Category: Engine

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Week 3 Wrap-Up

(The capture format was set to FLV in XSplit (instead of MP4) with the highest recording quality (20), but there is still some initial distortion in the video after it was loaded to YouTube)

Touch Up Work in Audacity

Touched up the sound effects in Audacity, to give them the appropriate lengths to be used in the game.  For the buzzer, I trimmed down the hair clipper sound effect to 0.25 seconds.  Not sure why, but I wasn’t able to find a crop function in Audacity.  Therefore, I just had to select the portion of the clip I want to use, copy, then paste it in a new Audacity window.  Next I started looking for a sound to use for the main menu.  The buzzers and rings were too harsh of a sound, so I loaded up my shaken Pepto Bismol sound effect.  After cropping out everything except for one shake of the bottle, I realized that this makes a great menu selection sound.  It actually sounds like muddy boots on a wooden walkway.  For the wire filling sound, I slimmed down the running water clip.  The original sound is a little harsh, so I raised the pitch by 265.  The ice sounds were a little flat, so I increased the speed by 200.  It now sounded like an old fashioned money changer.  With this new sound, I added 2 seconds of silence at the end, and then applied the echo effect (delay 0.5 seconds, decay 0.5).  The spoons sounded good without any modification except for cropping out the rest of the noise.  I’ll use this as either a menu sound or a rank display sound.  The spoon hitting the glass made a good sound, but there was a lot of background static noise in the sound capture.  I used Audacity’s noise removal tool to fix it, but it seems to have raised the pitch of the sound as well.  It still sounded okay, so I’ll probably use that as the sound when an LED is lit.  The CO meter made a nice beeping sound, but it was really loud so I used the normalize effect.  I’m not sure where I will use this sound, but I’ll go ahead and import it into the project for now.  This gives me a total of eight sound effects, which should be enough to get me started.

  

Apparently, the volume of the MediaPlayer object uses a value between 0 and 1, and I incorrectly assumed that it was 0 to 100.  For some reason, the sound when it is played on the PC is much louder than it is on the XBox.  Maybe the XBox (or my television) has sound normalization so it isn’t loud like on the PC.  Setting the MediaPlayer volume to 0.1 makes it sound about right on the PC, which I believe is one tenth of the volume.  I will have to test it on the XBox later to see if that makes it too low to hear on the console.  If it does, then I may have to write some platform specific code to handle the differences between the PC and console.

Ran into a bit of an issue with playing sound effects.  In order to play a sound effect, the current screen must have a handle to the MediaPlayer object, which is only available in the main ResistorGame class.  I don’t want to have to pass a MediaPlayer object to each function on each screen that may want to play a sound effect.  I think I’ll make the sound effects like the screen transition, where the screen will implement a public method which will report whether or not the screen needs a sound effect played.  Then the Resistor game class will query that method on each update, and then play any sound effect that is requested to be played.  I usually don’t write code this way, but I think it may make things cleaner in the end, especially if I decide to write a media handler class.  I created a method called getRequestedSoundEffect in the Screen class and added a protected instance variable called iSoundEffect.  If the ResistorGame calls that method and it returns a value greater than -1, then it will play the sound effect at that index in the sound effect array.  Thefore, any of the subclassed Screen just have to set the iSoundEffect variable to any of the sound effect constants defined in the ResistorGame class.  Amazingly, this worked perfectly the first time that I tested it.  I also discovered that MediaPlayer is not required for playing SoundEffect objects (Songs objects only), but it was good that I implemented it this way, otherwise I would have the same problem with passing the sound effect array around to all of the screens.  Just calling the Play method on the SoundEffect object itself will play the sound.  One drawback is that only one sound effect can be played for each update call, otherwise the previous sound effect(s) ID assigned to the iSoundEffect variable will be lost.  This may be a good thing, because there shouldn’t be too many sounds playing at the same time.  Once scenario that I can imagine is if two LEDs are lit at exactly the same time.  Just playing the sound effect once should be sufficient.

Using Audacity and a short tutorial from eHow, I was able to record my voice for the title screen which I gave a repeating robotic sound.  First, I used the Repeat Effect on the start of the audio clip.  Then I used the Delay Effect with Decay=10, Delay=0.01, and Echos=20.  I repeated that effect about 6 times.  I also made audio clips for “level complete”, “game over”, “S”, “A”, “B”, “C” and applied the same effects.

  

Level Selection Modification

I may have messed up by making the LevelDefinition instance a member of the GameLevel class instead of the ResistorGame class.  The ResistorGame class needs to pass the maximum number of levels to the LevelSelectScreen class.  The maximum number of levels is defined in the LevelDefinition object, so it has to get a reference of that object from GameLevelScreen which is a little messy.  I may have to rework this later.

Sound Effects Added to Game

After updating the game code, I now have sound effects for menu movement, menu selection, wire begins filling, light filled, and light busted.  I had to add an additional variable to keep track of light filled, since this property was never actually tracked.  I added that check to the game win check, since it was already looping through the lights on the board, so if the number of lit lights is greater than the number of lit lights on the previous check, then the lit sound effect is played.  I was happy with all the sound effects, except for the electricity one (originally water running from the faucet).  It still sounded to static-like, and it started to give me a headache after awhile.  Therefore, I replaced it with the phaser sound that I made (also from the water running) which has a much smoother sound.  I also had the Pepto Bismol sound (now named SE_PLOP in the constants) play on each menu movement and the spoon sound (SE_SPOON) played on the selection.  This didn’t sound right because the SE_PLOP was longer than SE_SPOON, so I just switched out the occurrences of those two sounds, which makes it sound much better.  The lit light and light busted sound effects sound great.  I may need some delay or an animation when a light is busted, because the light busted sound effect plays through the game over screen.

Special Cases

While playing the game, I noticed a special case that may need to be handled.  If a wire is placed next to two (or more) filled wires (or other pieces), I believe it just takes the Elex value of the first one in the if/elseif statement.  I should calculate the highest of all the neighbors, and assign the new wire the highest value of all the adjacent pieces.

Another thing that had been bothering me is that I thought that the time statistic was proportional to the pieces used statistic, which would make it somewhat redundant.  However, through testing I found that it is possible to get a S rank in time and a C rank in pieces by quickly spamming wire pieces.  This is a good thing, which prevents someone from getting the best possible grade by quickly spamming pieces.  The inverse is also true, where someone can get an S rank in pieces but a C rank in time.  Just take a long time laying down the pieces in the shortest path.

 

 

 

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Level Up

Tile Editor Agony

Started using the Tiled tile editor to create levels for the game, because I thought that was the editor I used for Legend of Tux.  I created a simple sprite sheet which contained the tiles on one layer, and the batteries and LEDs on another layer.  I found that I was only able to export my maps in a very limited number of formats.  It’s sad that this tile editor can’t output a simple indexed array of tiles.  I’m really not in the mood to write a parser for any of these formats, so I went back to the Legend of Tux wiki and found that I actually used Mappy last time.  Therefore, I downloaded Mappy and recreated my levels with that tool.

 

Mappyland

Mappy will not load PNG spritesheets unless two DLLs are included, so I had to download those file separately from the Mappy website.  Apparently there is a now bug with the “export all layers” functionality, so each layer has to be exported individually or else you will get an array filled with zeros.  What a pain!  Unfortunately, they don’t provide a binary download for the previous Mappy versions, and it’s not on SourceForge so a previous version isn’t archived for download.  The author even says on the website that 1.4 is a beta, so why can’t the last stable release still be downloaded?

 

Make sure to set the color depth to 16-bit when creating the map, or else the sprite sheet will not load and Mappy will complain.  As shown in the sprite sheet above, batteries start at index 10, and LEDs start at index 20.  I can get the Elex value of the LED or battery by modding (%) by 10, which really isn’t scalable past 10, so this may need to be reworked later.  This sprite sheet is just used for creating the level arrays, so I was sloppy when placing the numbers.  In the actual game, the numbers are programmatically placed on the objects.

I created getter methods in the LevelDefinition class to return the background tile array and object array.  Then I have a method in the GameLevel class which converts the integer arrays to actual objects (GamePieceBattery, GamePieceLight, etc).  Using the Mappy exporter, I was able to acquire the static array data definitions, which I pasted into my LevelDefinition class.  Wrote simple if/else statements to return the correct array for the level, but this could be changed to a switch/case statement (if C Sharp has those… I don’t know, and I didn’t feel like looking it up, since if/else does the job).

Next Level

Added instance variable to the main ResistorGame class to track the current level.  I’ve been trying to keep instance variables out of this class except for the media files.  When the GAMEWIN state is enabled, the current level instance variable is incremented.  If the current level variable is greater than the maximum number of levels (currently hardcoded to 5), then it gets set back to zero.  For the  LevelSelectScreen, the class could return a level index, and the ResistorGame class can use that value to set the current level instance variable.

One problem I’ve noticed is that the cursor defaults to cell 0,0 at the start of each level, which may be off the actual game board, now that the shape of the levels are custom defined.  I may need to add an additional object to the level definition which is the starting position of the cursor.  Additionally, all levels are using the same value thresholds for the ranks, which will need to be fixed later.  The S rank for luminosity should be easy to calculate (the sum of the bust values of all the LEDs).  As for the time and pieces used rank, I’ll probably just play through the levels a few times, and use my best scores for S rank, then use some sort of bell curve function to determine the thresholds for the A, B, and C ranks.

 

Loose Ends (Fix later)

Here’s just a few additional things that need to be fixed.

Currently, there is a display issue if the wires connect to the resistor from the sides.   The wires need to be removed from the resistor sprites, then just simply display a standard wire which will make the proper connections, then display the resistor core on top of it.

I haven’t decided if I should let the player move the cursor off the board cells, and just prevent the user from placing a piece on a non-board space… or should the player only be allowed to move the cursor on game board spaces.  If the player is allowed to move the cursor off of game board spaces,  then the player shouldn’t be allowed to lay pieces on those empty spaces.

I may allow the player to continually lay wires as long as the confirm button is held down, because currently the player has to keep alternating between pressing the direction and the confirm button to lay continuous pieces, which feels jerky.

The LED values can still fall below zero if enough resistors are used.  Need to set the bottom limit to zero for these.

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It’s Time for a Change

Bust Condition Handled

Added code to detect if an LED has busted, which makes the game transition to the GAMEOVER state.  Added a GameOverScreen class to handle the display of the game over state.  Need to determine if I should give a warning to the player if the wire connected to the light is higher than its bust value, and allow the player to put a resistor there before the light has filled to avoid losing the stage.  Currently, once the light starts filling it is locked to that value, which doesn’t give the player a chance to fix their mistake.

Will add a meter to the lower right corner to display the Elex flow value of the currently selected cell.

Time Variables Added

I was able to get the current game time using the TotalGameTime.TotalMilliseconds property of the GameTime object that is passed to the update method.  However, I had to update all the update methods of all classes that extend Screen to accept GameTime as a parameter.  Created three new instance variables to the GameLevel class for holding the level start time, the current time, and the end time.  The end time is now displayed on the game win screen.

Level Definition

Created LevelDefinition class to hold the definition of the layout of each level along with the requirements for each piece/time/luminosity rank.  Created arrays of size 3 for holding each grade threshold.  Index 0 is for the S rank, index 1 is for A rank, 2 is for B rank, and all greater values are assigned C rank.

Fixed the getPieceCount method that returns the Pieces Used end level statistic to not count the LED and battery pieces, but only wires and resistors.

Added methods to the LevelDefinition class to take a piece count, luminosity value, or time and it will return the grade rank for each of those values.  The grade ranks are now displayed on the game win screen.  Using yellow for S, blue for A, green for B, and red for C.

Just thought I would reiterate the fact that I’m trying to make a fun game that is as scientifically accurate as possible, instead of trying to make a scientific simulation as fun as possible.