gearleaf

Finally

posted June 8, 2009 at 10:46 p.m.
Shamus

Excitement.



Download this week's alpha release of Geas!

This update adds new portraits for Kiel (which I don't really like better but they are more consistent with Tanessa's portrait), every house in Shoda's Brook has an 'inside', and you can now leave town. Unfortunately, the overworld is still heavily in progress so you can't get BACK in town.

Discussion

I've been sitting on some of this stuff since Christmas (for some reason) and some of it is more recent. Lame, I know. Anyway, I like how the overworld graphics are shaping up, though the mountains are somewhat busy. I love the little short sprites and I want to get to animating making more directions for Kiel and a new sprite for Tanessa.

In addition, the download this week features an absolutely up-to-date copy of the verge engine so it is possible that it might be a little broken for some people. Please let me know if you have any problems! Also, if you are into this sort of thing, you can look at the directory structure and see that it is SO MUCH CLEANER now that maps can be stored in subdirectories of the root.

Lastly, as I mentioned last post, I am looking into writing some documentations. I hacked together a quick system to help me write them and make them accessible, and I've put up an index of topics I intend to write on, in some sort of semblance of order that halfway makes sense to me. You can check that out at...

Documentation index for LuaVerge tutorial

I'd like to hear some comments, if anyone has them, on the topics and the ordering. Please let me know if there's something I've left out or you think should come earlier or later. I'm very much wanting to produce a tutorial that focuses on getting a game made, rather than focusing just on the scripting. Hopefully it works out.

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Tags: geas gruedorf verge tutorials

Re: Finally

commented June 8, 2009 at 10:46 p.m.
cag
So I've wanted to say something, but I've been offput by the need to register. Turned out not to be very hard, but I do have some comments about the state of LuaVerge as of now. First: hooks in LuaVerge can be <i>much</i> better. As lua can handle functions as bonafide first class data, it'd make sense to be able to directly pass functions to hooks (like, maybe even <i>anonymous</i> functions). I'm currently resorting to a messy hack to get around this limitation. In terms of the tutorial, you wouldn't have to explain why you can't pass some table function like "thingy.do_stuff" into hooks, because you'd be able to just pass the functions in, without quotes, even.

I haven't checked the new build yet, though, so I'm just assuming this has not changed. Other than that, the topics seem comprehensive and nice.

Also, vx is a great framework. I know the tut's intended to revolve around LuaVerge, but I've a feeling vx is becoming a standard of sorts as far as frameworks atop LuaVerge go. Consider using that?

Anyways, watching to see you finish this game, of course. :)
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Re: Finally

commented June 8, 2009 at 10:46 p.m.
Overkill
I used to have 30 spam a day until I installed ReCaptcha. Now I get like 2 spam every two months sort of thing. You should set something like that up, since captchas are a VERY effective way to stop spam in its tracks, nad now you're not inconveniencing anyone human by forcing them to make an account.
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Just so everyone knows

commented June 8, 2009 at 10:46 p.m.
Overkill
So everyone who can read this will know now, the build of Verge included here is broken in several ways. Primarily, it's full of blitters that aren't reimplemented yet. So some drawing routines will crash, other ones will error unless you use zero lucency, and almost all of them only support 32bpp (this last thing should be fine though). Rotscale, AdditiveBlit/SubtractiveBlit, Silhouette, and a quite few other things are affected.

This, along with portability things need to be resolved before next release can be pushed. So please be careful if you're upgrading.

Also, a heads up: LuaVerge works MUCH differently now than the last official release. Any code written in it, will undoubtedly need to be converted. Code built on top of vx will require less conversion, but will still require you to change a few things.

With that in mind, go ahead, and look. It MOSTLY works, but these things are holding back the next major build.

And to answer CAG, that'd be nice, but it will undoubtedly wait till after this release. There would need to be quite a bit done to allow anonymous functions to be passed, so it's not high on the priorities yet. Maybe after this version is stable.
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Noted.

commented June 8, 2009 at 10:46 p.m.
Shamus
It WOULD be nice to be able to pass in functions instead of strings but as Overkill mentioned that wouldn't be a trivial change. I'll look into it, but maybe just not for the next release.

Also, I've been trying to decide whether to use vx as a base in these tutorials. On the one hand, it is way better than just using straight-up LuaVerge. On the other, it might be nice to have some comprehensive tutorials on how to do that, so people can understand "under the hood" a little better. I'm not sure. I'm currently leaning towards using vx but I'm still undecided.

And yeah, to see if I've finished the game yet is the only reason I come here too. :)

Oh yeah, and the reason I require signing up is because last time I had comments that didn't require posters to have an account I ended up with a couple dozen spam comments to delete <b>every day</b>. I figured that not having to do that would probably be worth the potential missed comments due to reader inertia, sadly.
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