2D Minecraft (teaser screenshots)

[ttm]

Here are 3 screenshots from a game I would be working on if not for Bio homework . I'll post it when I'm done, prolly.
http://imgur.com/a/cauvC
If someone can find or make me a Steve sprite sheet formatted like the last image that would be great.
(The 9 means 9 ms per frame)

[Raknarg]

Im curious, so how does your terrain generation work right now?

[ttm]

(Why does everyone ask that?) Rand.Int, some nodes here and there, and some of this.

[Raknarg]

Why because it's a point of interest. Everything on minecraft is rather basic, that's the only real interesting part

[jr5000pwp]

I wish you good luck on this, I did one when I was learning turing and it turned out pretty decent, my terrain was simple 1D perlin noise, but my mistake was I used Rand.Int for my random numbers instead of a noise function, thus making my chunks non-connective. Of course I've been working on one in C#/XNA and I can tell you it's way more powerful. I can do practically anything and maintain 60 FPS. Smooth Lighting, Explosions, you name it. That being said, I would highly recommend using this same project to help you into a new language, I used it to get into C#/XNA, and I can say I am very comfortable with the language now.

One thing I would recommend is doing your animation the way minecraft does it, manually animating the parts. It isn't hard to rotate images in turing, so why not just rotate the individual parts? This also gives the really cool feature of support for skins native to minecraft. I think minecraft uses a Sin curve for the arm/leg animation, but you can also calculate angles based on pivot points and distance.

I could give you tons of tips on exactly how to do everything in making a minecraft game, even as far indepth as how to use 2D perlin noise for better terrain with cliffs and overhangs, or how to make impressive explosions, or how to do collision for objects with non-square shapes (ex stairs), or how to make collision change with metadata (Stairs, Slabs, Doors, Water), or how to optimize your collision to support hundreds of entities, or how to make a skeleton AI. But that would ruin your learning experience, wouldn't it?

[ttm]

Thanks.
I coogled perlin noise and found this. The Cubic Interpolation section looks pretty much like what I'm using right now, and I doubt Perlin noise will be much of an improvement over it.
I've known C# for 5 years now and like it less and less as time passes. Yeah, XNA is a great entry into game dev and happens to be how I wrote my first games, before having Turing crammed down my throat by ICS2O. Hmm... a new language... idk, name one? I feel like I already have all my coding niches filled.
It might not be hard to rotate images in Turing but it's slow and looks like shit. I'll consider it nonetheless.
I'm sure you have lots of tips, good for you.
I checked out your FlatCraft program and it broke. (Something about an index out of range somewhere on line 1600-something at H:/some-path-or-other). I don't actually own Minecraft, so your blocks.txt and Recipes.txt will probably be helpful, ty.
(I guess I should probably give you feedback on it: Your camera being hard fixed on the player is mindbogglingly annoying; movement/jumping is slow and awkward; your terrain generation is too flat for my liking; your lack of a 2nd layer makes houses look weird and too hollow; your day/night cycle is very poorly implemented; frequency issues (trees, etc); lighting is quite awkward; there's no water; there's no redstone circuitry; there's no multiplayer. Otherwise, decent game. Excellent use of data files; everyone should do this. Definitely work on user interfacing though. (That menu screen...))

[jr5000pwp]

I don't necessarily think that fixing the camera on the player is a bad thing, in my new version it is fine (refer here if you wish: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-PqVfBM7Ck), but yeah, I agree with what you have said, and I also think it is a horrible game, as I started it with no experience and at the end I would have had to rewrite 90% of it, but it shows that someone with no experience can make something decent using turing.

As for C#, it's all about personal preference, some people like C or C++, and I hate them, but it's preference, use what works best with you.

About the rotating of images, at a certain point 2 angles will look the same, so why not just store a few images of different rotations (No more than 45 should be necessary) and just draw those, there shouldn't be a memory problem as they are very small images and you only need to make 1 set of them per texture (All zombies can share a set of textures)

[ttm]

Oops I meant that it was annoying in that it felt not smooth. For example, in mine the camera (center of screen) advances (something like) something% closer to the player each frame, so it has more of a, well, maplestory-like feel to it, and less tied-to-a-rocking-boat. And nevermind, I didn't see your update -- Fabulous, 11/10 would definitely play. The only minor things I can think of are, in mine I drew a 2px black line on borders between blocks in the foreground and blocks in the background to make it more obvious what's in each layer, and I drew a tool radius to show how far you can reach. Your sky is a bit empty but it matches the theme I guess. Also, I find a 3 block high jump works the best. (Terraria has 3 block jump too, I hear.) Otherwise, fantastic.
Yeah definitely. Turing is the best for teaching and making little games like these.
Because I'm paranoid about running out of available images. 1000 sometimes feels like 10. The walls are closing in. Something like that.

[jr5000pwp]

The one on youtube is a new one in C#, not turing, the turing one was abandoned.

For jump height I have it controlled by a single float variable, meaning that I can change 1 variable and have jump height at any height I want, I've played around and I personally like 2 high, but at the same time I could do a spring boots type thing where you could put on a special pair of boots and jump 3 or 4 blocks.

As for foreground and background, I've been trying to figure out the best way to do it, I find that it is fairly noticeable when the background is 33.3% darker than the foreground, but I will definitely look into the border method.

The sky isn't finished whatsoever, I've been constantly trying to figure out the best way to do it and I have gotten nowhere. The main problem is that anything I draw in the sky will be 26% brightness, so I'd have to do something weird for the moon and stars.

I don't have a reach distance yet either, mainly due to laziness, but I use the excuse that it makes it easier to debug things.

And I'm not sure if I've mentioned, yours looks very good for turing, way better than what I had, good job, I hope yours ends out better than mine did.

[ttm]

Obviously--Turing can't possibly have such lighting effects. I used http://www.planetminecraft.com/texture_pack/ocd-pack/ as my texture pack. Notice here how the border between foreground and background is a gradient -- maybe try something like this?
My sky is a sinusoidal slider between two shades of blue with stars fading in and out and some clouds of various speeds here or there. Meh.
If you (or I) ever implement Redstone, I imagine it to be a 3rd layer behind (or in front of) the map where you can enter blueprint mode, draw the circuitry, and then return to the game and have the circuitry work in the background.

[jr5000pwp]

I noticed you used FVDisco's pack, yes.

For redstone, I was thinking of just simply doing 1 layer, most gates in the game are possible 1 wide, so therefore they are possible in 2D, I would also add gate blocks such as AND, OR, RS-NOR etc. However, a blue print mode might not be such a bad idea, it would remove the ugly wiring you see and would make it a lot easier to manipulate inputs and outputs.

Oh, and about the previous thing, I forgot about turings 1000 image limit, that changes a lot of things, I don't know how you do your lighting, but if you do it like I did it, you end up with a bunch of images for different shades and that can use up a bunch of images fast.

Also, if you want to include mountainous terrain in your game, I would recommend looking into a system that generates 2D perlin noise (or a similar function such as simplex) to make the terrain. The way this works is that you have your general 2D smooth noise map, and you go for each block (or every few if you are interpolating) and add some number determined by the min and max of the terrain. For example, if I wanted my terrain to be from 64 to 72, my number would be something like: (y-68)/4 or (y-average)/range. This would force anything above 72 to be air and anything below 64 to be stone. This produces really cool mountainous regions, and standard flatlands, however, as far as I know, it forces you to use a biome system to determine the minimum and maximum heights of the biome. I would look into it if you want very easy, yet cool terrain.

[mirhagk]

If you do implement redstone, I think the coolest thing you could add would be a computer component. Basically let the user write little scripts (either in game, or in their own editors and just drop in a folder) and then load those into the computer. The computer could work with either 4 inputs or 4 outputs, and would just provide a compact way to add some complex functionality to logic circuits.

With turing you'd have to roll your own scripting language, and hence wouldn't be worth it, but with C# you can simply use Roslyn http://blogs.msdn.com/b/csharpfaq/archive/2011/12/02/introduction-to-the-roslyn-scripting-api.aspx which lets user use either C# of VB.NET to write scripts. You could also use another scripting language if you'd prefer (Lua is common, but python is also easy, and there is lots of support for python on .net, look at iron python)

[way2smrt]

Wait, you're in the programming club at Bell HS right? I remember you showing us that exact game for a bit.

[ttm]

way2smrt @ Sun Oct 06, 2013 10:43 am wrote:

Wait, you're in the programming club at Bell HS right? I remember you showing us that exact game for a bit.

Shhhh nobody needs to know where I go
Move on now, NSA?no personal information to see here.