I see why Bob Ross didn't like drawing people

I have the Admiral done. It's getting kind of monotonous drawing people. My paperdolls not "done" done. In fact, the heads are temporary. I also haven't drawn any of the battle scars or anything yet/ These do, however show off the direction I'm going in. My last goal is to do the outpost(?) staff lady. She's just wearing a jumpsuit, with no swappable heads. She has a background too. When that is done I will be going back into "Font mode" and will be fixing up the "gprint" font. It's not a fixed width font so I'll be grabbing selecting the proper point pitch and then getting each letter to fit on an individual basis. It would be kind of awful if after all my work, find that the letters overrun.

Anyways here is some more pretty graphics so you can see how they all fit

The EGA color palette surprisingly works! Can you tell I don't like hands?

Female is 80% there now too.

Female Captain - Old and new

So I have the female captain done now. There are not "done" by any stretch of the imagination. I wil; be doing the Admiral next. After that I have to add some details (ripped battle clothing and then rank on the left and side) and then do the 25 heads. (4 Admiral, 16 male and 8 female). Looking at the assets I'm replacing, it appears that I also have to make up an outpost officer as well, but she's only one person. I would love to make the game equal-opportunity, but the outpost officer takes up the space where the female heads would go. The female is actually a touch smaller then the male avatar.

Comparing the Commanding Officers

Anyways I will live you with a female mock up and I'll be doing the Admiral tomorrow. I've got a system down now so the characters I generate should be getting pushed out quicker and quicker. After the avatars are all done, then it's off to font editing and then planet rendering in blender for the spinney globe logo.

Look at me! I'm the Captain Now.

This is just a quick bonus before/after picture before I go to bed. As you can see, you can make a whole lot prettier pictures with four times the resolution. I 'm going to be starting on the female uniform tomorrow. I just thought I would show off the paper doll, with yours truly as the captain. I apologize as there really isn't much to espouse when I'm doing the art stuff. I guess the picture is worth a thousand words.  In the end I was lazy and decided to hide the hands.

Uniforms

I'm making a dent in the uniform for the male captain uniform. I have three major bodies to do. Male captain , Female captain , and the admiral who will be in a different pose then this one. The picture I have here is a work in progress, I still have to lay out the shadows, clean up the belt buckle and fix the lighting on the boots (It's backwards). I was never a fan of my ability to art. I seem to always be working by the skin of my teeth. The real hurdle is how much everything looks like a disaster until it's almost done. The head is going to be made with a bunch of swap-out generic parts swapped to give each face a distinct look.

I'm not sure about hiding the hands or not. I'm personally rubbish at them, however then is code that changes the hand color based on the race of the character you chose. Also I'm going to use a little creative license to fill out the shoulder patch. I'm most likely going to put a sun there.

After the officers are done, I'll be redoing the in-game font and replacing the gprint() command with Allegro's text. That becomes a bonus as I could use Unicode for non-western languages. (The ability would be there, but not implemented. Don't want to get too much feature creep). These bodies will make a return as later in the game you use them to create enemies as well.

Back to the Wacom I guess.

Programming on Accident

In my flurry of flu I attempted to make a little head way doing some much needed replacement of console and POSIX functions. The goal is to get rid of as many dependencies as I can and have Allegro as my core library for input and an output. As I wrote I was bent on getting rid of some very legacy console functions. Namely _kbhit() and _getch(). (Hello there underscore functions!)

It seemed simple. All _kbhit() did was return a 1 if there was a key in the keyboard queue, and a 0 of not. _getch() just grabs the next character in the queue. The problem I was having was I replaced the BIOS keyboard queue with Allegro's to get things functional. However, the new keyboard queue holds MUCH more than just what key was pressed. It also holds, in order, the key down and key up events. So just because something is waiting in the queue, doen't necessarily mean it's a character. I flailed with this for a while, making implementations of _kbhit() and _getch() that worked "good enough" while at the same time goofing up my keyboard queue. I got it to work in my test unit, and then when it was in the game, failed massively.

I was programming on accident.

For those who don't know, this is when you code without any idea what you are doing in hopes that it works. The problem is that if you do this, and the program breaks later, you have no idea what's wrong or how to fix it. It was also frustrating myself as I couldn't seem to get two fairly simple functions to work properly. I was pointed in the right direction with some help on a forum. Turns out I wasn't follow my logic properly. The cool thing was as long as I showed off my example code and made it obvious I was making an effort, people were bending over backwards to help and explain what I was doing wrong. Thumbs up!

The old paperdoll, layered in GIMP.

After I got my mojo back. I got rid of the master timer from time.h and moved that to Allegro's internal timer. I'm trying my best to do "drop in" replacements of the commands. Now I no longer need clock(), clock_t struct, or time.h  and have replaced those with my own functionality  as well.

Moving on I'm now working on the paper dolls that represent the commanders in the game. I'm fixing up the poses and character designs, but keeping the uniforms mostly the same. I'll do some initial character designs on my own, but may need backup if it's a little too time consuming.

Down with the Sickness

Oooh-Wa-ah-ah-ah~

I think I have the the flu that's going around. I wasn't able to get mobile till 3:00 this afternoon. I tried to salvage the rest of the day by doing a little side work. I'm still removing the legacy console functions and decided on replacing _kbhit() and _getch(). Turns out the Allegro queues do not work the way that these commands assume and are missing keystrokes are getting getting events stuck in the queue. When these are implemented the way I would like, I will move on to the more fun drawing and graphical updates. 

Screens

This was the only way I could think of to show off full screen

I spent most of the day getting the game to run in full screen. I had to do a few experiments with stretching, but in the end I decided to just run the game in the center and play shenanigans with the border. I tried to stretch the same over the whole display but it looked awful. I think 1280x800 is good and I'll doll up the border later. The big thing I fought with was the faders. I had to make my hacks a little more robust so they would work in windowed and full screen modes

The other thing I did was work on the audio so now I have a proper mixer for the music. The sound effects will be rolled in later when I start implementing them in the game proper.

Not much of an update. The fullscreen problem  seems like such a little thing, but it required a lot of refracting to get right. I'm happy with it now. There are just a bunch a little things to pick up now. Looking ahead, it appears I may have to start drawing some fleet commanders in HD. Let's hope I can make that work out.