Category Archives: Development Update

Quick Update – Creating Characters

This last week I’ve been busy laying the foundation to be able to creating characters. This primarily consists of getting the character’s to be able to dynamically render and animate with customizations (hair, base clothing, etc.) as well as with equipment. We have been contemplating and discussing how we would go about doing this since the beginning and then I found Spriter.

Spriter is a software tool used to create 2D modular animations. This means breaking apart the character into tiny pieces and moving them individually instead of having a static frame. This enables us to create animations with lots of frames and only create the graphics once – making content creation as simple as possible. I will save the remaining details for next week.

Aside from the animations I have begun constructing the UI for actually creating characters. Things are going well and I do not see any reason it wont be finished by next week’s update.

Speaking of UI, my good friend David has officially joined the team. He has been helping out since the beginning and was definitely Crea’s #1 fan. He is a professional web designer/developer and consequently will be focusing on the UI. I’m sure it wont be too long before I am showing off his work here.

Stay tuned!

Chat and Item Placement

Time for the weekly update! This last week was another productive week but it took an unexpected turn. At the start I was planning to get chat, item placement and some other feature done. I breezed through chat as I suspected, and once I started digging into item placement I realized there was much more potential (and work!) than I had originally anticipated.

Item placement is the feature the enables a player to take an item from their inventory and place it into the world.

I knew right away that I needed item placement to be dynamic and any item could provide a placement component to enable it to be placed into the world. Another thing I knew is that items should be able to define how it can be placed (known as the axis) – on the ceiling, floor, wall, and/or backwall. One last thing that entered my mind before I started programming is that some items should be able to be placed on top of other items – such as a candle can be placed on a table. Once I got the basics implemented and began looking into items supporting other items I had an epiphany.

Items can provide a list of different axes it can be supported on (think ceiling, floor, wall) and for each axis it defines the area the item takes up in the real world and also a list of supports that the axis provides. These supports can specify the side the support is at (top, bottom, left, right) and where the support is at on the item’s side. This basically boils down to one word: Awesomeness.

I will admit that it is a confusing without seeing it in action so here is a quick peek with more to come soon. This is a poor man shrine my friend David threw together.

The tables and shrines are all dynamically placed on a pixel basis and this is why I am truly excited about this feature. Later in the week I plan to write a more thorough write-up on how easy it is to create items with a placement component. I may even include a video of it in action!

Building anything just got personal.

Productivity Prevails

This last week I have been extremely devoted to working on Crea and lots of progress was made!

First, I have been working on the crafting system with my friend David helping on the UI side. The UI has been designed with expansion in mind. All craftable items have a category and subcategory. In the UI the categories are tabs and the subcategories are collapsible sections. Here is a screenshot of the latest version.

All of the graphics are placeholders for the time being as we iron out the design. Functionality wise it at 100%. Creating a new item with a craftable component will automatically be added to the dialog. The displayed items can be filtered by “only available” items and/or by surface requirement, which is automatically populated as well.

Saturday I implemented a feature David suggested where the active item is now more of an active column and pressing tab will cycle the active item. This will make it easy to clump commonly used items together and quickly tab through them. We are still playing around with it but it is a promising concept.

The last thing I worked on this week was internationalization support. With this in place it is easy to create new a localization. Each mod can provide a list of text translations for any locale. All mods for a given locale are combined to create the final localization. This means that even mods can provide translations for other mods. I am really excited to see what the community does with this.

That’s all for this week as far as updates go. I will write a new in-depth post about one of the features later this week – perhaps the crafting system. Be sure to subscribe to keep up-to-date on the latest news!

Back from Vacation

Over the last week and a half we have been on vacation. We went to the East Coast and had a great time with some friends. During the trip I did my best to sneak in Crea development whenever possible. I got two big things did get done during vacation with the help of a friend.

First of all, the blog is finally being hosted at siegegames.com. I have owned this domain for over a year now but never got my own hosting – even now it is a friend hosting it! All that remains is to finish setting the site up.

The other news is that the item toolbar is fully functional. It displays how many you have of each item and the currently selected items for your left/right click. You can change the selected items with the number keys. Moving items around is simple – just click on an item to grab it and then click another item or empty space to drop the grabbed item. The UI needs some work, such as the item’s icon position, but it is good enough for an initial version.

I’ll be returning to my posting schedule starting Monday. So more updates are on their way!