[page 0020] ~ Game 00 KISS:

Like a vale being drawn from my eyes.

Just to whet the whistle, I dove into HUD-On once more and found that, it is really really cool and very very messy. Giving it a month long kiss wouldn’t even begin to get it ready for the January feed.  One pad, many requests.  I know there isn’t a help file, so I’ll save time by not even looking for it.  In the game the camera has two modes, the ChaseCamera and the SampleArcBall camera.  These two eat up a lot of the players controller interfaces; buttons, joysticks, triggers, . . ., thereby having each mode overlap the other, and therefore they each become a different game state.  Hmmm, game state again.  The mini-map is working well, the scale works and the position of the ship in 3D space and on the 2D mini-map match, and the mini-map fade out, just to get a little more screen real-estate, is only still slightly visible when at full dim, all is good.  I concur, giving variables a “<summary> /* comment */” is a good thing.  A flowchart would be so much better, but C’est la vie.   HUD-On is as good as it gets for now.  Double hmm.  No rules?  This game is done.  OGAM bound.

“But what does it do?”

OK, it isn’t exactly done, yet.  I won’t have as much a head start as a whole month, so what does it need?  What does it have now so I’ll have a game.  Start the game, and, Not that button!  That’s the game exit button.

Alright: The ‘back’ button is exit.  The ‘start’ button is switch ships.  And now, for the two game states; ChaseCamera = CC, and SampleArcBall = SAB.  To switch back and forth between the two modes, press the ‘Y’ button in either mode.  Back in CC, to get the ship to initially move, hold down the right trigger and tap the right joystick forward, kinda like holding in the clutch when you start a manual shift car.  If the ship is ever going a zero speed it has stalled so the same procedure is used to start it going again.  This can only be done in CC, not SAB, true, I can see the overloading in action.  And that’s really funny.  While trying to switch back and forth between the game window and notepad using Alt+Tab, instead of only switching out of the running game, I have a command prompt that has also popped up in HUD-On.  Having an idea of the structure of the parts of this game, my best guess is that it has to do with [page 0004] and the PerformanceMeasuring sample, I think.  And how to exit the command prompt?  Unknown Command – CMD>.  I really don’t know, nothing I type in works.  Going to the IDE – Find and Replace CMD, and the victim is, Find All.  Matching lines: 20    Matching files: 4    Total files searched: 61.  This looks promising, cmd.callback(this, command, args); it might be something to look into, later.  Ah-yes, I commented out the command strings, in effect gutting the performance measuring part of the sample, using only the spheres, their collision aspects and of course their movement routines.  I get it, don’t press Alt+Tab now unless you like to have the command prompt covering the screen for the entirety of the play, unless you would rather it be there until you exit the game, did I say game.  Yes, it’s a game!  My January Game, game 00, my first game.  \o/.  Or maybe it was SpaceWar II, nah, that was a dry run.  But I could throw it in, in a pinch, just in case, later on.  The proverbial ace in the hole.  Or maybe, no ace, no face, no trump – a granny hand, not to be confused with a Granny Hand in Sheepshead but not Schafkopf.

OK, more button stuff.

Or, never mind.  If you press Alt+Tab again the command prompt does go away by itself, but it still makes the window call and switches notepad back to TopMost, my bad, whatever.  Change of plan, its just easier to leave the game and notepad off center over each other and then just mouse click on whichever window, to set its focus back to true.  That works.  Now more button stuff like, nope, more game play stuff like I fly a ship around the playing field and run the ship into the spheres that float around the map.  When I hit a sphere, it becomes a geodesic dome and sinks to the ground to become a colony.  In a two player game this could have some substantial connotations.  But for now, the game is only one player, MyI, me flying the ship, seek out the spheres, collide with them and letting them to sink within a given time limit.  I’ll need a timer.  There’s a timer in SpaceWar II that I know of, like a flash.  Whoa, don’t set Fraps to start a movie capture with the video capture hotkey set to the space bar, “Space”, and then type this blog.  You know how many files you end up with?  Lots, 202 for 39.1 GB.  LOL.  I always wanted to say that, just couldn’t find the right idiom . . .  Back in SpaceWar II, I’ll grab a TimeSpan and follow its “Go To Definition” and “Find All References”, OR maybe GameTime.  GameTime does get me into the Update method.

Like a whale being drawn from the skys, not the “Fail Whale”, nor the “Narwhal”.

It looks like I’m back in the groove so its time for hyper drive, take a deep breath and dive into the coding mantra place that gets things done.  I think I’ve got a game for January.  No rules, now that’s great fun.  And again: \o/

G’day.