Years ago, I started out on BYOND messing around and never actually accomplishing anything. (For a mostly complete auto-biography of my BYONDlife, see a few posts back) To this day I still haven't really accomplished anything other than, alongside Tiberath, helping bring up one of the greatest guilds BYOND had in those days.</bias> Recently, I came to the realization that it wasn't that I just wasn't satisfied with where I thought BYOND was going (which I've recently reformed my opinion on), I just wasn't really satisfied with BYOND itself (through no fault of BYOND's, mind. I guess I just started losing interest?).
So, I started working on a game outside of BYOND.
This is the first bit of real progress that I made. Not only was I able to load the multi-colored squares from a sprite sheet, I re-used that functionality for the text and managed to get my terribly-drawn font on the screen. Oh, also, FPS counter.
The next bit of progress I made is evident in this picture. I set it up to limit the frame rate from the 1300 fps I was experiencing in the first picture to 60 fps and added a render queue to it. Rendering a new tile on the screen was as simple as deriving from IRenderable and adding that to the renderObjects vector in the renderer's class. The black square is a result of 64 squares being created and added to the renderObjects.
This next one was taken during a time of much frustration and sadness. I set it up so that it didn't render objects that weren't in view of the camera (I messed up part of it in this screenshot, don't judge me), but in doing so I ran across a strange bug where my primitives (the black square and the console) were flickering whenever my text at the bottom was updated at a quick rage. After four or five hours of debugging, I determined that that was a direct result of keeping 2D texture mapping on when I drew my non-texture mapped primitives (whoops!)
The last picture is about where I'm at right now, having been at work since I fixed the problem with not turning off 2D texture mapping. The point of this post wasn't really just to point out that I'm actually doing something for once and pointing out a bunch of screenshots of nothing interesting at all.
A few posts back (the auto-biography one), I expressed much discontent with BYOND that might've come off too incredibly negatively. That wasn't really my goal of that post, it just sort of turned out that way. Last Thursday and Friday, I decided I was going to actually try writing a game in Java to show the people I've come across saying that I dislike Java because I don't 'know' Java why I hate Java. I spent a few hours on it and wrote exactly 8 classes before I realized that I hate Java and gave up.
After that, the Ludum Dare took place (Saturday and Sunday). Watching various people work on their games and listening to the great music, I was inspired to start working on a serious game again (except not in Java).
Some time between the second and third screenshots, it just sort of hit me. Here I was, working on (eventually, ) a game in C++. Just working away, thinking through my problems. Getting frustrated in the process, but managing to get by. I started out with BYOND long ago and slowly evolved into lower-level languages. If it wasn't for BYOND, I would no doubt be a crack-addicted gamer monkey hiding in a ditch somewhere. Alright, that was an exaggeration, but I wouldn't be where I am today if it wasn't for the effort put into BYOND by Dan, Tom, Lummox, and everyone else that's put in work on the project over the many years.
So I suppose this is mostly an apology post of sorts. My last on the BYOND subject was sort of harsh and overly-judgmental, and I didn't really want it to come off that way. I hope BYOND lives on forever (one can dream, right? Surely Tom or Lummox have achieved immortality) , as this is where my roots are.
That is all.
