March 05, 2012

Hard at work or hardly working?

So for today's update we have a simple idea that's much more complex than you'd think. I've been hard at work on the hud, getting all the little details right. I'm stuck on a switch between the cone and circle, I'm not necessarily looking for a progressive change but right now it's about at subtle as a jackhammer in the face. For some reason it's going from a wide and short cone to an almost map covering circle, and it's not accurately representing the damage area which thankfully is still happening the way it should. The circle shrinks when I scroll down like it should and will revert back to a short cone like it should but just that transition into it isn't working right. My initial plan was to  make the circle larger by scrolling down, not shrinking that way which while slightly counter intuitive makes sense as you transition between modes.

My attempts at limiting it during or after the change aren't quite working how they should either. Suffice to say that while this is a headache now, when I'm finished it'll seem so simple, and the average player will never know what went in to making it work right. I did manage to already fix the scrolling bit by just inverting everything. Scrolling up covers a larger area instead of narrowing / focusing which apparently almost immediately made everyone happier, they didn't even seem to realize it was a problem until I changed it. I'll probably try to include both options in the final game but if that doesn't work out then it'll just be the one.  I'm not sure why or where the error is coming from considering a slight adjustment works without problems. I'm thinking it's in relation to some part of the code not related to the actual input but how it's interpreted, to say then that it's likely the part of the hud responsible for the circle. Though I again don't know how it works one way but not the other, but when I have another look at it in the morning I'll likely figure it out right away.

As for the giant circle, I've already checked default properties and min / max area etc and everything in the code so far says it should start out at the min range. So tomorrow I'll be rechecking the rest of the code that interacts with that info and see what's telling it to be so large because it obviously isn't doing it at random, something has to be feeding it the wrong info somewhere.

I'll be hard at work most of tomorrow, but after that I'll likely be consumed with mass effect for a couple days before I can pull myself away to really work more at this. Granted it'll take me much longer to really finish up with ME3 but I'll be more likely to take breaks and do other things, but the first couple days I'll probably not even realize I'm hungry or tired just play right through till I crash.

6 comments:

  1. Good for you... These days, defiantly not my days.

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  2. Coding is soo much harder than anyone thinks!

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  3. You deserve a break for a few days, I can't wait for ME3 either. And I took the pic off of my last post

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  4. Gotta take a break from coding. I start staring at my codes and doing nothing when I've coded for long hours.

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