Small snippets of time are sometimes the most productive

Well, I managed to get some time to work on the GUI system in TileMax and now have buttons working with an event system... I'll tie those into the BMax event system soon.  For info, they support fully animated states and are fully rotatable and movable in real-time.  Now I'm going to add the animation components to the mounts themselves so the GUI elements can move into the screen in any way shape or form that the designer wishes.  Its pretty cool actually... I'll have to put a demo together after this next bit of coding :)

A Day of Progress

Well, with the family down sick I've had some time to code while the kids lay resting, watching TV, or playing on their computer... which was great because I hit a major milestone with the GUI in TileMax.  I had to integrate it into TileMax so I could take advantage of the animation control system within TileMax (which is turning out to be pretty sweet)

I now have a working GUI that is fully rotatable, scalable, and dynamically adjustable.  Any images, anims, or polygons attached to mounts that are identified as hotspots automatically populate a hotspot list (that is populated in reverse order to rendering).

I'll add a state and transition system into it now (animated movement) and I'll be rocking.  Then its just a matter of making the various controls that I need.  Spun input boxes should be fun... NOT!

Seek and Find my way through the rest

It seems to me that my biggest obstacle is obtaining media for my projects.  I have tonnes of TileSets and Character Sheets that I have downloaded from the internet to use as placeholders, but the sheer lack of original artwork is forcing me to reconsider what I am producing with it.  My original plan was to make a platformer style game for kids, but I'm now working towards a seek and find.

The reason is that I can crop a good image and have a decent camera... a seek and find is a few days of snapping and cropping.  Ok, maybe a few more than that.  But the point is that its achievable whereas drawing original artwork is not unless I want the game to look like it was made by a child LOL.  The nice thing about that is, I should have pretty much everything I need once this GUI is done, save the sound system... AXEGUI itself will be the interaction layer with the objects, since it already possesses some interesting capabilities as far as a seek and find goes.    More to come...

Refocus is good

The funny thing is that I haven't gotten much time lately to work on the project, but just because I couldn't sit at the computer didn't mean that my brain shut down lol.  I've certainly done a lot of thought with TileMax's direction and almost missed something insanely vital... or convenient.

Had I trotted off in the direction I was heading I would certainly coded myself into some disappointment.  I really really want to incorporate a physics engine into TileMax, to do that you have to go polygon for everything, but the problem with that is then you need to outline all your collision spaces with polygons rather than just using the already drawn images within the tiles.  But right now, by using this feeler system of collision I effectively create a polygon outline of an actor... now it's currently not organized that way but with a small bit of code rework it will be.  Anyway, those "feelers" already collide with tiles (when a collision layer is present) and can implement any kind of reaction upon the player.  There is nothing then stopping me from adding that polygon to a physics engine... gluing it together will be the fun part.  

The one bit of code I have been touching and feeling on occation is the new GUI part... I'm calling it AXEGUI and I don't even recall why.  I needed a GUI that can move panels around (animated) like having robot arms come out with the settings panel or the like.  I have the parenting, rotation, and image attachment parts working. Once I get the PointInPoly stuff going, I should be able to create the first clickable "buttons"... It works by defining a Mount, which is like a 2D pivot... everything extends a mount and is fully rotatable, can be extended/retracted, and is scalable.

Anyway.. enough for now, I actually get an hour or so to code tonight! 8)