Get it here: SG’s Japanese Days of the Week Practice.zip [6.69 KB] .NET 3.5 required

Tools I’ll be using partially, wholly, or not at all:

blecki’s jileed (mapping)

http://jemgine.omnisu.com/

drpetter’s sfxr (sound effects)

http://www.cyd.liu.se/~tompe573/hp/project_sfxr.html

drpetter’s musagi (music)
http://www.cyd.liu.se/~tompe573/hp/project_musagi.html

keeyai’s chronolapse (timelapse)
http://keeyai.com/projects-and-releases/chronolapse/

someone else’s paint.net (image editing)

http://www.getpaint.net/index.html

I really only need to get Helmets and Jewelry (Rings and Amulets) and I’ll have all of the equipping slots covered in Diablo I. As for the melee weapons, there’s really only Clubs/Maces and Staves to put in. I’m not sure how I’m going to deal with two-handed weapons yet.

Next I’m going to put in Bows and probably put a youtube up to see whether people [don't mind] or [absolutely hate] what I’m going to do for targetting. I’m going to use the same system for missile targetting as I am for spell placement, and doing it with Bows saves me the trouble of having to first build the magic subscreen. After that, I’ll get some of the important spells in, so you guys can get a good idea of why I’m going this route.

Items are back. Gotta get that HUD back up now. I think I’m almost caught up now.

Got monsters back in, and damage counters are bouncing again. You can attack with your sword again, but I’ve improved melee with an arc path instead of just holding the thing in front of yourself. Progress!

I’ve been off-and-on learning the Japanese language since my teens; I’ve been interested in manga/anime, and Japanese games since I started playing them on my NES (I knew I could tie it back to games somehow). Of course, back then I didn’t know that the games I enjoyed most were originally Japanese. When I learned this, I immediately started doing research into this fact – and discovered a myriad of games I may never have known about otherwise. It’s a fact that there are many games I would love to play, had I a proper grasp on Japanese, that I’m not likely going to without it.

In my recent Japanese learning, I’ve come across a very useful online tool that I’ve been using extensively over the last couple of weeks. With it, you’re randomly given a Japanese character and you have to guess what the romanized version of it is. That is, any given “kana” (simple Japanese symbol) can be written out with English letters and still be understood. When presented with a Japanese kana, you’re prompted to give the “romaji” for it. It’s basically a computerized flashcard system.

With the turmoil that suddenly presents itself in my life, I suddenly worried that I might not have access to the internet, or I might not be able to pay the site I use anymore, or some other of the 1,000,000 reasons I’ll come up with if given the chance.  So why not “borrow” the format and build my own? To be honest, I’m not sure where the line is between “borrowing” and “stealing” when you’re considering designs.. but that’s a topic for another discussion.

After about a day’s worth of work, I present my Japanese Kana Recognition Practice app!

Download JapaneseKanaRecognition.zip (17.5 KB)
Requirements: .NET 3.5 and Japanese Language Support

I think I’ve covered all possible issues, but I might have messed up somewhere; if anyone has any problems with it, feel free to drop me a comment.

JileEd testing

I did some user testing on JileEd with Blecki and requested some useful features. It already has more things in it that I can make good use of than Mappy did – not to mention the file format is easily-read XML. I look forward to more good things out of this package – I definitely recommend it for your tilemap editing needs.

Tilesheet rearrangement tool

After playing with JileEd for a bit, I was reminded of how awful my Final Fantasy Adventure tilesheet was laid out. Have a look at what I had to go digging for tiles with:

JileEd screenshot

The tileset selection is a mess! It’s because I didn’t try to do any ordering of the tiles when I ripped them, I just wanted a complete set. Well I had enough of that and built a quick-n-dirty tilesheet tile swapper! The tool itself only took a little while, but I spent probably 3 or 4 hours swapping tiles until I wound up with:

FFA Tileset rearranged

Sweet. I can find everything now! Yes I have alot of empty space, and no I’m not going to leave all of those almost-but-not-quite-repeating water tiles like that. I’ll clean that all up before I use it again. I’ll probably wind up being able to cut the texture size in half.

I’m not going to bother showing the swapper tool, its just a window with a picture of the tilesheet in it, and you click on two tiles and they switch places! Not very exciting, see? Anyways, I’m not a lazy bum; I worked my butt off tonight. I’ll be adding in support for JileEd maps just as soon as I’m happy with the reduction in water tiles and the subsequent realignment of tile groups. I’ll need to redo the town map since my tileset indices will be all different.

ActionRPG tile edge problem

I don’t know how to get rid of the lines between tiles on my map. I know why they’re there, but I don’t have a simple solution to it at the moment. I don’t want to make 2×2 patches for every tile, that’ll quadruple my tilesheet sizes. I’ll be satisfied to turn off the antialiasing for now, but I’m thinking I’ll need to render the tilemap to an offscreen buffer and blit that somehow. Not sure how to do that yet.

Next I’ll be adding in the sword attacking again, but I’ve built a small prototype program in Allegro/C++ that I used to try a sword sweeping motion. I liked it, and I’ll be putting that in directly. Also in the testbed was a missile shooting test that I’m going to need to definitely get input on. I’d like to use it for most of the directed/placed spells as well, and I think it’s an ok method. If you’ve played Children of Mana or Crystal Chronicles, you’ll have an idea of what I want to do.

[update]
Tried a few things including SamplerStates fiddling (thanks Blecki, Jolle, X-0ut, gustav, DrPetter, and anyone else I missed over at #ludumdare). Found the best solution was to render the scene to a 1:1 destination and then stretch the thing out, using a manually created RenderTarget. I like the texture sampling, I just wanted to get rid of my bleeding/seaming issue.

On the other hand, my source code from two years ago is incredibly bad. I’m shocked at the things I was doing; and I refuse to settle with copying some of it. You’d be sickened by the number of times I’ve used the keyword static – and how I decided to get around class scoping rules. It’s better if I not go into any detail. Shameful, shameful code. I’m bitter.