sound - Day 1.

Day 59
Sound - Day 2. I'll get you OpenAL and your little dog to....

Day 60
You hear that? You hear that? I love that sound. It sounds like victory!

Yes I now have sound and even though it's just a test of me going "Brrrrm", to me it's the dawn chorus heralding a new day. A brighter day on a more beautiful world. A world without input systems where a man is free to code game logic. If I have to lie, steal, cheat or kill. As God is my witness, I'll never tweak the menus again*

So what shall I do this is new freedom? What monolith of beauty shall I erect that millions shall come to worship? Well let's face it folks this never was going to be anything more than "Look Ma I gone and writ me a game!". Plus the end of October is less than 20 Tam coding days away**, and I don't have any kind of object system***, and I think I've caught bird-swine flu from that flying pig...

But this is about having fun (me not you), so I put such things to one side, take my vorpal sword in hand and continue on my Quest.


* We all know that's not true
** That's about 40 of your Earth hours
*** I have cunning plan for that....Write a game with no objects

[Tam Toucan]

Day 63
Played "Pin the tail on the chipmunk".


Day 65
Life, they say, is a journey. Some people take the "Go that way, fast. If something gets in you way, turn" approach. Me, I'm from the "Hmmm, which way now?" school. Thing is I've never had much vision. Combine that with pondering which way next and you get a kind of Langton's Ant. Sure you can look at each step and say why it was taken, but look at the journey and you think "WTF?".

Now I'm happy with this approach, "Know Thyself" my cat reminds me, but it does lead to some "interesting" places. I now have 4 different start up programs, 6 menu control schemes, 11+ game control schemes, but no redefinable keys (unless you find and edit the appropriate config file). Is that where I wanted to end up? No, but it's been fun getting there.

The search for a game continues. Since this is nothing more that my first attempt to put all the bits together I'm not too worried about what actually comes out at the end. Case in point; one of my original "design" points was I wanted a non-one-key game that could played with one-key. So the bus has accelerate/decelerate rather than just (say) jump. Game wise however, with what I've currently got, I'd be better throwing away most of the control stuff and making a one-key game (not actually much of change).

But I'm not going to.

Why? Well I'm more interested in the reaction to the mess, than trying to make it less of a mess. See what I mean?


Day 66
You can't teach an old chipmunk new tricks so I moved to the trunk version of the physics library (I need the new features). The old workforce objects to this and corrupts my SVN repository. With the promise of final salary pensions and all the nuts they can eat and everything's back.

Still have to clean the mess the little buggers made of the bathroom though.

Day 68
Boing Boing Boing. That's what the bus suspension used to do and it was long painful process getting there. Days of randomly changing things until it "felt right".

Boing Boing. BeeeeoOOOOING! That's what can now happen with the new library. Well, makes things more interesting.

Day 70
Are sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin....

After a drunken party watching Summer Holiday and Back To Future
continuously Dr Tam Toucan L.S.D. (Life Sciences Diploma) is struck
with a gestalt moment and combines the power of time travel with
the classic British look of the double decker bus.

Unfortunately Dr Toucan does not possess a PCV license so YOU! have
been chosen to pilot the vehicle on it's first mission...

         Retrieve the Golden Acorn of the Ancients

Sinbad tried and failed, Hercules had triskaidekaphobia, Jason would
have, but the Argo in for a service, so now YOU! must do what lesser
heroes could not.

But beware! The Gods are aware of your Quest and have released
Spermophilus the Chipmunk to thwart you...

[Lobo]

"You return home alive but without your nuts"

The Cloud~

[Tam Toucan]

Day 71 to Day 79
Question: How many chipmunks can dance on the roof of a bus?

Day 80
Answer: None.

Sometimes. I hate coding.

Day 81 to Day 85
Never work with children or animals or passenger carrying vehicles larger than 7.5 tonnes. Words to live by and ones I shall be following now that it's finally over.

Having long given up hope of finding a game in this mess, a 16 hour crunch over a few days and I've at least managed to get all the parts of a game. So you can win, lose and sort of play it. I am however quite pleased with how easy and how much fun it was putting those bits together. There's something really satisfying about just being able to scribble a vaguely phallic cloud and then see it appear in the game (without even needing to recompile!)

Anyway, thanks for everyone's support. I know there's not much to comment on since it's just a silly little broken game, but I'm interested in whatever thoughts you have about future stuff e.g. I know I need to fix the outline edge drawing, using GL_LINES with a fixed line width is just rubbish. The whole 11 different input schemes was an interesting experiment. I know it didn't work in a lot of ways (no editor. no dwell time indication. no redefine keys!), but comments welcome. Also, any system problems (performance, crashes etc) I'd like to hear about since they'll obviously appear anything else I do.

There will be an update at some point for stuff that I'll need in my next project (auto-pause for the oneswitch), but I'm done with buses and chipmunks for a long time!

Oh, for those that missed the other post. Get it here

[Lobo]

No performance issues but a few things here. Menu arrows are sorta confusing stuff, I kept clicking on wrong 'buttons' all the time. Maybe if they were encompassing the option/choices on top and bottom instead of literally being inside the actual choices? Ugh, sounds complicated!
Just make them below and above the choices was the idea

As for visuals, mspaint style is kinda meh, can't compare with the old, beautiful black screen and outlines in green (or red).

[Tam Toucan]

Yeah the arrows are a bit shit. I'd meant to go back and tidy them up, but....

For the GFX you can edit the DDBJ.cfg file and delete the second line "GFX_STYLE == SOLID". That will use VECTOR, but they are see through and so I didn't put in the backgrounds (other than the sun). Or I actually have this color scheme. Just untar it to the DDBJ directory. It just swaps the solid and edge colors so the bus is black with a red edge etc.

Oh, it screws up the Chipmunk view though because it doesn't adjust the Z coords, just the colors so you can't see the ground in the little "map"

[caffeinekid]

It's those little quirks that keep a guy interested.