Images of the interior of the hangar area of the large voidplane craft. I added a warehouse section, which is the area behind the wall on the right in the first image. The 4th floors from the center that jut out and have balconies are also part of the warehouse section. In the middle of the wall is the circular elevator that provides the primary access to the multiple floors.

A view from the back looking towards the front of the craft, with the purple nose door visible in the center. There are two Voidskimmer craft in the hanger, the one on the left being inverted.

A basic side-view map of the craft’s sections:

Alas, I have not put any major work into the Pi/Tri engine and games for some time. My last big changes to the engine were in the end of 2014, and I did a little work on a game idea in June 2015. Soon after that I got a job, and I haven’t been much in a programming mood since. Some things have changed since I last posted, so I decided to talk about those.

Pi/Tri now uses GTK (The GNU Image Manipulation Program Toolkit) as its GUI framework instead of the Windows ‘Forms’ system. This primarily affects the design of the editor:

The Pi/Tri Editor now sports a more structured interface, with a fixed-width toolbox window on the left side and the main editing screen on the right. A montage of many of these toolboxes below:

The packager as well as resource editing screens are now integrated into the main screen instead of opening in new windows. One reason why this was done was to help with the way the OpenGL rendering is accomplished in widows like image resource editing.

The editor also now supports undo/redo. Anything that changes the contents of a map (add, move, delete, change a property) has an ‘edit action’ associated with that has enough information to put things back if undo is invoked.

Looks like everything else was ‘under the hood’ kind of stuff, just cleaning up code and fixing bugs.

I might post soon explaining my Pi/Tri arch-nemesis: occlusion sorting.

What’s this? Pi/Tri on Linux? Cross platform functionality?

I use Ubuntu Linux as my primary OS at home, and it’s where I have my creative tools: Blender (for 3D modeling), Inkscape (for 2D vector images), and GIMP (for 2D bitmap images). Now joining them is MonoDevelop, allowing me to do my C# programming right along with everything else. No more switching to Windows 7 to run Visual Studio. In a few days I was able to port my rendering code from SlimDX/Direct3D to OpenTK/OpenGL. (The OpenTK library is the OpenGL equivalent of SlimDX for my purposes). Probably some new bugs and tweaks to work out, but so far the game and editor seem to be running all right. I’ll also need to eventually re-port the engine back to Windows, but no rush to do that at the moment…

I tried this porting operation some time ago without success. Luckily MonoDevelop and OpenTK matured a bit since then, and hopefully they will do the job well.

Yes, despite not reporting anything since… February? Wow, that’s pretty bad.

So anyway, some updates about the engine’s progress.

Images now have an offset value. This allows the sprite designer to set image positioning with no need for programming.

The editor now uses standard window controls instead of a custom rendered GUI.

GUI layouts can be designed like world maps, using mostly the same program.

Transit Departures and Transit Destinations are used to facilitate movement between world maps. Departures search all known maps for destinations for simple selection.

The cinematic scripting has evolved into a more complex scripting language. Supports conditional logic (if, else if, else, end if) and the ability to run scripts on the universe, dialog boxes, and entities.

Scripts can report errors in syntax or logic.

Solid image resources, a combination of sprite and collision data, allow for the creation of basic map entities without the need to do extra programming.

World maps can be divided into zones. The camera and most entities stay within their current zone. Entities outside of the active zone either go dormant or get destroyed. The player can transition between zones by touching adjacent borders.

After almost a year of neglect, work has resumed on the PiTri game/engine.

Some new sprites and some simple stationary enemies that shoot lightning balls. Please excuse the temporary player sprite.

Dialog boxes for info and conversations.

Packager, now integrated into WorldBuilder, sports a new icon layout for displaying package contents.

Grid Textures now can be created and edited directly in Packager.

A big advance in sprite animation. Images automatically update according to which direction the sprite is facing. Sprite Animation Sets can be edited right in Packager.

Other significant updates:

A Cinematic system that can manipulate the camera, dialog boxes, and entities to create narrative scenes using a basic scripting syntax.
A major issue with the sound system has been fixed, so it’s now officially functional.
Got ramps to behave well.
Text Blocks can be used to easily make multi-line text. Though the dialog box picture above doesn’t show off this functionality, it is capable of being much wordier.
Some window tweaks, like allowing maximize and minimize and remembering window positions for WorldBuilder.

After almost a year without programming, I decided to change the type of game I’m going to be working on with the “Pi/Tri Engine”. It will now be a overhead view action-adventure.

Some major changes to the engine and game I’ve made in the last month:

• Sprite occlusion testing: when two sprites overlap, this determines which should be drawn in front of the other. (Not as easy as you might initially think!)
• Pseudo-3D capability using altitude and height properties
• New camera with “slack zone” in middle of screen
• 8-directional controls
• Contextual actions based on what the player is facing
• Game pad input
• An input configuration screen
• Pickups and treasure chests
• Ability to transition between maps
• Persistent state tracking (for example, an opened treasure chest will remain open after going to another map)
• Basic status displays (currently for health and equipped items)
• Start of inventory system with menu (shown below)

And of course, there was a bunch of other changes here and there with the engine to make it easier to work with, but are a bit too technical to mention here.

The packager, which combines multiple files into one, has been converted to a regular Windows application, so it doesn’t need to run the full engine.WorldBuilder, the level editor, has various improvements here and there.

At the moment I’m debating whether to convert portions of the editor’s interface into Windows components instead of in-engine GUI code.

One thing I’m not looking forward to doing: making the daunting amount of sprites for characters. I’ve inserted Raeja from Agwilika Rhe to stand in as the player’s character for now, but it’s only 8 standing frames, so no walking or fighting animations yet.