Monster Storage and high CPU Usage, TNR News

Hey guys, It's been quite some time since I last posted news on this project, I've been a bit... down... latelly, but possibly I'll feel better the next weeks.

Now let's talk about the stuff, and yes, that I mean the Tamers Network Project. I've been doing some tweaks on some parts of the game, even though looking at the codes again, I'm sure that there are way better ways of making the engine do stuff. I removed some codes related to humanoid characters (player and some npcs) from the general tamer script, so the game will be a bit lightweighter on the memory on the run time.

Another thing I've did, was implement a storage system for the game, differently from... One of the versions of TNR released, all monsters in the storage wont be loaded with the player, instead, will be loaded when you open the monster storage window.

Here a look on how it looks right now:

The greatest mystery for me is how to make it less confusing, since if you had the experience of messing with that, you would probably be lost when trying to browse it. For example, try to find the selected slot in the storage.

Maybe if I make the border of the selected slot bigger would make it easier to find the selected slot, I'll have to test that out later.

Meanwhile, an old issue has returned, the high CPU usage, when debugging the game, the CPU usage went to 85%, at least on my pc. My pc is low end, so possibly the cpu usage will be lower on more powerful pcs, but still, It was kind of worrying the issue.

I've first begun testing to see what was causing the issues, until I noticed that was related to the script used on npcs and the player, disabling it seemed to have solved the issue, but If I kept it disabled, we would have no npcs or even a playable character in the game, so I've kept on the debugging. I've been commenting some codes here and there, and even saw some false alerts that the problem was solved, until a little thing that happened gave me the clue of what was the problem.

Since the beggining, the issue wasn't related to updating the actors(player and npcs), but was kind of related to drawing, actually, not even the drawing scripts was the issue causer, It instead was related to the script I use to draw text with borders, for some reason the 5 times drawing was causing issues, so I had to change the script for something more simpler, made so It draws a the text with the choosen color, and in the background has a transparent black targe.

Well, that fixed good part of the issue, I'm not even having slowdowns on the main menu after the fix, check by yourself:

Even though the abusive cpu usage was solved, I believe I can still lower the cpu usage, but I'll still do some checkings and try finding other things that might be causing an abusive CPU usage. Beside that lead me into thinking if...

Oh boy, I guess that fix opened up a new window. :D

Well, that's all for today's news. And wow! 4:50am. Not that It's a special thing, since I've used to stay up late before... I kind of have no idea why so special so... Well, whatever.

Until next news.

Dawn to Dusk, TNR News

Hey guys, the development of TNR is stagnating again, but I'm being able to bring up some things during the times of development.

I've just finished implementing this day and night system for the game, It's still imperfect, but at least one can say that there is dawn to dusk in the game.

I've also been messing with a few other things, currently I'm trying to change how the game will handle monsters that spawns in the maps, that includes normal monsters and bosses, also did a few changes to the main menu, but I may end up showing the changes later.

Well, for now, that's all. I still have a lot to mess in the project, but I need to increase the pace of the development, aswell...

See you guys on the next news.

"I guess I should take a break of battles..." TNR News

Hey guys, nothing much really happened in the gap of time since last news until now, mostly what happened were a few tweaks on the game systems and stuff.

Currently, I believe I'll give a break on working at the battle system of the project, because everytime I work on it to fix an issue, 3 pops up, and that were eventually making me stop the mod development for the day. So I'll try working on other things instead, for example, I'm spriting a new monster, and this one isn't humanoid looking.

Meet the Pixel.

The pixel is going to be a Small sized monster, and currently the attack I sprited is Biting, in the future, I plan on adding a cast animation that will use It's antenaes to cast the spells, and I may end up also adding body attacks, like Tackle or Body Slam.

I'm going to try to create some monsters that aren't actually humanoid looking, but some of them may come being humanoid. Also, a number of those monsters are planned to be Small or Extra Small sized, because that kind of monster will be more predominant in early regions of the game, so when the player just starts the game, or is about to level up a new monster, the player have the option of doing so without many problems.

If you are asking "Why leaving Small and Extra Small monsters on low level regions would make things easier?", I'll tell you why: A good number of updates ago, the creatures sizes impacts, like a LOT, in their base status, so a Large creature will be physically stronger than a Small creature.

Now you might be asking "Wait, if the Large creatures are stronger than small creatures, then what is the point of having smaller creatures in the party?", I'll tell you why: Because even though the Large monsters can be physically stronger, they wont be faster, or even be in higher number than Smaller creatures, even more since I plan allowing the player to carry more creatures in the party If the player party is composed mostly of Small creatures.

Well, that's all for today's news, see you guys, on the next news.
Actually, I wont see, since this blog page doesn't have eyes, and Blogger statistics only tell me how many people have read the post, and the statistic based on countries. But whatever.

See ya!