Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Active Bricks

Active silver blocks have been successfully created. I have to learn more about the behaviour of inactive stone walls before I move on to completing the primary set which will be the mother code for all the other active blocks. Took me the whole day to figure this out. Previous active/inactive block systems seem to rely on the inactive walls being 'walk through' bricks which I would like to avoid using. Furthermore, the present 'walk through' bricks do not allow bricks to stack vertically while building unless there is an interfacing tile next to it.

Good night

P.S. I have not watched any anime series for more than a week now. Troubling thought that.

Monday, March 26, 2012

The Transport Drill

Before even undertaking this project there are several things that I need to take into consideration which will prevent this drill from becoming a game breaker. These will be:

  • The Drill will only dig through the --what I qualify-- as soft ores, woods and stones. This will prevent from cheap ore farming
  • It will be crafted from logical items namely (This list is very tentative):
    • a couple of drills
    • lots of Iron bars
    • lots of cables
    • gelo because it has not many uses but you could glue things with it (yeah.. i know..lame)
    • glass for the portholes
    • lava bucket to solder things (yeah..i know..logical)
    • Book (you need an instructions manual - how else do make your bloody Gundams)
  • It will be craftable only on the tinkerers station possibly if the mechanic is close by
The end result will need to be a 4 person fully controllable vehicle that can move in the vertical and horizontal axes. Custom sounds and all the fanfare. Not sure if it will travel through lava yet, but probably not.

Now a few limitations present themselves from the base game:
  • Rotational movement physics does not exist (diagonal sprites??)
  • No vehicles exist and multiplayer vehicle means 3 people tiddling their fingers while the other drives them into lava (maybe they need to be holding the gelo that powers it)
  • what happens to the player sprites during travel
  • How do they get off the transport?? default to behind dig path spawn??
I have quite a few milestones ahead of me. While crafting mechanics is not an issue, it was probably the easiest part of this project.

The second milestone will be the movement physics which I will test out on playable characters first. The movement involves rotating the transports and then probably propelling using the jump key. This is very similar to a real swimming mechanism where the character actually turns rather than move vertically forward when in liquid and propulses itself with its legs when one presses jump. So this mod will be called real swim, where the swim physics will knock out 2 milestones which is movement physics and the diagonal sprite situation. If this real swim works we will be able to move forward with this. Excited.

If you guys have any suggestions just want to tell me to give up please comment below and share on fellow terraria community friends pages

May the Cybergod bless this cyber dog


Modding Terraria

So after testing out that I can make a coin out of wood with a couple of programming lines, I set off with a few projects in mind based on my own consumption of Terraria. While building is more my focus as a standalone consumer, Terraria provides a platform for interaction/ranting/trolling/laughing/messing about with the old 4. If I am able to I will try to get screens of the destroyed never completed dojo in which we had the funnest PVP in a long time (where the funnest part was probably when Shura just randomly started bombing the dojo while me and TZ were building it -_-. I did not find it funny then but meh control freaks), if Shura allows, that is, he owns the map.

I have plans on duplicating the Castle in the Sky and putting it through a bombing session before we PVP in there. It is only fare (nods to fortify his conviction in the idea).

Diversion

While I have a couple of specific items that I want to create to make the castle complete namely:

  • Active *enter any ore name* Brick
  • Active Books
  • Side Wall Candle holders that can be activated
  • Jail Doors
  • Switch only Doors/Jail doors (that cannot be open by clicking so blood moon zombies can't open them)
  • Multi Cables to create coded Island Entrance (credit to Lauren's point and click puzzles for that idea)
  • Chains rather than modern switches
  • Block switches


I also want to create some world exploration 'essentials'. These consist mostly of vehicles:


  • Transport Drill:

I have already made an initial sprite from scratch. This is a clear reference to the transport module Shredder and his sidekicks use in TMNT animated series. This is purely fan based work and I don't claim any copyright but if you want to use anything that is not yours, be polite, ask for permission and thank the owner.



















  • Stargate - To teleport from one spot to another. They will operate on a code system so multiple gate can be present on a map.
  • Bouncy Terrain Buggy - with a rotative physics to make fun and annoying travels or even races.
  • Either a ridable Pegasus or a gelo powered jet bike, to get to aerial areas



If you have any more suggestions improvements or wish to provide assistance please leave comments below. Please share on fellow Terraria community pages.

Terraria On goings

While the purpose of this sandbox was to keep in touch with TZ, Shura and Shini, Terraria had always been a treasure box of surprises for me. This randomly generated environments created explorer moments in the rather grey evenings between juggling job and applying work. I even got Lauren into it. Mind you this unlimited box of Lego as I may refer to it was more than easily adopted by both of us.

While several build projects were of essence with Lauren namely (in order of creation):

1.Tree House

2. Snow Bridge x Lake Taho

3. Forester's Rest (Completed) x Castle in the Sky (On going)

I encountered a similar conundrum to what troubled me to the point of sawing Lego bricks as a child of 12; my resources were starting to feel...limited (sign of exasperation). While the Tree House was a build that birthed naturally from the resources that were present.
The snow bridge was meant to be a suspension bridge however, background cabling was not a feature Regedit thought of. Similarly the prehistoric pump system made filling up Lake Taho quite the task (yes that mass of water is all pumped from underground). Now I wish I recorded the initial view of that mass of land. Diversion. Point being that having no cabling did not bother me but the database of utilities at my disposal started to show their limitations.
However, when it got to the Castle in the Sky, some critically required resources became apparent such as better theme decorations. and more importantly, a castle requires secret passage ways. The day when active blocks came to be I was over the moon full of anti-gravitation potion (**chuckles** while Lauren Facepalms. It's like scene in episode 3 of Daily lives of High School Boys when a girl passes by while they were re-enacting a scene from an J-RPG...ehem...diversion).
ONLY to find out that active blocks can only be active STONE blocks, here is one of those moments when you scroll through your menu and wiki and stare blankly into your imaginary conversation with Regedit: 'Really man would it have been that hard?'. It is not a very secret passage way if it is made of stone within gold bricks. Because MR Sir here decided a Castle in the Sky mash-up with the Mysterious Cities of Gold reference just HAD to be built with gold bricks.



As an Elder Scrolls Series fan, I was more than familiar with video game mods--more so as a leecher than a seeder--for all the wrong AND right reasons. With a couple of Unity Projects on hiatus namely Basic FPS and top down fear shooter, my Java skills were rusty and C++...well C++ skills were non-existent, google being my saviour, the search Terraria Mods opened a whole new worlds within Terraria for me. The sandbox within the sandbox and the possibility of being more than just another leecher after s u c h a l o n g t i m e. People out there had already started dissecting Terraria to the world of the divide by zero. In my favourite 2D environment attached to a 3D screen, therein lied the perfect knife to cut the Lego bricks in whatever form I wanted. All it would take was some C++ and some photoshop skill.

The Cybergod bless tconfig and object oriented programming.