Hello again. It’s been 3 and a half hours since I started this project and damn do I have a lot done! The first important lesson is that code reuse is great! I don’t think I’d have as much done as I do now if I had to rewrite everything from scratch. However, there have been some nasty subtle bugs because of the reused code, so I ended up spending time debugging and rewriting entire sections. This is mainly due to how entities move in this game. In UGH, they moved one tile length at a time but “slid” from tile to tile. A lot of the old moving and entity updating code had to go.
So what have I complete so far?
- Loading tiles from a .png file (copied)
- Loading entities from xml (copied)
- Created the entity manager
- Draw the PC and the monsters on the screen
- Move the PC with the Xbox 360 controller
- Move the monsters via their own AI. There are two types “Aggressive” which will always follow the player trying to hurt him and Neutral. The neutral AI runs around aimlessly, but turns aggressive it gets hit the PC. (about 50% copied, 50% rewritten)
- Created the Monster Catalog. (copied)
- All entities do collision detection so that they won’t step over each other. It’s not 100% perfect and it can lead to weird gridlock issues, but it’s workable for now. I’ll probably look at it more later.
So, next I’m going to tackle combat. This will mean that a bad guy will try to seek out the player and “collide” with it. If that happens, the player takes damage. Then I will implement a way for the player to defend himself by lobbing fireballs at his enemies. This will new entities spawned and if they collide with any entity, the entity takes damage and the fireball “dies.” I’m expecting this to at least take a few more hours.
Here’s a screenshot, you’re the red wizard. There are around 100 entities on the screen and everything is running very smoothly:
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