Skeletons in /trunk

Work on TideTurner led to various bugfixes and small feature improvements in the engine during the past week (for example, more uniform handling of positioning for both static and dynamic entities). It's always the case that actually using a product leads you to find all sorts of small things that you don't think of during development...

/trunk should now contain a usable environment for testing of TideTurner: I imported all the media files, etc. - I don't like the idea of large binary files in a version control system, but really there is no alternative. I'll also try to set up a hosted server so that multiple people can playtest at once (I need to recompile the server for the appropriate distro). Finally, I set up a section in the forums for discussion of TideTurner development. Meanwhile, here is a random screenshot:


The main character model is by Tiziana aka TiZeta and the skeleton by Adam Ward aka Gixter. Both are models that can be used freely. I intend to replace them eventually, once I find an animator to work with on this project, but for now they should be good for playtesting.

The initial game idea is for the main character to have a few spells, one to summon a skeleton, another to create barriers (you can see one in the screenshot, it's the semi-transparent yellow area), and maybe a fireball for combat. The character will then fight another group of skeletons, perhaps led by another player, with the barriers being of stategic importance, to prevent your opponents from surrounding you, giving you time to regenerate health (the barriers will vanish after a certain time period, or if they have been damaged enough), and so forth. So far in trunk you can create barriers with a click and skeletons with a rightclick, and clicking on a skeleton makes it walk to you - still in a very early stage here.

Here is the code in charge of creating barriers:

create_barrier = StateArrayFloat()

BUTTONS_TO_SPELLS = { BUTTON_LEFT : "create_barrier", BUTTON_RIGHT : "create_minion" }

def click_action(self, button, x, y, z):
    self.clear_actions()
    self.queue_action( SpellcastAction([x,y,z], Commander.BUTTONS_TO_SPELLS[button]) )

def can_modify_create_barrier(self, value, actor_unique_id):
    self.barrier = create_logic_entity(Mapmodel)
    self.barrier.model_name = "forcebarrier"
    self.barrier.position = value
    self.barrier.yaw = yaw_to(value, self.position)

    return False # No need to change this value on the clients

It might not be entirely self-explanatory, as you need to have an idea of what StateVariables are and how can_modify_X functions work, but I think it does show how only a little Python code is necessary to do stuff like this.