XFTW – Independent Study Project for Richard Jones

I started doing the assault tank sprite and came up with 6 frames of animation in two(three) directions. I still need to do a backwards animation but that is next. i started with the tank and it will be the easiest to draw initially so I can create/figure out all the different views/animations I am going to need before attempting more ambitious ones. In case you were wondering, it has a turret mounted main cannon and four slug cannons, 2 on each side (as if that means anything to anyone but me right now). I should have a rotating animation by next week along with firing animations for the eight fire positions and target animations. (E NE N NW W SW S SE)

On programing news, I made a successful connection to the local host server I am using but am having troubles getting values to return from the queries. I found a few tutorials that were very useful in setting up the database but so far I haven’t found with a solution to my problem. It is giving me a fault error and crashing the program, suggesting that I am trying to reference a NULL value or other such nonsense. The Database is `players` with table `users` with the fields `id` and `size` which are both integers and the char field ‘color’. I will put the actual query code up later (on a different computer) if anyone has any suggestions.

Sprites > programing

Edit: I went ahead and finished all 8 positions of the tank and included the animations for driving up down left and right.  Also included is the animation for firing the slug guns in any of the eight directions.  I hope to have 18 frames of animation per firing (of each unit) so those 6 will loop 3 times.   I hope to have the main cannon firing soon and then some animations for the targets of the attacks as well as death animations.  I believe once these are done that I will have an accurate number of the frames of animation needed for each of the 20+ units I am planning to have in the game.

for something

I am currently unable to get the allegro application (working stand alone code on other page) to communicate with the database on my desktop at home. So far I have been unable to find a tutorial other than for purely web applications.

All is beginning to look well here.  I finally got a connection working but unfortunately I have not had the time since the fix to edit values with my own database.  Some good news right?

I have just finished writing all of the pseudo code and comments for the game.  Obviously there are things which I have not foreseen but at this moment the algorithms for multi-player play, unit movement and attacks, as well as army selection and storage are in place.

Here is a little something though to give you an idea of where this is headed and how it truly has evolved from its predecessor.

The unit types are

Infantry- the suck of your army, plentiful in case you have points left over.  They can be annoying if opponent doesnt have resources to beat them.  Can “reinforce” to regain health.  Uses machine guns.

Tanks – tough, fast, and only good against armor.  Lacks the ability to deal with infantry but useful against all other types.  Immune to normal artillery fire.  Uses main cannon.

Artillery – deals damage over a large area and from further away than other units.  Effective way to remove infantry but lack armor of other mechanical units.  Uses siege cannon.

Mechs – weapons of war unseen before.  Adaptable for any combat role by using armor cutting blades or gatling guns for dealing with infantry.  Uses chainfist and dual vulcans.

More unit types to come.  At release I hope to have 8 unique and deadly unit types for players to tear at each other with.

-Chard

Here is the support blog for X-TREME FTW, the natural evolution of the worlds most unknown combat simulator!