What's up latelly?

Hey guys. Since the break I've given on TNR project, this blog has been quite... Quiet. Of course It has been, I haven't been writing anything here (obviously).

Since TNR project has been paused, I'll try talking about some things unrelated to the project, and also something related to the project too.

TNR Project

To begin with, I've thought about changing how the game "approach" the player on It's first contact with the game, instead of the game questioning you a lot of things, like name and second name, I thought about making so It only asks for your character nickname instead. There is no point in asking the name and second name of the character, even more since the player is... Well... You. Unless you want to expand the lore of your character or something but... Well.. Let's leave the name and second name fields for the npcs, instead. They need it more than the player.

The second thing I thought about changing, is how the game begins: Before entering the game world, a monster without form could speak with your character, asking you some basic things of your character, like nickname, age and nation. After that, the monster could ask your help to choose It's form, which is when you'll tell what monster It will be. At first, I thought that was a good idea, but actually, It is. It's like as if you were invited to the world of Tamers Network, by a creature you just met.

After that, you end up being sent to the Login Island, and so begins your adventure. You may ask yourself, "Why all characters are sent to the Login Island, independing of the nation you pick?", and the reason is simple: I'm pretty sure that a number of players will choose different nations to play as, but that doesn't means his friends will pick the same nation as his, so the login island allows you to pick where you will start the game, be it a town of your nation or not, and since I have no plans on locking quests and stuffs to a specific nation, that means you can, for example, begin the tutorial in a Spanish town, when your character is Brazillian.

I guess that's enough TNR talk for now, I will need to put that planning on practice some time later. Now, let's talk about other things, like my modding trek (liked the name?).

TerraGuardians Mod

Making the companion mod was an awesome thing, and it is, but Terraria has grown old for me, since It's mechanics are very centered into getting new equipments and tackling the next challenge. One thing I'd like to change on the mod is to make the companions more alive, since right now, the only thing you can do is ask them to follow you and help you in the combat, or leave them in the town and protect your citizens, aswell as give quests. Would be cool to see them interact with the world around them, and possibly do things I don't want to do, like alchemy.

One of the things I wanted to do, was adding a mood system for them, their mood would change depending on the environment and the recent events that happened. The problem is that I would need to split the head sprite from the body, and animate different facial expressions to the companion.

But I have to say, programming the game systems and then part time spriting the new guardians isn't an easy thing.

Java Programming

I've been playing latelly with Java, to practice what I learned on my programming classes, and boy, the things I've learned are helping me a lot to discover a lot of things related to programming itself, aswell as showing me things I can do to help on the development of programs and games. I can literally create a buffed version of a system in the game, by overriding their classes, so If I want the game to get the main player controls before the game updates the character movement, I can just override it, add a call to the base version of the method, and before that call, add the script to get the player controls. I've been playing with that on Java, and to practice, am making a little game on it. If the game gains enough progress, I will talk more about it, and even show images of it.

As of now, the only things I got working were: Characters and their animations and map drawing. Aswell as other systems like classes, monsters, player stuffs and etc. Those things doesn't configures the game as ready, but at least a small percentage of the game is completed.

Java Itself isn't really that bad, It's like... C# 0.75, because It has a number of features from C#, actually, It does look a lot like C#, but it isn't. There are a number of features from C# missing, and a number of methods in Java functions differently. I don't really say that Java is bad and lacking, but I surelly preffer a lot to program in C#. But at least Java is multiplatform, right? Beside you can extract the entire project source with any zip program...

I've been thinking for some time about moving to Java when making the TNR project, even more since It seems to have more support than XNA, but making the project in C# would probably be safer and beter than Java. If there were another engine I could use to build my project on using C#.

You may be thinking now, "Unity", and other engines. The problem with them is that they now need a 64 bits computer, and my computer right now is 32 bits, so I can't run that kind of engine anymore. Godot Engine I tried to use, I couldn't get into the programming method of it, and trying to make use of the C# port of it gave me more headache than result, since I couldn't actually make it work.

Well, better I end this wall of text before you fall asleep on the keyboard.

Until next news. Also, did you liked the news splitting? :3