TNR Short Break and Terraria Companion Mod news.

Hello there, I'm back and with some news, whose at least one you may not like much. Let's start talking about the TNR Project.

I'm currently giving a break on TNR project, the break might be short, but right now, I don't really want to touch it. I know that I'll have to resprite a good number of monsters, but that's not much of a challenge for me, beside, that's not the reason for the break, I've been working on it for quite some time anyway, but not as much to explain the break... Well, I'll tell later in this post the reason of the break, as for continuing the TNR news:

I've got an idea of how I could split the graphical part of the skills from the animations, but to make that work, I'll need to think about how I'll do that.
My idea is to leave the update part to handle the time of the skill (which is really light on processing), and leave the harder part, the graphical stuff and monster placement for the drawing script.

Doesn't sounds so bad, right? The problem is that I'll have to rework a lot of scripts, includding the walking system to make the skill animations work correctly, and not cause bugs on the game. The pro is that the battle will be only a bit demanding if a local player (by local player, I mean the user(s) on the pc) is currently watching or participating of it.

As for the other news, the Terraria update is taking quite some time to come, beside possibly wont come until either the end of the year, or until next year. So I've been trying to make up with tModLoader and try making some mods. So, are you thinking that I'm working on the newest season of N Terraria on it, right? Then you're wrong. :P

Actually, what I'm working on is more related to the npplayers from the mod than with leveling and stuff. I'm working on a companion mod, which adds a giant creature that can assist you in combat. The creature has it's own equipments and items, whose It will use depending on it's situation or necessity. Also counting that I've added a friendship level system, so doing it's requests rises the friendship, and rising the friendship level may allow you to do some more actions with your creature.

You may check out a video I made of it trying to slam the Queen Bee by using a tree as a weapon.

A lot of things has changed on the companion systems since the video was released, It even is able to use ranged weapons to attack foes.

As for the mod release and stuff, It might be coming any time in the future, I really want it to be ready before I launch it for the public. Until then, well... Try getting a pet on Terraria and teach it to attack enemies.

Until next news.

Edit:. Ps:. I've been trying to post this news has about 3 days.

Discontentment on monsters. TNR News

Well guys, long weeks no see, I guess? Well, today I've got to talk about the current game monsters, but first, I'll explain why of this news, If you are lazy and don't want to read a wall of text, then skim your way to the end of the blog post, to the part where the changes actually comes.

Ever since I begun making the monsters sprites on the game, something was telling me that the sprite was quite off, and that the monsters designs themselves weren't very... Alright? At least for monsters, even more since... Beside they are actually different, they doesn't really feel very different from each other, of course they have different animations, but almost every monster in the game is literally an humanoid creature, if you gave a quick look, you'd say that they are all humanoid creatures, not unique or "Oh! What a cool and different creature."

What kind of gave me the clue that the monsters are... Lame, let's say, is the fact that when "accidentally" watching other monster taming games or cartoons, the monsters themselves are different, they look unique, and you can distinguish it from a real animal, or even tell what kind of animals and other things were fused in to make that creature.

That kind of thought has been in my mind for a long time, and even resulted into me, recreating the Cait Sith monster, whose at least on my point of view, is very different and unique, compared to the other monsters. I believe that I will have to add more unique design to the monsters, when making their sprites, but that also means a lot of monsters will have to be resprited too, and that lead me into another idea:

I'll reduce the walking animation frames, because not only not many people will mind watching a full animation of a monster walking, but also that takes potential frames for other monster animations, so some of the frames that are used for walking, could go to other monster action frames.

What's the result of this? I'll have to create new sprites to several monsters in the game, I'll have a hell of a job, but trying leads to making things right, right?

That is all for today's news, maybe with this sprite recreation idea, I can try to put into practice my idea of gender based sprite difference, so one can tell by sight if a monster is male or female, and no worry, I plan on making it so people of all ages can play the game.

Until next news.

A change of plans on TNR news.

Well, before you guys begins thinking that the project went downhill, it didn't went, just there isn't really much to say about it since I don't really have concrete things to talk or display about it's progress.

I've been thinking latelly, and I've been theorizing too much about what changed in the game, without showing any proof or images of it, so that's kind of a let down, but I do really like to talk about the changes in my project and what's planned, so I just have written away everything that came on mind.

I'll try to slowdown on the development news until I have some solid and interesting change that actually can be posted here, because minor changes like small tweaks on some systems and stuff isn't really all that exciting on the gamer side.

As for the game, It's still in development, but the development is stagnating because I barelly am being able to mess with it, because this month is being a twist in my life, even more since I'm having to look for a job to help with the house income, so yeah, busy.

That doesn't mean that the project was all abandoned, latelly I've been messing around the game systems to make some things works better, by adding some extra pointers on characters animation sprites for skill use purposes, aswell as changing how the animations will be handled, but I wont enter in detail about it until I get something worth talking about. But I have to say, at least the change in how the animations are handled made my job into creating new monsters easier, I only have to remember to create their sprite infos.

Currently I'm having some problems related to monster positioning in battle, but I believe I'll manage to figure out how to fix it, eventually.

Well, that's it for the news, I'll try bringing up something worth of progress news the next time I make a post here, If it's about TNR project, I mean.

See ya on the next news.

Animated changes in TNR

Hey there, I've once again came back to bring in news about TNR project:

The last weeks I've been quite not into programming, so I didn't do much in the project, but today I did so many changes and additions to the project.

I've changed how the game handles the monsters animations, now each frame will have it's own setups, like the points telling what is what, like eyes, mouth, and stuff. Those points will be used by certain skills that will require those.

To make it a bit more easier for me to set the points, I've created in the project an extra debug option so I could setup the points without having to mess with switches and lines of codes. I only need to beware not to do the dumbness of setting a point in another point type, even more since the new feature has a weird bug on the buttons, where I can only click them if I zoom in the monster sprite (???).

Due to the implementation of the new animation system, I've had to change a good number of things in the project, one of them is that when setting up the monster animations for the actions, I no longer need to specify the sprite size, or even the action points positions. That change made faster to create animation points, even more since each frame id will have It's own points.

Another news is that I added 2 new monsters to the game, but they currently only have the stopped animation frame. In the future I'll add more animations to them.

As for the planned things for the project, I've been thinking about adding conditionals to the skill effects, so they are triggered based on certain criteria, for example:
You use a skill where the monster attacks, but If the target has less than 50% of health left, the monster could attack again to inflict extra damage. That's just an example of what It the addition of conditions could do.

Well, for now I guess that's all. Sorry If I wrote a wall of gibberish that you can't understand, but today I didn't slept well, so stayed since about 6 am programming the game.

See you next time.

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.