You may have my second born child.

You may have my first born child.

What's the license on this baby?

We have been making a TON of progress, and I don't think I could spam the boards any harder, so I've created a website and a chatroom to post our progress on. The website is here.

I've set up an IRC channel on irc.esper.net, in channel #voidrunner. Those of you unfamiliar with IRC can use this link to get to it.

All future progress will be discussed and/or shown in these two locations, I will refrain from posting in this thread anymore save to answer questions.

Well if I try just Bob = System.Create it gives me a NoneType error when I try to set the angle. No error on the actual creation, heh...

I'd seen the object picking fix, but I don't think that will help me in this particular case, since everything will be handled within the python.

Is there some way to do this?

Alright, I'm creating a lot of objects from within Python, and I was wondering if there was a more reliable way to keep track of all of them than just keeping a running track of the index of the last one. (Sprite[5]) or whatever, as I create them.

I noticed there was an object type in the script editor, and I tried messing with it to store an actual reference to each object in a list, but no dice.

I tried something like this:

Bob = object()

Bob = Create("Sprite", 1, System.MouseX, System.MouseY)

Bob.Angle = 5

I need to store a bunch of these in a list/array...so some actual concrete references would be nice..."create" creates one, but does not hold it as the event sheet does, so references would rock. I'm trying to write a custom data structure to hold a bunch of line objects and describe them in a relationship.

Basically the mistake people are making when they reply to topics like this one is that they try to be "helpful" and say "I won't help you because of this and that, and others wont for the exact same reasons". Which isn't true. It doesn't matter how many people won't help, what matters is that there might be one or two people who will, who are exceptions to the rule, to whom your reasons don't apply, for their own reasons. So why bother replying? "I won't help"? That's okay, 6,863,399,999 out of 6,863,400,000 people won't. This doesn't mean we need a topic with 6,863,400,000 replies. "No one will help"? Speak for yourselves.

This is why I just watch these threads from afar. To be honest though Karl, many people have been helping you out on IRC, and you've really just started with Construct. From what it sounds like, you're totally capable of doing this, you just need the time to get some experience. You've barely scratched the surface of what Construct is capable of, and that's totally understandable given the time you haven't had to learn it.

If your artists don't understand this, I'd get some new artists. Tell them to take a break and go outside and play in the sun or something for a week while you figure something out. They don't need to be drawing 24/7.

Hit a snag doing the power subsystems in the ship - you can see the tile based solution we were trying before in the last screencap of the ship interior. I think I've found a good solution now. Here's a quick screencap of the testbed application for our new freeform power system:

<img src="http://content.screencast.com/users/Arsonide/folders/Jing/media/89f0c9d3-9b3e-4e49-9e20-e91aa0f8d5dd/2010-08-20_0555.png">

Wires were created at runtime, and are draggable. Movie Time!

We're still alive. Making good progress. The list of changes is huge. Weather, detail objects, main menu, ship interiors, ship internal systems (power, navigation, etc), space stations with a nifty docking animation, etc... The next release won't be coming until ship internals are complete, inventory is added, and all interiors are at least generated. (Caves, Buildings on planets, and space stations.) Here's some pictures.

Inside the ship...

On a lava world...

On a jungle planet...

We are currently using one layout for space, one layout for planet surfaces, one layout for interior generation, and a main menu layout.

EDIT: I needed a break with all the ship stuff. I made some progress on it today, but I decided to implement weather. Rain, Snow, and Ash Storms are implemented and persistent. Some planets are more prone to storms than others. Tomorrow I'll plow ahead on the ship stuff a bit more and implement moons around planets and space stations in deep space sectors.

Oh and I also added a main menu that lets you spawn where you want in any universe you want: http://screencast.com/t/MzYwMTMyOGU

Till next time gents.

Made a little video showing progress, a little bit about where we're going with it, etc. I used my best pilot voice. "Attention passengers, we will be experiencing mild turbulence for the next five minutes or so. Please remain seated."

As promised, a couple of ships from the current iteration of my ship generator, none touched by hand: Ship Number One, Ship Number Two, and my personal favorite, Ship Number Three (I swear. I didn't touch it!):

<img src="http://content.screencast.com/users/Arsonide/folders/Jing/media/d36e3a9a-9997-4bca-ba04-749e9e69c3a7/2010-08-10_0142.png">

May I suggest a random name generator, to generate star system and/or planet names?

Check the last link I posted, up in the top left you'll see I'm on planet "Apyor 6", which I've changed to roman numerals "Apyor VI". Now when you click planets, the ship computer (text to speech object), will say the name of the planet, and a few details about it, like population, moons, type, size, etc.

But my big project right now is coming up with this system to randomly generate ship interiors. It will be used both for the player ship (you should be able to walk around your ship as you fly it), and when boarding enemy ships, or derelict vessels:

<img src="http://content.screencast.com/users/Arsonide/folders/Jing/media/2fc3b7b4-616f-45af-8011-9b8e4e750509/2010-08-09_0045.png"> <img src="http://content.screencast.com/users/Arsonide/folders/Jing/media/c5d125ff-54f6-4d8c-a24a-404a03ad7a8e/2010-08-09_0046.png">

I made branches symmetrical so they don't have that "deflated testicle" look anymore. I've already changed this to generate an actual tilemap, with walls and stuff. I'll probably have a workable version up tonight and post a screenshot.

The more I think about the system I've used, the more excited I get about it. I am fairly sure I could modify it to generate spacestation interiors and buildings and dungeons on planets!