Re: [Help-liquidwar6] Happy new year! ( and more levels)

[Christian Mauduit]

Hi,

Kasper Hviid wrote:
> www.kasperhviid.dk/stuff/4more.rar
Thanks a lot!

>   ATLANTIS
>
> I drew a labyrint on paper, scanned it and traced its outline in
> Illustrator. I did the painting in Photoshop. It ended up looking
> quite cool. It took a while to draw all the neon, though.
I like mazes!!!

>   INK AND OIL
>
> I finally finished a tush a ink drawing I had started a long time ago.
> In Photoshop CS3 the drawing was inverted and combined with a monotype
> painting I had created with oil paint.
I just love this one... Looks really great.

>   STRANGE NEW WORLD
>
> This is a bit of fanart, a remake of one of the classic Liquid War
> levels. The 1:1 aspect ratio is kept for historical reasons. It is
> painted in Photoshop CS3. The background is one of my monotype
> paintings. I hope that step wasn't to bold.
Wow, this is a must have. I have longed try to do it (make the genuine 
level "look good") and... you did it!

>   SINUSOID
>
> Painted in Photoshop CS3. The practical purpose of this map was to use
> the wrap-around feature of LW6. The map is just a vertical sinus
> curve, with horizontal paths connecting it with itself. I'm a great
> fan of Art Nouveau, so I tried to make a lot of natural looking forms.
> Quite a bit of work!
For sure this one must be played on.

> Creative Commons have been updated from 2.5 to 3.0 ... I have chosen
> to use that newer license for my new maps.
OK, noted.

> Looking at opt-static.c, I noticed a lot of parameters still not
> mentioned in the documentation. Don't know if they're working, though.
Well, in fact, a bunch of things "happened" to the code since last 
release... Again, I spent a lot of energy on those apparently useless 
100% technical stuff which seem to be of use to programmers only, still, 
some things "had to be done". Among the major changes:
- LW6 now has a "self-documentation" system, the consequence being that 
config files contain the options description (believe me, this *is* 
convenient), and basically if an option is undocumented -> program 
complains!!!
- LW6 goes multithreaded, for instance map loading is done in the 
background. I'm not a great thread fan, but it sometimes does help. The 
good aspect is the game will actually use recent multicore CPUs "the 
right way". The bad side is that multithreaded programs are always 
harder to debug...
- I've tried to port the game on MS-Windows, it started better than I 
expected but then I was stuck on a problem with SDL not being designed 
for cygwin, the cygwin port being in fact a mingw32 hack. In short, you 
can't have both standard UNIX libs, more specifically POSIX socket 
functions, and SDL graphics together. I'll give it another try with 
mingw32, if it doesn't work, I'll try and give as much information as I 
can on what LW6 requires, and try to transfer the task to some 
cygwin/mingw32 guru.

> Maybe you should add a few more screenshot, to indicate that the game
> has more than one level ready!
Yes, in fact what I'll do is make a beta-0.3 release in January. What 
I'll put in this will simply depend on how fast coding goes, but the 
idea is to release something. This will be a good occasion to update 
screenshots, as you point it, they do not really reflect the current 
state of the game.

> IDEAS:
>
> The background could be scriptable, so the designer could design his
> own sprites and background, and how the sprites should behave.
mmm, I like this one - I like scripts 8-) But this really requires work.

> Some newer application takes into account that their program will run
> on different screen resolutions. In Adobe Bridge and Word 2007, the
> horizontal size will determine how much information will be shown.
> For instance, life bars could expand from simple colored rectangles to
> some 3D bars with the player name at the bottom.
OK I see, this goes beyond level resizing, I like the concept.

> The mouse could be used to make in-game adjustment: Change HUD, add
> local players, turn elements on and off, drag elements around,
> fullscreen and such.
Well, in fact, speaking of this, I have made a rather radical GUI 
choice: LW6 will be "6 keys driven". That is, anything that has 6 keys, 
6 buttons, or a pointing device + 2 buttons, should enable full control 
of the game. There are several reasons for that:
1) it forces the game to remain "simple"
2) it increases portability (think of handhelds...)
3) it makes it easy for several players to share input devices
4) it enables a default "factory setting" which is "use keyboard arrows 
and ESC/ENTER" or "mouse pointer + buttons" or "standard joystick" and 
it works. The idea is that a player launches LW6, and control just work 
the way you would expect them to. This doesn't mean you can't redefine 
them afterwards, program hot keys to do arbitrary complex stuff. But... 
all functionalities should be accessible with 6 keys.

Note that given the current architecture, it's not so hard to trap keys 
and put "hooks" on them to do, well, pretty much whatever you want.

> I only discovered this movie recently. Damn, it is just so cool!
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrJyJVd0JWs
Yep, that's cool.

Back to your levels, I showed them to my wife this evening and her 
reaction was "wow, this is nice, it must really motivate you to make a 
great LW6". She's right 8-)

Happy new year,

Christian.

--
Christian Mauduit <address@hidden> - http://www.ufoot.org/ ___ __/\__
Liquid War 6 - http://www.gnu.org/software/liquidwar6/     / _")\~ \~/
"Les amis de la vérité sont ceux qui la cherchent et non _/ /   /_ o_\
ceux qui se vantent de l'avoir trouvée" - Condorcet     (__/      \/