so one of my big goals for Exigy - my graphical IDE and software development toolkit for lua/love2d - was integrating networking

i've never written a line of networking code in my life until two weeks ago. learning network code necessitated writing Events-driven code, which was mostly new to me too.

i needed some kind of 2d game to test out the network code, so i spent a couple of days hacking together a mini Lunatic Fringe game, if you remember this old classic After Dark module.

for the first time since i was in high school 30 years ago, i had to re-learn trigonometric theory. just making that little ship turn and thrust in the right direction took me WAY longer than i'm comfortable admitting to 😬

these two lines should probably be tattooed to my forehead:
xPositionIncrement = -cos(shipAngle)
yPositionIncrement = sin(-shipAngle)

so as of today, Exigy now has server-client networking over UDP. 🤞 i'll be able to get a dollar store quality Lunatic Fringe server up and running in the next few days to test out the networking code

https://exigy.org

#exigy #lua #love2d #indiedev #macintosh

this short note shoehorned into a tiny space in mr mike’s Gaming Coding Complete programming book is the most important thing no one else told me about building games that are capable of saving to disk/state/network (aka serializing)

i’ve spent months figuring out ways of trying to work around missing address bugs in Exigy, and 100% of them were because i had made a fundamental architectural error in designing game objects from the beginning.

i was using their (Lua table) addresses to keep track of object instances. this works great when you have a program that runs once and terminates.

but when you want to reload a saved game, you can’t count on those addresses remaining the same.

i had written all kinds of hacky remapping voodoo to deal with resetting those addresses after loading a save. but the real solution was to keep track of objects myself using a manager. indexing objects by unique number from the beginning would have saved me months of sweat and tears.

good learning experience for a novice game engine coder like me!

#exigy #programming #lua #gamedev

adventure game studio users: what do you think of AGS’s animation editor?

i’m building a drag and drop animation editor for Exigy, and i’d like some input on what AGS gets right/wrong.

what would make your workflow less tedious/annoying?

#exigy #adventureGames #indiedev

local artist kelsie gosse sells her character portraits for $10 on fb marketplace.

i wish i had a good name for this particular style of furry art. it's something that was popular in the late 90s and early 00s when Furcadia was at its peak.

what makes this so charming to me is how unpretentious it is.

the kind of games you badly wanted to make when you were in junior high, noodling around with line art and coloured pencil at lunch time. you didn't have friends to play d&d with locally, so you found places like Furcadia online instead.

it's *exactly* the kind of novice that i'm trying to aim for with Exigy: someone who loves drawing and wants very badly to make role playing or adventure games, but doesn't want to deal with unity or godot.

#furry #furry_art #exigy

today i'm building a NeXT-inspired interface skin for my little game/shareware construction kit called Exigy
https://exigy.org

nextstep in monochrome has exactly the right number of colours 😋

000000 (0, 0, 0) black
555555 (85, 85, 85) dark grey
AAAAAA (170, 170, 170) light grey
FFFFFF (255, 255, 255) white

#exigy

jobs demoing a codeless UI using NeXT/OpenStep's Interface Builder at macworld expo in 1997

making games in Adventure Game Studio taught me how fast games can be built when designers spend their time working on scenes and gameplay instead of coding scrollbar and button behaviour

i admire and get inspiration from hypercard for the same reasons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl0CbKYUFTY

i'm trying to implement something similar for my little game construction kit, called Exigy. if you've got UI suggestions on how to do this well, i'm all ears!
https://exigy.org

#exigy #shareware #indiegamedev #macintosh #hypercard

PPC/OS X users: has anyone come across successful builds of *recent* love2d (sdl2) binaries for PPC?

i'm fascinated by the possibility that exigy could be backported to the iMac G4/G5 and OS X 10.4 if i could just figure out a good way of distributing binaries.

#ppc #vintageApple #macintosh #exigy

canadian (and international) railnerds: is there an accepted/respected book on the early history of canadian railways? i’m thinking very early - 1836 to 1875.

something highly technical would be great, if possible. even academic papers in canadian rail history - i do not know that literature.

the world needs Railroad Tycoon Canadian Edition more than ever. sid: this is the campaign you should have built in the first place dammit

update: answering my own question -

yes. the accepted historical monograph on this exact topic is:

Stevens. (1960). George, R. Canadian National Railways, Vol .1, Sixty Years of Trial and Error - 1836-1896.

It is followed up by:
Stevens. (1962). George, R. Canadian National Railways, Vol .2, Towards the Inevitable - 1896-1922.

#canada #history #indiegamedev #trains #exigy