Birth of Legends

I won't be home much tonight so, not much coding will be done today. I'm starting to get tired getting a side project, that is only sort of related to the bol gui, to work so I'll just have to review the other code and figure out what was wrong in the first place. Oh, and I just got called down to supper. So, I'll do some work sometime soonish and release something new in that time. Now for food.

-Mark

Well, (takes a look at last post), oh right, I got that side project to work, which was an alternative method for the BOL gui, basically getting CEGUI to work with BOL. For people who don't know CEGUI is an open-source gui api kind of thing to save game programmers a lot of work when it comes to creating a gui. So, anyway, I'll need to spend some time to modify the demo around an actual gui system. In the meantime (and hopefully it will be a short meantime) I'd be very appreciative of anyone who would want to use their artistic skillz to create a cool background for the login screen.

About character creation/selection, I'm realizing that I need to reconfigure the database in a much more major way to get it the way we want. Basically, how it is now is that you have a login and a password for a single player, and the adjustment I made to add customization was that there is a numerical value that determines your appearance and color. The problem with this though is that as it's only set up for one player per account I can't think of a good way to set up customization and character selection. Furthermore, since the final product is supposed to allow multiple characters per account, and since I'll eventually need more then a number and switch statements for character customization, I'm going to have to redo the whole database. Usually this wouldn't matter at all to users but I'm unsure of how to set it up so that people can still play without problems while I'm in transition and/or how these new accounts will or won't be able to interact with the old accounts. So, just a warning in case you find yourself unable to log in. So another feedback item then, is whether or not you want both login and character selection at the same time or login first and then character selection.

This is a long post...but it's full of good news so it should be long. Something I constantly forget is that even though I can't play BOL from this computer at the moment, I can still play from the family computer in the next room. So, if anyone wants to play with another person online just email me to see if I'm availible, which I'll try to be as much as possible. Talking about people playing online, Videoguy and myself were the only people online in the past 24 hours, so thanks goes to Videoguy for trying. And talking about being online, this brings me to another topic which I thought of today. Since the MySQL tables keep track of whether or not a player is online, I think I could set up a little info box at the top of the site saying who was currently logged in, as well as the last person to log out, which would be cool. But, I'll wait till after I change the tables around to write that script.

So, quick recap, I would like someone to help me make a cool background for the login page. Secondly, I'd like some opinions about whether to release login and character selection in separate updates or to spend a little more time and do them in the same update. Third, if you can't login it's probably my fault, and please report it. And the fourth bullet; email me if your going to go online and would like someone to play with. Until next time!

-Mark

Well, I know that few of you read this, but I'll post anyway for the one or two people who do. I still need to spend about an hour to get the switch statements set up properly. Right now the login screen comes up, you can connect, but then you can't see the game because I still need to write some more code and finish changing all the old code to work with the new code (basically I need to write another switch statement). So, I'll do that tomorrow morning when I can think straight (hopefully). So, I'll post again tomorrow morning.

-Mark

Ok, so, as the title implies, the login screen won't be out untill this afternoon. That's all I can say because I'm out of time.

-Mark

So, I still have time but right now it doesn't exactly look good as I have 46 errors left that I haven't settled. Though, that might not mean much as I just fixed 20 errors in my last swipe. You'd be surprised how many errors can be found when going from login screen to gameplay. I'm almost tempted to get rid of server selection entirely, which I may do, but I have to go...

Ok, I've returned to finish my post. Mothers can be very demanding. But anyway, I still have 46 errors as I just got back home and it looks like it won't all get done tonight. But, you can still download the current stable version and play online without any problems. Once this login screen is done with character creation should be a lot easier to implement, and then you'll have more reasons to play. So, until tomorrow.

-Mark

So, I'm writing this from school because I'm bored. Good news, there are only 14 errors left as of this morning. Bad news, I'm not at home so I can't fix it right now. So that's the current status.

-Mark

[Later] So, now I'm home and I'll be working on those 14 errors shortly. But, I feel that I should finish my school rant. Basically, I'm fine with being bored in school, but they really need to stop trying to prevent me from doing things during my boredom. Like, for instance, I redownloaded BOL today at school, and I try to connect, and I get a "cannot connect" error. And I knew for a fact that the server was still up so it was so annoying, as you may imagine, to realize that my school was blocking be from contacting the server. Because of my anger I'll be spending the next few days at school figuring out how to route the demo through the school network. Once I figure it out I'll tell all of you so you can play from school too (of course, if it wasn't blocked for you in the first place you won't care). So that's my school rant of the week; I hate my school's network. [/Later]

So, those 14 errors kept regenerating and all in all I think I went through about 700 errors today. But, to my horror, after it finally compiled, I ran it and the login screen never showed. It just went straight to the game. And after all that work! Oh, and I just started thinking about it and I know why, it must be because I accidentally commented out one of the switch statements when I was getting rid of server selection after all the problems stemming from that. I'll get to that right after I write three pages of an English paper, a Physics lab, and some calculus homework...

-Mark

So, today, or right now, I'm playing online with a friend, and we find out that the debug information hadn't been turned off, so it was really hard to talk. So, anyway, you can get a client fix here, or the full thing here.

-Mark

And now back to the game.

For those of you who were really hoping for the login screen, I'm sorry. I haven't actually looked at that code at all today. But, now for my bug report/findings that me and Adam discovered today:

Bug #1; The clouds aren't rendering properly in todays' update, which is kind of a pain but still better then all of those debug messages. It isn't too bad, but it's all boxy, so it looks a little weird.

Bug #2; For some really strange reason, unknown to me, after playing with another person for about ten minutes they appear to stop moving. This seems to be something server-sided but I can't figure out the real cause yet. Even stranger about this though, and also kind of cool, is that while they won't appear to move they'll still spin and change directions as well as throw snowballs from their actual location (not the location from which they appear to be). This bug, though, might be client-sided, and not server-related, because it first was only happening to Adam, and then seemed to happen more frequently for him until it finally happened to me as well. What I did do to try and fix this problem is reset the server, so who knows if it will happen again. During this whole bug we were still able to talk to each other, which was a good thing.

Bug #3; Sometimes the snowballs would go through me or Adam without seeming to actually hit (there is a hit animation when such events occur). This is a bug, not an error, but I know where this one is coming from. It's from the lack of actual physics (something I'll be implementing in one of the next updates). This also caused a few collision errors, as had been reported back before this was online, but those didn't really matter as there are easy ways to get free, like hitting f1.

Bug #4; I can't think of one...that might have actually been it. If it wasn't Adam will hopefully remind me sometime.

So, all in all, the first half-hour or twenty minutes that Adam and I were able to play bug free were a lot of fun. I'll fix the login screen and then go on to getting real physics, npcs, and other models into the game.

-Mark

That's right, you read it correctly, 68 pages of code. And that's not even the entire thing. So what am I talking about? I'm talking about the massive amount of changes I'm adding to the game. In the main cpp file alone there are 3056 lines of code, which comes out to 68 pages worth. For people who've seen me lately I've been carrying around this clipboard and constantly reading code, which is kind of weird and cool at the same time. But, because of me carrying it around today I got a lot of more people interested in BOL, and they might be reading this right now, or heading over to the downloads section to try it out. For those who want to play online, you want to download this version. The only thing lacking in that version is that the clouds aren't working for some reason. So, if your obsessed with having clouds, and don't care to be online, then download this version. If any of those links aren't working then please leave a comment so I can know to fix it.

If your the only one online and feel lonely, email me and I'll play with you if I'm availible (which I usually am, though I won't be tonight). So, enjoy, have fun, and be warned: I am still in a pre-beta stage. This means that the RPG part of BOL hasn't been coded yet, that these are not the final graphics, and that there are still some errors and bugs that need to be worked out. If you have errors or find bugs please either email me, leave a comment here, or post something on the forums. For more information about the games use the links on the right -> ->

Enjoy!

-Mark

Don't ask me why I wrote that title, it has almost nothing to do with this post. But, anyway, I've been sick today and have also decided, once again, to take a break from the land of errors which is the login screen. Also, about a gui, good luck with that. Onto better news, what I have had the courage to try and fix are the clouds. Why they misteriously stopped working I'll never know. Right at this very moment what I hope to be the fix is compiling. So, I'll come back and edit this post when that great thing arises.

-Mark

[EDIT:] It didn't work. However, I was able to do another test to see that it could work, and that I didn't mess up anything in the engine. So, I'll finish fixing it tomorrow, and hopefully I'll feel better. Now for food and sleep. [/EDIT]

Other people from school were wanting links to my older games; so here they are.

Monster1 : Platformer, basic, only six levels.

MTTB Arcade : Just a basic arcade, lots of fun.

Extreme Pong : Just what it sounds like.

Fooseball : The first ever fooseball game for the computer. (still looking for where I put it)

-Mark

(p.s. links to come)

Update 12/25/06

Downloads page is integrated into the rest of the site, so now I work on dynamic links. Current Online Demo

//Outdated but partially relevant info
This page has been in need up updating for a while but I haven't really wanted to. I will eventually integrate this into the rest of the site better, but not today. This is an updated demo with the fixed gnu built in. I'm in the process of creating a better animation system so that problems like this won't happen again. The server is on its way to being fixed, and I'll update this page again at that time.

The following are particle effects that I've recorded. They are in the bink format, so you need bink and smacker to play them. One Two Three Four Five Six Seven Eight Nine Ten

Tech Demos:

This is a quick particle demo that I made. I forgot to include a help file so the basics are you use the number keys 1-0 to change particle effects, a and d to rotate the effects though this doesn't work too well, and w and s to zoom in and out though this is also kind of glitchy. Enjoy!

This is the thrid BOL demo release. This demo was suppossed to be online but it isn't because of server deaths. Download it here. It requires WinRAR. If you don't have it, head over to rarlabs.com

I realized that I should still have the original demo here too. Don't let the number 2 fool you. This was the first demo just version 2.

Ok, so recently there have been more people coming to the site, and I've had many questions as to where to download the game, where information about the game can be found, and other such things. To help those with downloading the latest version of BOL, there is now a Download the Game link over to the right. For those of you who are unclear BOL is not finished yet and what you can download is more of a demo. I'm working on adding many more features, some of you have even seen the code to prove it, but my schedule lately has not been allowing me much time, so I'm sorry for the delays. I have made a small update that fixes the scroll wheel bug where you could zoom out to forever and I've also made the loading screen more amusing. I didn't make a separate upgrade download for this one because it only addresses very minor things, so if you want to get it you'll have to redownload the whole thing. Sorry for the inconvenience.
The downloads page has finally been integrated into this portion of the site, and I've learned a few new html tricks, so I'll be trying to fix up problems with this site and make everything easier to access. If you have any ideas or thoughts as to what you'd like to see please leave a comment. I'll make a page for my older 2D games tomorrow so that those of you who wanted to see them won't always have to look to the post below.
Server news: Today during programming class my teacher was absent so I had some fun and, for the first time ever, there were four people logged on at once. Once I figure out a good way to get through the school firewall I'll create a school version of BOL so that those of you who want to play at school, who might normally get blocked, will have that opportunity. And that's all for today's update.

-Mark

I've been very distracted lately, and, as you might have realized, I haven't updated much of the site yet and I haven't released any updates. Honestly I haven't looked at the code for a little while, but npcs seem like the easiest thing to create at the moment, strange as that sounds, so I think I'll go populate the world with adorable little creatures that you can throw snowballs at.

-Mark

p.s. If you want to know the distractions, you'll have to ask :) .

I have officially finished my last day of school this year, and now have the next nine days off! But, of course everyone does, so now I'll get to the important stuff.

During school today I ran out of time, but was able to get seven computers connected to the server at once, with over 100 moving objects on the screen at any one time (me an a friend were shooting snowballs like crazy) and there was no lag. So yay for the server! By the time we have twenty people playing at once I'll have fixed the click as fast as you can unlimited snowballs bug. On another note, the npcs work, but I'm still trying to figure out how I should do their AI (for now that is). Hopefully I'll come up with an update later tonight, and have a great vacation!

-Mark

First of all, I want to wish everyone a happy Christmas:

Click Here for the full thing

And now, for my release plan: Instead of have a release everyother day, and always posting my status, I think I'm going to set dates for releasing the next update/s and then not post again until then. That way there aren't so many useless posts on my part. So, that said, the next planned release will be on christmas, when hopefully you'll be able to see little guys from the screenshot above running around. In case you didn't know that screenshot was zoomed in pretty close.

For the upcoming release of 12/25/06; The new things will include npcs, realtime shadows, a proper login screen, and character selection. The bugfixes will include the mouse wheel problem, the camera bug (the one where it goes up too high), and possibly the snowball rapid-fire (vote whether or not I should get rid of that by leaving a comment). If I have a little extra time I might even change the controlls to WSAD and/or make them customizeable for those of you who've been complaing (politely of course).

-Mark

I wasn't really thinking when I said I'd put out a new release today. Yesterday I wasn't home very much, and today I've been busy with Christmas. I'm leaving in a few minutes as well, so I'm not certain that I'll be able to get everything done in time for today, but here's what you'll definitly have by tonight:
Realtime shadows,
Mouse wheel bugfix,
Camera bugfix,
the optional WSAD control.

As for everything else: I haven't actually looked at the login screen so I'm not sure whether I'll have time to get that up or not. For npcs, the client part is finished but I still need to fix a few bugs client-side. So, even though you might not see npcs by tonight, they will be around. Also, because it's an easy thing to do, I'm going to be adding a whole lot of fuctionality in the config file, so those of you who want to see other features, or have fun playing around, can. The config file can be edited while the game is running and changes will be made in real-time (for most things anyway). So, I'm off to a Christmas party of sorts, and I'll post here again later tonight when I have a better idea as to what's going to happen.

-Mark

I don't know about all of you, but I've been having a great day. But, I won't bore you with the details. Basically, I've had less than an hour to work on this release since the last time I posted. And, on top of that because of some technical difficulties I'm currently unable to test it myself, so, long story short, I wasn't able to bring all the features to this release as I had originally planned two posts ago... but I did still get in the most functional ones :)

Release of 12/25/06:
For those of you who've been aching for WSAD you can now have it. Basically, for wsad people, there is now an option in the config file that allows you to switch from arrow keys to wsad. And, for people who aren't brave enough to change it themselves, included in the download is a WSAD.cfg that you can just rename to client.cfg if you want an easy fix. Side effects of WSAD; it will type in the command console. To help this problem you can easily erase whatever has been typed in by hitting escape or control. I'll work on better functionality when I can actually test it myself to make sure such a change would work.
There are now realtime shadows for all characters. This is turned on by default but can be turned off in the config file. In testing of this feature it seems that it might not work at all with some computers. I think that was fixed, it definitely works on my computer right now, so if you see no difference I'd like to know.
The mouse wheel and camera bugs have been fixed, as far as I can tell. If you find otherwise or find any new bugs please report them.
Another thing, clouds have been turned off as a temporary fix to their ugliness. If you liked them and still want them, however, just change cloud_count at the bottom of the config to anything besides 0.

Next release date right now will be set to this Saturday. In saturday's release I plan to put in all the features that I wasn't able to fit in this release, as well as some voice over ip action, as I now have a headset to test it with. Merry Christmas!

-Mark
(p.s. The updated everything can be found here.)

MTTB Games is a small game development company. We are made up of a few teenagers who have a passion for making and playing good games. Currently there are only five of us; one programmer, one 3d artist, one concept artist, one idea maker (friend), and one me who does everything else and all of the above. MTTB Games has the benefit of a lot of man-hours (we're just teens afterall) and no pressing need for money. That said, any donations made to MTTB Games will be much appreciated and it does help speed up development. I'm tired right now (at the time of writing this) so I'm not really sure what I should put here. [To be continued...]

-Mark

There was a small problem with Monday's release that I recently discovered so I'm sorry for any inconvenience this might have caused for those of you who had downloaded the Monday's release. It is now fixed. About shadows: They always work for other people's characters but they only sometimes work for your own character. The exact reason for this is to be determined and I'm still working on it.
In today's fix npcs are starting to become possible, but there are as of now a little spazzy. If you want to find out what I mean you can create your own by using the new command "/addBot". The parameters of addBot can be found by typing "/help addBot". As a warning: if you give /addBot the wrong parameters the client might crash, but it does give you the possibility of having more fun. Most of the issues with npcs that are left are clientsided. I hope you enjoy the fix.

-Mark

So, I said I wouldn't post again till the next release date, but I can't help myself :) . Some interesting statistics some of you might be interested in is that although the server will only allow 20 players at a time right now, the server does allow for 1999999999 npcs to be on at one time. And yes, that is in the billions, I didn't miscount. The thing is though, I don't have the time or patience to create nearly that many, nor the desire, which is why you can. All npcs created by players can be seen by other players and will remain online when you log off. Remember, this is using the /addBot command. If you decide you want to get rid of any you can just use the /removeBot command to get rid of whichever one you want. To figure out the identity of certain entities you can use the command /entities. Also, the great thing about this is that so far everything is backwards compatible with older versions, so even though older clients can't create or remove bots they can still see them (of course, they could just upgrade to get the current fix). WSAD has been tested and does work, which is something I had forgotten to check yesterday. By the time you read this there will be an edit at the bottom with a link to an even more up-to-date client. So have fun! With your help we will be able to do better stress tests of the server. And, furthermore, as the day goes on I plan to get more interaction between npcs and players working, and maybe they'll even start moving. Also, about voice-over-ip for BOL, I'm working on it but I can only do so much at once. Post any comments you might have either here, on the forum, or email them to me. Enjoy!

-Mark

[Edit: Here you are; just an update of the client itself can be found here. The entire thing can be found here.

This is like the second post in an hour, but I have nothing else to do right now :P . So, first of all make sure you read the previous post if you haven't already. I've updated the client download about four times so far today, and I'm not done yet, so if your not sure whether or not you have the latest thing just redownload it. So far the npcs are becoming much more stable (they no longer are so spazzy in their movements) but they don't all move properly. If you log on you might wonder why all the npcs have a number in their name. That's their ID, just so it's easier for me and other people later on who want to play around with them. If you accidentally try to create an npc with an ID that already exists it will give you and error and try to crash, but hitting ignore will usually get you out of it. And now for the real reason of this post; pictures!

-Mark

Here's what should be coming to the public tomorrow:

That's more then what it looks like, it's 100 npcs, an army, charging and throwing snowballs. I think I'll have them ready for everyone else tomorrow. Enjoy!

-Mark