moonman

[eigenbom]

Hey guys, I just released a really early alpha of the sfml2 game I've been working on this year.



It's called moonman, and is a 2d platformer minecraft-like. You can grab it from here, with more info available at this thread.

[Zephilinox]

I heard of this name before somewhere, best of luck to you

[eXpl0it3r]

I heard of this name before somewhere, best of luck to you

Maybe because of this, this or this?
I defently recognized the art style again back from the "Who Are You" thread and the website.

Although it maybe a bit annoying to maintain two diffrent threads I'd still suggest you put links to the most recent download in here to.
So if anyone wants to download it, here you go: Moonman 0.1 (Windows)

As you've stated over there with:

Jumping onto sloped ground may cause physics issues

I guess you mean rather a collision detection problem at higher speed, right?
Like this:


Also it's kind of odd that you can mine any block within reach. I mean how do you manage to mine around the blocks in front of you?

Other than that it looks really good!

[eigenbom]

Thx guys!

eXploit3r -- Yeh I wrote my own collision code, and the stuff for slopes is still a work in progress. Although I'm seriously considering switching to box2d at some stage.

And there was a link in the original post, but I'll make it bigger.

[Zephilinox]

How did you implement lua in your code? LuaBind? could you show me a simple example? I've been trying to run lua 5.2 but there are no tutorials for it even though it has been out for half a year.

[eXpl0it3r]

I'm not sure what he's using but Diluculum seems to be quite a nice "binding" and I've know a project that is using it. Although I give you any code the homepage and it's documentation should be quite enough.

[Nexus]

Nice! I love exploration games like Knytt and some others from Nifflas, I can only encourage to add such elements to your game

Some remarks:

• As you probably know, there are some collision bugs.
• When one zooms out, the game becomes really slow. I think technically it should be well possible to optimize the rendering of tiles. Do you use sf::VertexArray?
  
• That's rather a personal opinion, but I can imagine that a longer journey through the ground quickly becomes annoying, because one has to repeatedly click three tiles every time one advances a tile. You could think about a possibility to automate that (perhaps available at advanced game progress).

How did you implement lua in your code? LuaBind? could you show me a simple example? I've been trying to run lua 5.2 but there are no tutorials for it even though it has been out for half a year.

A week ago, I wanted to do the same thing, with no success. After I tried Lua 5.1 with luabind, which works well so far.

[StormWingDelta]

No clue why but for some reason my computer chokes on the game. The whole screen for the game goes blurry-lined and doesn't play for some reason. Any Ideas why since I'm at a loss on this one?

[eXpl0it3r]

No clue why but for some reason my computer chokes on the game. The whole screen for the game goes blurry-lined and doesn't play for some reason. Any Ideas why since I'm at a loss on this one?

Stop posting this under all the game threads, it's obviously something with your computer and not with the games. -.-

[Tank]

Nexus & Zephilinox:
I *really* recommend Diluculum if you can live with Lua 5.1. I tried so many bind libraries and always hit the edge, got 5000% more compile time, missed features and whatnot. If you're looking for a really simple to use and rather low-level binding library without too much bloat, I highly suggest taking a look at Diluculum -- which is btw. maintained by a very nice person, had some e-mail conversation with him.

I'm using it in my game and it's really straightforward and fast.

[eigenbom]

Thx for checking out the demo guys.

@Zephi, yeh I'm using luabind. I used it for a prev project (fugu), and it does the job.

@stormwingdelta I bet you have onboard Intel video? If so, I'm looking at a workaround atm to fix some issues people are having. (Related to this.)

@Nexus Thanks for the notes, yeh I love Nifflas too, and plan to steal some ideas

I use render textures for large 256x256 block chunks which only update once the terrain changes, purely so I could zoom out and have it run fast (runs at 60fps on max zoom on my mid-entry vaio.) What are the specs of your machine/gfx, and did you have lighting enabled when you were zoomed out? And was the slowness caused everytime you mined/placed a block, or every single frame?

And I think I agree with you about having to mine three blocks underground, I'll look at speeding up the mining rate..

[SoulBlade]

I love it!  Great work!

I'm wondering if you could explain some of your technique with rendering?  I'd love to learn more about what you do here; it runs so smoothly!

Overall, great job and I'm looking forward to see more from you.

[eigenbom]

I love it!  Great work!

I'm wondering if you could explain some of your technique with rendering?  I'd love to learn more about what you do here; it runs so smoothly!

Thx, glad you like it!

I spent a little while on getting the rendering system running quickly, and I think it performs as well as it does because it a) caches chunks of blocks, lighting, etc., into render textures, and b) culls those chunks outside of the viewport. Technically I've got chunks of 256x256 blocks which each map to one render texture (of size 2048x2048). Then whenever a block is changed, its subchunk (16x16 block region) is redrawn into the render texture. There's some tricky business with notifying adjacent blocks when drawing a block whose visual depends on its neighbours, but that's the gist of it!

Also, here's a gif of a fluid system i'm building atm (amongst other things!)

[eigenbom]

Update: New build is available.



Changelog for v0.2
Added a program launcher
Added water simulation (press middle mouse to unleash water!)
Added porous blocks
Added foreground blocks (e.g., vines)
Reduce mining distance
Many bug fixes

Download: http://moonman.io/files/moonman 0.2.zip
(You may need to get vcredist_x86 too.)

[eXpl0it3r]

Nice!

But now I can't fall through the surface that easily anymore.

But it's still possible, for instance if you take image above and just walk to the left into the water and then as far left as possible. The moonman's head will then be stuck in the wall and if you jump it's sometimes possible to fall down.
Additionally the tools go through the wall and you can pickup stuff that you didn't even reach yet (maybe it's a feature who knows? ).

Keep the good work up!