People were right. I was pointlessly reinventing the wheel in an attempt to make something that nobody would’ve used anyway.

I discontinued Brockoly.

I was hitting major roadblocks, and redoing code that I didn’t really want to rewrite from the bottom up. I would never finish by myself in this lifetime.

However, I still assert that I learned a fair deal while suffering of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome. I learned how to write C++ code better, and how to do slightly-complicated software image blitting techniques. I also took a heavy inspection of ways to structure internal file formats like sprites, tilesets, and maps (which I am actually interested in — and what threw me into making my own engine to begin with).

But this madness stops.

Now.
 
 
 
From now on, this engine know-how should be invested smartly. I should be fixing things that are already out there. Things that just need improvement. Fix the wheel, don’t make a new one.

Verge is a great candidate for this. It’s already enough-to-make-games-with, just needs a push to make the whole ordeal of making a fully-fledged game a less tedious experience.

I think the internal engine stuff should be improved. And now let me go on about how.

Entities must have custom animation strands.

The .chr file format itself should allow animations to be scripted. This way you don’t need to write a custom animation system on top of Verge’s. This means that you can tell your hero to strike a victory pose without having to hardcode “F10W10F11W10B” and such in your engine — and it allows sprite editor to handle all sprite animation instead of HAVING to write out code for it.

Entities and Layers should be referrable by name.

So you don’t need to memorize index numbers. So now you can say in your script something like “Move Bob” instead of “Move Entity 34″, or “Change the rooftop transparency” instead of “Change the transparency of Layer 23″. It keeps you a lot more sane, and prevents scripting mistakes from creeping in.

Obstructions, Entities and Zones should be on each Layer.

Allow every layer on the map to have an obstruction channel, zone channel and entity channel. Instead of ONE obstruction layer, ONE zones layer, and so on. This, in turn, allows you to have bridges that you walk both above and below, without hacky tricks.

Maps need Waypoints.

Waypoints would be for a single spot on a map that have a name (constant lookup by name) and allow you to work it into your scripts quite easily. It would allow tile regions on a Layer to be referred to by name.

This is different from a zone, because Zones are for many spots on the map that all share the same events (constant lookup by (x, y) position).

Additionally, this single name to single position mapping means it’s ideal for pathfinding!
 
 
 
So say you have a water fountain, and you want your player to walk towards it. Currently, you need specify an exact path to walk to the fountain through a series of EntityMove(player, "X10Y11U10L10") like commands probably with a bunch of if statements and stuff.

Contrast this with just saying something like EntityMoveTo(player, "fountain"), which could pathfind automatically. It could be pretty quick about its search, and maybe have a restraint on distance to pathfind from, after which you could chain a bunch of Waypoints together and move from point to point.
 
 
 
Perhaps more interesting is, say, when you have a bunch of treasure chests on a map.

You can use zones for their activation on map, and waypoints for actually telling where the chest IS on the map, so you don’t hardcode positions.

So when you return to the map later, and need to set tiles for all the chests again, you can change the tiles at the waypoints! As opposed to needing to write coordinates in your map startup event, which gets messy quickly.

LuaVerge needs to be faster.

LuaVerge, the new twist on Verge, which has Lua instead of VergeC for scripting. Lua’s a language that I figure could replace VC at some point, because it’s much more expressive, and less restricted. LuaVerge has a lot of potential.

Sadly the potential that has gone sour by the fact that the LuaVerge is several magnitudes slower than the VC version right now. Surprisingly, the problem isn’t Lua, or its helper LuaBind. It’s our code that glues Lua into Verge. It was supposed to be fixed a long time ago, but I never figured out how to represent array-of-structure like things through LuaBind directly.

LuaVerge needs to play nice with packfiles.

Right now Lua scripts need to be outside of .vpk files, because otherwise they can’t be included by Lua. In short, this means people who release demos have to include source, which could be fun-ruining. Also I respect peoples’ desire to have their code stay private, just so nobody outright steals stuff.

This is probably a fairly easy fix, just make the Lua code use verge’s I/O stuff instead of the <stdio.h> library that comes with C. Kind of hairy though, since you need modify Lua itself.

I need write tutorials for vx.

So, vx (Verge eXtension) is my little code library that makes LuaVerge even nicer to use. The problem is, I need to write a tutorial on how to use it. Unexplained code means very few people are going to jump on it.

This brings me to my next point…

I need to entice people to switch over to LuaVerge.

Right now almost nobody uses LuaVerge, and I know that’s mostly because nobody has been encouraged or taught how to use it. So we need to get people interested in the newer Verge and to demonstrate how it’s better. Ey, ain’t that right, Kildorf, ustor?
 
 
 
Anyway, that’s a lot to think about. Hopefully I can redeem myself of my grand suckitude. School is murdering me, so I want my dev time to be useful and rewarding. That is all.

Tags: brockoly, gruedorf, lua, LuaVerge, verge, vx