Gravity Induced distortion effects


I wanted to make what looks like gravity wells and other gravity induced distortion to my background grid and this is how it’s turned out. I’m using newton’s law of gravitational attraction to loop through each pixel and find the forces that would be acting on it. Then I had to add a way to blend the neutral color into the distorted colors, otherwise I would get very noticeable noncontinuous jumps. What I didn’t realize until I looked it up this morning (after already getting an equation in place but some weird artifacting lead me to search out reasons why), did I realize I had independently come up with the equation for Alpha blending! It turns out that I had typo-d the variable that is suppose to be containing my lerp value (which acts as the alpha value) with another, similarly name variable, meaning that my logic was sound. So that was pretty cool! What a relief!

 

lerp: linear interpolation. This should be in the range of 0.0 to 1.0 However mine were going outside of that, the first time I debugged I noticed a 4.xx and knew that I had been doing math somewhere wrong long before this point of the code.

BitRoamer Update – X

BitRoamer Update:

Changelog

  • Controls change. Mouse is no longer used

 

BitRoamer Update – IX

BitRoamer Update:

Changelog

  • Enemy meleers move faster than player
  • Added a melee weapon! Press space bar to use it

 

Commence to jigglin

I got my hands on a pretty cool program that lets me make 2D animations. I’ve chopped up a couple pictures and animated them just to get my feet wet.

Below you’ll see the still and then the animation I was able to rig up from it.


BitRoamer Update-VI

New BitRoamer update

  • added randomization to mob spawner sprite
  • add health-drop sprite
  • add ability to collect health drops and refill players health
  • health-drops gravitate towards player
  • Enemies now have a 15% chance of dropping a health item when killed. This is too infrequent.

BitRoamer Update-V

BitRoamer Updates:

  • Turned the mobspawner sprite effect into a singleton class which makes it run more effeciently but reduces the number of independent effects to one that is shared by all spawners. More than one and performance was impacted significantly.
  • Added a pulse to the mobspawner sprite

BitRoamer Update-III

BitRoamer Updates:

  • Add user healthbar
  • add enemy healthbars
  • add more mob spawners

Planetside 2 Xbox 360 Controls

After a couple hours of flying in PS2 I’ve gotten my 360 controller layout to be really comfortable.

Get Joy2Key. http://www-en.jtksoft.net/

Use this config. http://liquid-software.com/PS2/PS2-Pilot.cfg

Here is the button layout (mapped by function). Most of the binds map to the default PS2 keys. If the controller doesn’t work like it should, check your mappings in joy2key and compare it to the mumble or PS2 bind. For instance, I added a mumble key of the ‘ character. Joy2key see’s that as something else but if it doesn’t work just set it yourself. To see what joypad keys are what in joy2key open the windows control panel and open usb gamepads, go to properties and press the physical button and see which one lights up on the screen.