Comments for Koonsolo Blog» Indie Games Blog of Koonsolo

Comment on deWiTTERS Tao of Coding by CodeMaker

CodeMaker — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 15:02:15 +0000

@CodeMaker obviously if(!my_name_condition) would be better!!!

Comment on deWiTTERS Tao of Coding by CodeMaker

CodeMaker — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 15:00:47 +0000

Use a postfix for your fix… my_name_condition, or my_name_state

thus…

if (my_name_condition != TRUE) { … }

Comment on deWiTTERS Game Loop by Lindsay

Lindsay — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 06:34:26 +0000

I actually don’t have that full understanding regarding this but I really find this very useful..Maybe because I still have to read a lot more to know more as well..

Comment on 19 general purpose 2D engines by Niriel

Niriel — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 09:21:58 +0000

I love PyGame too. Partly because I haven’t tried anything else. One annoying thing though is the total lack of GUI widgets. Which is also a good thing because whatever they’d come up with I wouldn’t like it. I tried all the PyGame GUIs I could find and hated them all.

So, I try to keep my game GUI as simple as possible because I have to do it all by myself. Not a bad thing .

Comment on How much money will your first game make? by Niriel

Niriel — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 09:11:48 +0000

And once in a while, Minecraft happens.

Comment on Object Oriented Programming doesn't need Encapsulation by Niriel

Niriel — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 19:56:02 +0000

I love that, with Python, I don’t need to write getters and setters if these are dumb. And properties allow me to write them later if I realize I need non-dumb getters and setters after all, without having to change anything but the class itself. Sweet. It just saves me some time.

The article made me think about something… In Python, you can choose to have one or two underscores in front of your variable of method name. Two underscores makes it more annoying than one underscore for the guy who’s trying to access the internals of your class. I’ve never found a use for it. Has anybody ?

Comment on Make an RPG with an existing framework and resources by Niriel

Niriel — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 19:40:41 +0000

A thing about RPGs is that they all love to use a different system for fighting. Real time in the map, versus turned based on a battle screen, and then come all the weird-ass combos requiring you to change your outfit and put gems between them on a graph. I can imagine writing a RPG engine that will animate sprites on a tiled map and that’s going to be super re-usable. But I have no idea on how to write a battle/fight engine that will be fun for enough people. I have the feeling that whatever I choose, many users will dislike it. So… Only half an engine ? Meh.

Comment on Game Architecture: Model-View-Controller by Niriel

Niriel — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 13:05:41 +0000

Maybe I overdid things, but my view never touches the model and knows nothing about it. For example, my DudeSprite instance does not contain a pointer to my DudeModel instance. Instead, my DudeSprite listens to DudeMovedEvent instances that contain dude_id and a position (all floats, integers, strings lists or other simple types that JSON could handle).

I found that useful when I started to split my game into a network/server architecture. The DudeModel is on the server. I may put a DudeModel on the client as well and in that case the one on the server is authoritative. But now, I can have my DudeSprite in a different process and even different machine than the DudeModel. They speak exchanging light weight messages.

Maybe this will create a huge overhead, but it gives me a lot of flexibility. I’ll optimize only if necessary, not before.

Comment on Flexible use of game libraries by Niriel

Niriel — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 12:55:40 +0000

I’m lucky to have chosen python for writing my game. I could afford a ’slow’ language because I’m not aiming at creating the next Crysis MMO, but something looking a bit like the old-school zelda games, 2d seen from above. Python comes with so many useful libraries that the only third party library I have is pygame. That makes things easy. Not only I abstract pygame away, but I do it in an model-view-controller fashion. My game would work as well with another rendering engine, or two at the same time, or even no engine at all. I’m thinking of having a curses renderer for the lolz and get a nethack look :p.

I’m still struggling with the networking though (my game is multiplayer, say half a dozen friends). I really really really don’t want to use Twisted because I find it fat, ugly and invasive (it wants to steal my main loop). Some third party libraries like twisted are very hard to abstract. Same goes for GTK by the way. Imagine both together… So I have to write my own networking code when I’m not good at it, and my own widget/gui/buttons code because pygame doesn’t have one and I like none of what’s been done so far. Decisions…

Comment on deWiTTERS Game Loop by AlbeyAmakiir

AlbeyAmakiir — Tue, 24 May 2011 03:08:00 +0000

I think I’ve found an instance in which “Game Speed dependent on Variable FPS” is not so bad. If the game stores all movement in terms of vectors (for example: object a starts here at this time and will end here at this time using this path), then you just check the time every game update and move the object to where is should be, *regardless of where it is now*. This does not work in any game that has collisions at all, and games like that are few and far between, but I’m making such a game, and the negatives you describe do not apply for it.
That said, I do wonder if there are any other hidden negatives that anyone can think of.