Older blog entries for ingvar (starting at number 155)

So, I got distracted by making a "mushroom name framework" (currently, alas, only listing English, Swedish and Latin names for assorted mushrooms; also in need for some explanatory exposition, I guess).

However, there's a couple of "Compiler notes" when compiling with SBCL and with Lispworks personal. THose who have the source URL can, at will, grab a fresher tarball. Not quite at a stage where everything is as should be (for one, there's information in the status bar that sould go away).

I'm hoping to be ready for a release comes Friday.

Code-cleanup. Whittling away at the compile warnings, one by one (as long as it's "only notes and style-warnings" I'm not to worried, but...)

Monster generators now work. There's been reports of assorted compilation issues "in the wild", these will be looked at and hopefully resolved by the weekend.

Keyboard repeat problem: fixed.

Unfortunately, I've spotted another problem, for some reason, the list of monster generators isn't maintained properly. This means that I don't get monsters when I would've expected it.

Left to do:

• more maps
• power-ups (alas, this means more graphics...)
• multi-player

Not much news. Found a problem (keyboard repeat makes things FUNKY), but there's a fairly simple work-around (make keyboard not repeat while window has focus, if I can get events for that (otherwise, wait until pointer is in window) and set it to whatever it was when not). Other than that, it seems to work well single-player, to the point where I now have some information properly webbed (here).

Next: fix keyboard repeat problem, more maps, look at multi-player.

So, map problem found, I'd managde to miss TWO FULL LINES of map data. That fixed, testing happened. Bad (and I mean bad) flicker in the animation. That's because I tried to remove an earlier "the feet are not over-drawn". So, in with a second clip-mask for each animation. Problem solved. More testing showed smooth non-flickering animation, but once I got to the latest etst-map, things bombed out, badly. I've now changed the "map from map character data to in-game type" code to default to whatever keyword is fed, unless it's a keyword requiring special handling. I'll also stick in a slightly better handling of "don't know how to map this, honest", but taht's for tomorrow. Unfortunately, "time to head to office" arrived before I could recompile and test so taht too will have to wait until tomorrow morning.

DOH! Had a very (very) strange bug yesterday. "Class :TREASURE not found" (the DEFCHECKER macro has been re-worked slightly, so as to fulfil my actual needs and have less impact on existing code, unfortunately, I ended up with " ,type" instead of " ,typespec" in the one place where type is (at all) mentioned. "Oooops!"

Not to worry, that is now fixed. Of course, there's (at this instance of time) some more errors, though I'm aiming to have a compiles-cleanly, working codebase by the time I need to head for the office (I shall ignore the redefinition style warnings, they're de rigeur when compiling anything large in the same image as last time around; there's a "you're re-defining constants" warning in that same class).

*Sigh* Compiles fine, didn't run fine. The re-org of the data storage affected maps as well as bitmap images, so map-loading failed miserably. As an added bonus, it seems at least one map is corrupted.

Still not much further along. "Health" packs are in-game. Monster generator #1 has graphics and partial collisions. Exact method for handling is NOT decided., yet. I'm expecting a hash table in my not-too-distant future. I also ended up with a new version of the "generate collision-detect code" macro, so I can go "no, in general there's no collisions wit this, but for these types of game objects...".

Semi-related, I snagged a check-out of Portable-CLX over the weekend, but my tuits went square roughly in-betwen "install DARCS and check out" and "look at implementing Big-Request support" (road-map half-way exists, though; I'm also wondering if I should add in my (fairly small) support for X-on-Win32, boils down to one special variable and one extra place to check for display specification).

Interesting stage. I have keyboard interactivity, I have a status display (with some info that needs taking away, I really don't need to have player co-ordinates nor view-port offset displayed once I get closer to a finished version). I still have some annoying animation glitches. I don't, yet, have any way of increasing player helath. Taht's probably OK, because there are no monsters, either.

I'm very much in two minds when it comes to monsters. I can see making "monster generators" (possibly as floor tiles, even). I can see placing single monsters on the playing-filed. However I do it, no solution is a neat fit. Ah, well.

W00t! Keyboard input (well, OK, movement-only so far, I'll look at getting firing to work, once the rest of the bugs are ironed out.

Beeeeh! Seems as if the "scroll underlying game playing area so player is as close to the middle as possible" was amusingly buggy. Didn't show up in my original test map, but withte latest one it shows up with a vengeance. Will have to look at that, possibly tomorrow.

Also "Beh". Not had a chance to look at "BIG-REQUESTS" extension support for CLX yet. I have a vague plan, namely "check for server-side support in or sufficiently-close to display-opening", "check the xlib:display class for ``supported extensions´´ and stuff in an indicator there" and "compute if a given request takes more/less than the water-shed". I have a horrible feeling that I might have to ask someone to send me a suitable test case, since it should only appear at a fairly high-cornered PolyLine (4-corner-stupid? nah, try 32764-cornered) or PolyArc requests (X Image Extension was also mentioned, but I don't think I even have a server to test with).