False Positive

Posted on November 11, 2020 by Eric DeBrosse

Have you ever written and compiled an application that instantly gets flagged as a Trojan? Windows Defender thought my Setup.exe bootstrap program was a virus! This cracks me up. I reported it as a false positive to Microsoft and all is well.

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Been There Radar Window

Posted on November 3, 2020 by Eric DeBrosse

The radar window now works in the game. It shows all avatars that are nearby. It can also be used to select an avatar. Once the combat system works, it will also show the enemies/monsters. In addition to a few minor fixes, new portals and objects have been added to the game as well. The new fire effect looks awesome!

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Object Identification

Posted on October 21, 2020 by Eric DeBrosse

The examine dialog can now be used to identify all objects in the game that can be interacted with. This includes everything in your backpack. New treasure chests have been added to the areas where the portals take you, all with new inventory items.

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Drag and Drop

Posted on October 12, 2020 by Eric DeBrosse

The Trade Window in the game finally works correctly, and consistently. There was a lot of frustration getting there however! I kept finding a lot of weird quirks with how I implemented the drag and drop feature. For example, I was hit testing on windows that weren’t even currently visible, lol. This has all been cleaned up and seems to be working great now.

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Avatar Trade Window

Posted on September 18, 2020 by Eric DeBrosse

Currently working on the “Trade Window” in my Been There Game client. This will be used to safely trade items between two avatars, or a vendor NPC. To open it, you simply double-click another player’s avatar. If the other avatar does not already have a trade going on, your trade will be initiated. A lot of this code is similar to the treasure chest code that I already have working, so this new feature shouldn’t be too hard. We shall see!

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Treasure Generator

Posted on September 6, 2020 by Eric DeBrosse

Still working on the massive inventory system. There are a lot of small details to deal with! The treasure chest is working great now. Reward items can be spawned when an avatar opens it. The treasure generator allows you to specify individual probabilities for each each item. Or, certain items can always be returned if needed. People can also leave things in a chest for other players to find. Items that were left in the chest will expire and go away eventually, unless in a private chest. There is also a wait time before new treasure will be generated for each avatar. If the chest is a public chest, then there is a time limit on how long a player can keep it open.

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Animation System

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Eric DeBrosse

I was planning on adding a chest that can be opened into Been There Game. However, I discovered that my keyframed animation system was not working totally correct. To deal with rotations that don’t happen around the object’s center, I realized that an optional offset transformation would need to be added to the nodes in the Orion Engine mesh file format. Luckily, this part was easy due to my “chunk” based mesh file format. All existing files still work as intended. However, I’m not going to lie; updating the scene objects in the engine proved difficult. The matrix math involved with the hierarchy of 3D transformations and rotations was hurting my head for quite a bit, but I finally have it all properly worked out. This new “feature” changed the way that my bounding volume checks and intersection tests must be handled. But, it ended up being a lot simpler to implement than I had originally feared.

I also made a lot of improvements to the engine’s exporter to fully deal with the object offsets and/or pivot points. The animation export has also been further optimized, to deal with redundant keyframes.

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Web Server OS Upgrade

Posted on July 19, 2020 by Eric DeBrosse

Testing out the fresh installation of Red Hat’s Fedora 32 Linux. Everything seems to be working great!

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Dropped Items

Posted on June 17, 2020 by Eric DeBrosse

Some things came up recently where I had to take a short break. But I’m back at it again. The game’s inventory system was nearly complete. I just need to finish dealing with dropped items.

Once this is complete, I need to tighten up how the currently online avatars are being handled. This is going to be key in dealing with avatars that are in different zones; i.e. if a person is in a dungeon (or far away), they won’t need to know about any avatars that are outside of that particular zone.

Once the handling of avatars is corrected, I’m going to add a portal to a new dungeon. This should be exciting to see in the game, and a lot of fun to implement!

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Been There Progress

Posted on April 24, 2020 by Eric DeBrosse

Still working on the inventory system for the game. Much of it is finally in place. You can move items around, and organize your packs. You can give items back and forth between avatars. Also, when you wield your weapon, other players in the game can see you change it, etc. It’s working pretty nice. Currently, I’m working on dropped items. This same mechanism will be used for spawned items as well. Hope to have more updates soon!

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