Let's Chat!

After taking a brief vacation, I'm back working on my game.

I was heavily inspired by the Android game 'Pocket Empires' which I think is brilliantly designed.

Integrating the chat involved working with Perl, Erlang, and Java all at once, but I got it mostly done in less than a week.

Most of the time was wasted fiddling with the Android UI toolkit.

So here's a screenshot of the rough results, of course multiplayer enabled!

New Client Screenshot

After a lot of work on the game's multi-player code, I've seemed to have wrapped up most things regarding real-time movement.

Though it's not perfect, it's working quite well, so I'm posting a screenshot with 3 players on the screen at the same time.

Videos should be coming as soon as I get some time.

Status Report 2/19/10

So, after a good 6 months of development for my game it seems that things are coming along nicely.

So here's a status of how things are going:

Android 2d Engine (Completed Features):

• Loading areas and displaying rendering to screen
• Independent frame-rate animated tiles/sprites
• Pixel based camera movement
• Character/Object loading/rendering

Android 2d Engine (Upcoming Features):

• Pixel based character/movement inside the area (DONE!)
• Character idle animation
• Render strings. (i.e. player names/levels/status)
  

C++ Area Editor (Completed Features)

• Loading previously saved areas.
• Editing and saving areas.
• Editing tileset properties (Tileset Editor).
• Works on Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows.
• No immediate upcoming features.

Master Server (Completed Features)

• Validating users
• Pathfinding character movement
• Track object/character positions/status/collisions

Master Server (Upcoming Features)

• Save player information

Fun Shot!

Haha, here's a picture of my notes for handling movement in the game....

Game Editor Screenshots

And now some shots of the game editor in action....

First Client Screenshot

The first screenshot I'm uploading of my game running on an android device. More to come soon!

Android/T-Mobile G1 + Cent OS 5

Fix for udev:
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1586

WTF Am I Doing? (Non-Technical)

Growing up as a kid I always loved T.V. shows like Pokemon, Digimon, Monster Rancher, Yu-Gi-Oh! and many others.

Although I was never into the card games, I dreamed of really being able to battle monsters.

So now that I'm all grown up, I haven't forgotten about my childhood dreams. I am now a computer software developer, and it seems that I finally have the chance to make my dreams come true.

With the rising of mobile computing devices it seems like the time is ripe.
So this is what I imagine. A digital world like Digimon, filled with 'monsters' that people can battle against each other at any place and any time.

I also envision a single (expandable) digital world, where everyone can interact with everyone else. Where monsters roam free, and can be truly unique. A self-sustaining world.

So, how do I achieve this? Well, I'll use the tools that are at my disposal.
I'm choosing google's Android platform to develop the actual game. For simplicity it's going to be 2D. I already have the prototype ready, and am now in the process of integrating it with all the other parts.

Of course I'm going to need a server side program, or God.
The God is being written in erlang, it controls the world. However, it really knows nothing about it. It simply takes data in and spits data out.
This is truly the brains of the program.

I'll also need a designing program or Architect. This is heavily inspired by programs like RPG Maker. I remember building my own custom battle system for RM2K back in the days. But I digress.

I've already finished the prototype for the Architect as well, but there is a lot of work yet to be done. Since this isn't particularly exciting I've only programmed it for what I need so far, but I need do add a lot more.

So, I've gotten some of the basics done. However, as some of you will know, developing a MMORPG type game is a lot of work.
So, in the hopes of gaining a bit of extra cash I've started this blog to detail my journey.

If anyone is interested in helping you can e-mail me at therevoltingx(@)gmail.com.
I plan on making the game open-source so it can continue living when I move on to other projects. (Robots!)

Don't worry, I will retro-blog all my progress so far going back to the beginning with setting up a solid 2D game engine with android.
However, I'm concentrating on the God program at the moment, so most likely any new blog posts will be about that.

Regards,
Miguel.

RabbitMQ + Erlang Client = Yay!

UPDATE: Read the second part at:  http://developingthedream.blogspot.com/2010/08/setting-up-queue-consumer-with.html

Creating a new erlang project based on the rabbitmq erlang client.
Please take these instructions with a giant grain of salt as I am still an erlang noob.
This is how I got started on my CentOS 5 machine.
I installed erlang via yum.
Everything else is installed manually.

First, create a proper folder structure for the new project. This seems to be pretty standard in some of the erlang projects I've seen so far:

project/
project/db/
project/deps/
project/ebin/
project/include/
project/src/

Then install the latest version of rabbitmq and the rabbitmq erlang client like so:

cd deps
hg clone http://hg.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-server
hg clone http://hg.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-codegen
hg clone http://hg.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-erlang-client
cd rabbitmq-server && make && cd ..
cd rabbitmq-erlang-client && make && cd ..
ln -s /path/to/project/deps/rabbitmq-server/ /usr/lib/erlang/lib/rabbitmq_common
ln -s /path/to/project/deps/rabbitmq-server/ /usr/lib/erlang/lib/rabbitmq_erlang_client

This downloads and builds rabbitmq and the erlang client to the project's deps/ directory.
Then it links it to erlang's lib directory.

Now it's time to create a makefile to simplify building the code.

Makefile.am

.SUFFIXES: .erl .beam 
.erl.beam:  
erlc -W $< 

ERL = erl -pa ebin -boot start_sasl -s rabbit -mnesia dir 'db' 
ERLC = erlc -o ebin 
MODS = src/consumer.erl 
all:  
${ERLC} ${MODS} 
run:  
${ERL} 
clean:  
rm -rf ebin/*.beam erl_crash.dump 

Now we're ready to go and write a consumer using the erlang client, coming up next.