JeffSventora

I think it's cool and I know what its saying but that is not a "B".

Lol its cool Oreo. And of course General Pony!! Meet us in Vegas tomorrow, you can can meet her for the first time just like me.

Omg Jungle, it was actually number 250, the very last name you posted. Holy shit I really though you weren't gonna list it. *Hugs Jungle & likes his post*

Not even close. This name is… ahh no hints.

Nope, but I'll hug the first person to guess it, and I'll be honest about it.

So I said screw it. Never did the whole online thing before but it shouldn't be too hard considering the amount of women I pulled from Facebook alone. This was the result of my very first convo:  And for the record, I blurred her out for privacy not because she wasn't hot. I swear she was. Rofl!

I'm absolutely in love with this song. Take a listen to it. It seems like a happy upbeat song but when you read/closely observe the lyrics you might find the song isn't as happy as it seems. **SONG** [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThbJtOAkHy4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThbJtOAkHy4) **LYRICS** **And everything is going to the beat** **And everything is going to the beat** **And everything is going** **And you said** **It was like fire around the brim** **Burning solid** **Burning thin the burning rim** **Like stars burning holes right through the dark** **Flicking fire like saltwater into my eyes** **You were one inch from the edge of this bed** **I drag you back a sleepyhead, sleepyhead** **They couldn't think of something to say the day you burst** **With all their lions and all their might and all their thirst** **They crowd your bedroom like some thoughts wearing thin** **Against the walls against your rules against your skin** **My beard grew down to the floor and out through the doors** **Of your eyes but go in disguise like a sleepyhead, sleepyhead** **Go ahead** I'll go ahead and break it down, at least in a way that I understood these lyrics which conveyed such an intense amount of emotion I felt that I was forced to share my feelings with you. I'll do it line by line: –-------------------------------------------------------- I'll start by assuming that this is a tragic story of love and loss from the perspective of a man talking to a woman. **And everything is going to the beat** - Everything is going great, me and you have a lot in common, we get along, we are bound to be together. **And everything is going** - The more I've gotten to know you the more I realize this may be harder than it seems. **And you said** **It was like fire around the brim** - When I told you that I loved you, the feeling overwhelmed you, you were filled with so much fiery passion. **Like stars burning holes right through the dark** **Flicking fire like saltwater into my eyes** - You realized you loved me in return, the tears started to project from your eyes, your eyes are beautiful. **You were one inch from the edge of this bed** **I drag you back a sleepyhead, sleepyhead** - Even though we shared the same feelings, you knew certain complications would not make this easy, you didn't want to hurt so you tried to stray away. I wouldn't accept it so I pulled you right back. I couldn't accept that your hope was dead, it was just asleep. **They couldn't think of something to say the day you burst** - You knew they wouldn't accept our love and our future but you knew they couldn't find out the hard way, you let it all out. **With all their lions and all their might and all their thirst** **They crowd your bedroom like some thoughts wearing thin** - Instantly you felt the rage consume them, you knew it would happen this way, and you knew it wouldn't be easy. **Against the walls against your rules against your skin** - Your defense was no match, your morals and feelings served no justification. They viewed us being too different for compatibility. **My beard grew down to the floor and out through the doors** - You disappeared and I waited for you to return but you didn't so I had to search for you. **Of your eyes but go in disguise like a sleepyhead, sleepyhead** - I knew things would be rough but not this rough, I know you are not dead, you're just sleeping. You must be sleeping. **Go ahead** - Wake up

> I agree with this one. If NPC's are able to walk at least a little ways out of their own region before losing aggro it would be a lot better and like most real/big games. When a player right now can just run out of the map and the NPC can't do a thing about it, it makes certain things a lot easier. Now with having seamless mapping in regions it would be kind of weird if your fighting an NPC and maybe don't know it and step out of your current map and the NPC just like hits an invisible wall it can't walk past. I plan on allowing NPC's to walk beyond the scope of their map but not regions. > If regions are just big maps.. What's the difference then, from a normal map? > > * A region with 4 maps in a square, each map is 5x5\. That makes the region 10x10. > * A map of 10x10. > > I'm struggling to see quite what the purpose of regions are..  It's all about culling data that doesn't need to be represented. If we had a HUGE map, would we want every single thing that we can't see to be sent over the network to us if it doesn't matter? By doing it this way, we would only ever update the viewable set.

> Wouldn't it be better to load just like your current map and the map above/below/right/left of your into your memory at a time and not the whole region? > > Also a question about the editors in this project. Are you making them part of the client like in the vb6 Eclipse or are you making them external editors that doesn't require you being logged into the game to use? They are external. And I'm sort of working like that in a sense that only VISIBLE maps will be drawn but having them loaded in memory will greatly reduce the amount of HDD accesses which will always be slower than reading from RAM. Besides, I've done some math and if you have a region of ~50x~50 (2500 total maps) it will only consume roughly 20Mb which is considerably small.

To be fair, even XML is plain text that needs to be parsed. I personally feel that during the debug phase, XML is optimal, being able to change things on the fly but upon release of a game/application you should always convert to binary. Maybe you could add a Boolean in the source for something like that.

> So, if you could have regions be any amount of maps you want, you could basically wrote your whole game as one "region" and the whole game would be seamless. Would there really be any benefit of making more then one region? Like, do bigger regions run any slower or have any problems that may come about making your whole game one region? Or would it be more like if you wanted to create an ground level of your game and like an underground, you could make the ground level one region and underground another… I think the beauty of the system is that you can use it for whatever you want really. Personally, I would create regions for whole cities and separate large areas on the map. You could do one GIANT region for your whole game but I wouldn't recommend that being that whichever region you are in is the region that will be loaded into memory. Personally I wouldn't choose to make regions bigger that about 25x25 maps. I was also thinking about allowing you to define the dimensions of the region, so you could have one that is 25x1 or vice versa. About the teleportation, yes. When you reach the edge of the region you will be teleported to the adjacent regions IF one is set. I want you all to think of regions as just BIG maps. Lets say you have 3 main cities in your game and a lot of fluff in between. Create three regions for your cities and shops and create a few larger regions pieced together to connect it all. As Ertzel said, you could even "layer" the regions. So if one of your cities had an underground dungeon, create a new region the players will be warped to that define that underground dungeon. No more "MAX_MAPS" on a grid, think of it as a bunch of LARGE maps floating in the air (under the hood) but pieced together on the front end.

 Nothing TOO crazy, but I'm re-working the entire world system. It is now powered by Solar, the rendering engine I created. On top of that, here is some info on how the maps will work in Eclipse.NET. the world will be broken down into "regions". Regions are nothing more than a grid of maps that can be any size that you wish. So you could have a very large area take up 20x20 maps or a small town take up 2x2 maps. These regions are seamless HOWEVER, upon reaching the EDGE of the region, you will teleported to the adjacent region. if that doesn't make sense, I'll try to elaborate further. - 6 Static Layers (3 Ground, 3 Fringe) - 4 Animation Layers (2 Ground, 2 Fringe)

When you reach that stage, feel free to PM me if you'd like. I wouldn't mind lending a hand for free 

Looks great so far, what are you guys creating this with?

> Jeff this isnt a debate topic i accept your idea. but it really has no bearing on the art of it. so unless you has an idea on improving it art aspect of it then please share. i wont be making a debate on anything to off track the topic.  but this wont be in a game its just so i do somethin.  > > Updated Thurst. This is simply not a debate. I am not an artist, I am a programmer. This seems to be some kind of art asset for a game right? As a programmer I'm giving you insight on how you can improve efficiency. I doubt you would go through all of the trouble of copyrighting/watermarking this if you weren't going to use it in some form of project or at least someone else use it. Your art is good but I would never use it and that's why I'm giving you some tips. Accept advice if you want, but that's what you're going to get in this section.

But ultimately will be translated by programmers. When your game has hundreds of sprites, the size of your game will dramatically decrease with simple changes like that.

Why use all of that texture space for the SAME exact texture? You could just use 3 with different flames in one direction (forward) and then rotate it in code?

This is my weenie. 

Will be graduating with my Bachelor's of Science in Game Dev. in March.

It's more than just a conference! It's my opportunity to meet developers face to face and get a damn job in the industry! lol

It isn't on my side either lol, I'm all the way in Florida xD Spending at least $2,500 on this trip.

Anyone going? I'll be there all week, would love to meet up with anyone going 

My only suggestion would be to work on the sky, it just looks odd to me for some reason.

That was me defining a source rectangle in the tiles image and drawing it with a red overlay. It's a stack of hay that I have following the mouse cursor, just for debugging. 

I know how parameter lists work, but I don't like them for readability reasons. I like to know what goes where.