 |
||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
| Re: Paul, can we get a Cetka update? by Commander Tansin A. Darcos 06/15/2013, 5:42am PDT | ||||
 |
 |
|||
| Original Title:Re: Paul, can get get a Cetka update.
"Yes we can can, why can't we?" - The Pointer Sisters. You said, "Can get get a Cetka update," not "Can we get" or "Can I get". :) Funny, I was just thinking about that, doing an update on what's happening. So I'll give you an update. 1. I've been working on some more of the game, right now I'm busy finishing the rest of the translations of the text into the other 5 languages (Spanish, German, Italian, French and Russian, those being the most popular ones that people are buying games for, and all of which can be done through Google translate. I check the translations and I think they'll be good enough to get by. I use a separate module and all language strings are loaded from that module so that I know what each translation is for, plus, whenever possible, I use an icon that is fairly clear as to meaning and isn't language specific. Do this right, and the extra language support becomes almost superfluous. But, still, I'd like to find a way to make a game that people are willing to buy, and games that do at least try to provide Internationalization are very rare (thus making the game worth buying if you - or someone you know who'd like to play the game - does not read English). If you don't read English most games are very hard to play if they're not done by a company that can afford to pay for translation and are willing to include it. I decided to include Internationalization support from the beginning when I saw how much business Steam gets in languages other than English. 2. I was thinking about three things. How do I write the maps for the game, how do I load them, and how do I make it so that users can print out their maps? I have to write a map outputter, an input parser, then I have to write a map printer, and so on and so forth. People will want to share their maps, and being able to show them off will allow them to do that, thus encouraging people to buy the game to be able to do their own maps. I might even include a website related to the game and have a place where people can upload and share the ones they have done. Then I got thinking, why bother with all that work? Why not figure out a way to leverage existing tools to do that for me. Create the maps as SVG drawings. Encode the information into the drawing using SVG's dialect of XML, and then, to print the map, you just load it into a web browser and print it out. (Set Firefox to print page at 50% and you get the first half of the game, 48 maps will all appear on one page. Then, to load an existing map, either the game-supplied map, or a user-created one, use the XML parser tools built into Free Pascal to read an XML file and thus use the tools to read the coding from the map. This means I don't need to write binary files and write a binary scanner, just use the XML scanner to read the file, pull the XML coding, and then examine the XML components for the data. If it's not right or is damaged, the components will tell me. Here's an example of how it looks, if you go into "File, Print Preview", and select this image alone, then set scale to 50% it shows maps 1-48 in full color on one page. (This is a demonstration of how the maps will look; I probably will either use color or shapes, not both. I might stick with shapes as it means color-blind people can also look at them). 
The image is supposed to be on a white background, so it's going to look funny. This is also a cut-down version of 48 maps to test the SVG writer, a full map has 96 levels on it, plus 4 bonus ones. To see it on a white background, you can either right-click on the image above and select view image or click on this: Cetka_Sample.SVG. If you save the image and look at it, notice that it's not an image, it's a text file! No complicated routines to save, just write text. It's reading it in that's complicated, and the XML parser does all that for me. |
||||
 |
 |
|||
|
