Zania week 10: Inventory

The current test web deployment with laser equipped and god mode enabled can be found here: http://www.alongside.me/zania/ Requires flash 10 and uses GPU to do the calculation. My crappy AMD runs at around 20%.

My timing seems unfortunate, as tech bubble 2.0 is gearing into full throttle.Â When articles of people not related to tech moving into tech for money appears, it is a sign that the count down to d-day has begun. Millions of dollars are being invested in companies founded around the idea of a feature instead of a fully fleshed out product. Yes, we’ve learned from the tech bubble of 2000, but that only educated a certain demographics of investors. Those that didn’t get hurt in tech 1.0 are bound to repeat history along with new bloods.

I give myself 1~3 years, before the whole thing goes out of control. 1 year if the accelerated gyration of the stock market due to algorithm trading is true, 3 years as a safe estimate because I often miscalculate the general investment public’s prescience by applying my own to them. BUT, in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter. There’s a bigger obstacle to overcome which overshadows the boom and bust cycle of political Tourettism. The omnipresent statistics which says 95% of new companies fail in 5 years.

As such, I determined that revenue should come first before I go for the cool factor and popularity. I’ve given some thought to the next stage after the first demo on flash and determined that I need to push this out to apple iPad first and then perhaps iPhone. The reason why I chose Mac as opposed to Android is because GOOG is getting sued by AAPL while AAPL is getting sued by some patent troll Llodsys. My financial instinct tells me that a Patent troll will eventually get squashed by APPL while GOOG will suffer tremendously, besides, the 0.05% stakes that the patent trolls are asking is not as disastrous as the possibility to have the whole platform disappear. To do the deployment, I will need an original investment of a Mac Mini and a first generation iPad. A Mac mini goes for about $200 on Craigslist and a refurbished iPad goes for $340, $300 if I can find it on Craigslist. So, the focus of my first release, will be to generate $500 as a goal in order to bootstrap to the next level. The bootstrap should start once $200 is gathered since I have an iPhone for deployment testing. I should be able to get a feel of the environment while waiting for the next block of $300 to be generated to see if iPad deployment is more important.

Complete

Improve physics engine
Equip function for different type of ammo
- Overhauled weapon.xml structure
- Created test function RayCast for lasers
- Lasers created, but at the wrong offset, wrong rotation and wrong length.
- This is related to the radian to cartesien translator I made for bullets creation. Looks like math time.
- OMG!!!! The drawing was correct. It is just not tracking the camera movement.
- After tweaking, here’s the formula to track the laser position to the player’s GUI:
  - Zania.m_hud.graphics.moveTo(Â -Zania.m_hud.GetX() + p1.x * CONFIG::PHYSSCALE,Â -Zania.m_hud.GetY()+ p1.y * CONFIG::PHYSSCALE);
    Zania.m_hud.graphics.lineTo( -Zania.m_hud.GetX() + (p2.x * lambda + (1 – lambda) * p1.x) * CONFIG::PHYSSCALE, -Zania.m_hud.GetY() + (p2.y * lambda + (1 – lambda) * p1.y) * CONFIG::PHYSSCALE);
- AI and other entity’s lasers does not track correctly.
- The physics body for the AI ships were blocking the raycasting. So the ray was immediately blocked at 0,0. Need to add offset in the future.
- Boom and it works. I am very happy
- Realized that lasers are a fundamental part of the game world. Affects a lot of stuff. How am I going to count damage?
- With the completion of laser, a whole new world of possibilities opened. I could allow the laser to split physics bodies if I want, but should probably keep myself to just doing damage for now. Will sleep on this.

Incomplete

Change xml loading to relative path instead of absolute path.
Fix RayCast problem with compound object
Add damage to Laser type weapons
Forced to revisit contact events and Damage assignment. The new physics engine changed that drastically, also, laser damage needs a separate event for itself.
Add offset for weapons position in ship
Move bullet creation to actor construction.
AI calculation on where to turn is a bit off when player is positioned at the 2nd quadrant (and directly at negative y axis) compared to the AI.
GUI health bar not decreasing correctly fully, also, health count drops to negative before counting is terminated
Determine which class should be the one retaining weapon ID
- Actor? Ship? Player? AI?

Reviewed milestone

Core: Physics based space shooter
GUI: Health, ammo, radar, inventory
Graphics: B/W vector graphics
Music: 1 track repeated

Original Milestone

One player ship and one ai ship artwork finished along with their xml data (Art + some programming)
~~Hitpoints, body existence timer and actor destruction (Hardcore Programming)~~
One planet orbiting the sun. (Hardcore Programming)
GUI placement (Art + menial Programming): ~~Health bar~~, ammo count, ~~radar~~, inventory
Booster animation (Art + Math + some programming)
Populated galaxy (menial programming)
Dynamic graphics loader for background? (Cleverness)