Im pretty new to coding and wanted to start a side project. The project idea is to make a interface to theory craft builds with all the parameters included in the game and have it show the damage output, similar to path of building for path of exile but i want to make it for another game.
However, for path of exile, a lot of the data such as damage numbers, boss defences, formulas, etc are available and released by the devs. Is there a way for me to get this information from the steam files? I intend to do this for lost ark
Related
I`m programming a WPF app to keep track of the in game trades.
I was wondering if there is any way to get a CSV file, JSON file or anything else, that is "easy to access" of every Rocket League item there is.
And even better would be an image to each item.
Simon
My school has a flash document we play across the TV's around the school. It has a schedule and time. It animates to different layouts and is supposed to have weather. It was made ages ago in ActionScript 2. As of now, the weather part doesn't work. It used to pull info in from a weather sevrer out school has, but I can't figure out how to do that. I'm just trying to pull in from Yahoo Weather or forecast.io at this point. They output to JSON but I can not for the life of me find a way to do this in Action Script 2. Does anyone have any advice?
Are you pulling the values directly into Flash or are they being run through an intermediary aspx/PHP page first? If it is going through an intermediary server first, then you can use either of those language's native JSON parsers. Otherwise, you're gonna have to use an AS2 parser, or write your own (fun exercise!!!)
I have an old SWF project file which is a series of png sequence to produce a 3D tour of numerous stadiums (If you can get it to load http://tinyurl.com/7h2zpcb). When I initially created it I never intended it to be published on the web (it was a university project) however I now would quite like to show it on the internet. The structure is of a main timeline with 4 stadiums each with a png sequence, then, when clicking on one of the stadiums, 4 more png sequences. The only problem is that it is all in one file and is over 12mb, plus has no pre-loader.
It is written in AS3 and is rather complicated as I used movie names and trimming to have reusable functions. It does however have global variables already set-up if this could help.
I have 2 questions. First, is there an easy method of separating out the project movies to 5 individual swf files. i.e main timeline, and each individual png sequence? Or will I need to copy and paste and copy assets over to each FLA file?
Secondly, would it just be easier to try using a preloaded and hoping that users wait for the project to download?
If you have any thoughts on this please give them. Is there a way to optimise the project in another way I am unaware of? As a side note there are a lot of pngs and total over 300mb when combined so I think XML is out of the question?
Thank you for your time. Any suggestions are welcome
For completeness' sake.
I did some research and tests and realised the time it would take to change the project to use any other technology would be too great for my needs. I simply just added a pre-loader to the site and saved myself a lot of extra time. When linking to the site I affix a message explaining that is for an offline installation and there may be a long load-time.
Hopefully this will help others in the future.
Thank you to Marty Wallace, shaunhusain and grapefrukt for their time and advice on this.
I'd like to start developing a "simple" game with HTML5 and I'm quite confused by the many resources I found online. I have a solid background in development, but in completely different environments (ironically, I started programming because I wanted to become a game developer, and it's the only thing I've never done in 13 years...).
The confusion derives from the fact that, although I know JavaScript very well and I have some knowledge of HTML5, I can't figure out how to mix what I know with all this new stuff. For example, here's what I was thinking of:
The game would be an implementation of chess. I have some simple "ready made" AI algorithm that I can reuse for single player; the purpose here is to learn HTML5 game development, so this part is not very important at the moment.
I'd like build a website around the game. For this I'd use a "regular" CMS, as I know many of them already and it would be faster to put it up.
Then I'd have the game itself, which, in its "offline" version, has nothing to do with the website, as, as far as I understand, it would live in a page by itself. This is the first question: how to make the Game aware of User's session? The login would be handled by the CMS (it should be much easier this way, as User Managememt is already implemented).
As a further step, I'd like to move the AI to the server. This is the second question: how do I make the game send player's actions to the Server, and how do I get the answer back?
Later on, I'd like to bring a PVP element to the game, i.e. one-against-one multiplayer (like the good old chess). This is the third question: how to send information from a client to another, and keep the conversation going on. For this, people recommended me to have a look at Node.js, but it's one more element that I can't figure out how to "glue" to the rest.
Here's an example of a single action in a PVP session, which already gives me a headache: Player 1 sends his move to the Server (how does the game talk to Node.js?). I'd need to identify the Game Id (where and how should I store it?), and make sure the player hasn't manually modified it, so it won't interfere with someone else's game (how?).
I'm aware that the whole thing, as I wrote it, is very messy, but that's precisely how I feel at the moment. I can't figure out where to start, therefore any suggestion is extremely welcome.
Too many things and probably in the wrong order.
A lot of the issues don't seem to me to be particularly related to HTML5 in the first instance.
Start with the obvious thing - you want a single page (basically a javascript application) that plays chess, so build that. If you can't build that then the rest is substantially irrelevant, if you can build (and I don't doubt that you can) then the rest is about building on that capability.
So we get to your first question - well at the point at which you load the page you will have the session, its a web page, like any other web page, so that's how you get the session. If you're offline then you've persisted that from when you were online by whatever means - presumably local storage.
You want to move the AI to the server? Ok, so make sure that the front end user interaction talks to an "interface" to record the player moves and retrieve the AI moves. Given this separation you can replaces the AI on the client with an ajax (although I'd expect the x to be json!) call to the server with the same parameters.
This gets better, if you want to do player to player you're just talking about routing through the server from one user/player to another user/player - the front end code doesn't have to change, just what the server does at the far end of the ajax call.
But for all this, take a step back and solve the problems one at a time - if you do that you should arrive where you want to go without driving yourself nuts trying to worry about a bucket full of problems that seem scary that you can probably easily solve one at a time and I'd start by getting your game to run, all on its own, in the browser.
About question one: You could maybe give the user a signed cookie. E.g. create a cookie that contains his userid or so and the SHA2 hash of his userid plus a secret, long salt (e.g. 32 bytes salt or so).
About question two: For exchanging stuff and calling remote functions, I'd use the RPC library dnode.
About question three: Use the same thing for calling methods between clients.
Client code (just an example):
DNode.connect(function (remote) {
this.newPeer = function(peer) {
peer.sendChatMessage("Hello!");
};
});
You don't have to use game IDs if you use dnode - just hand functions to the browser that are bound to the game. If you need IDs for some reason, use a UUID module to create long, random ones - they're unguessable.
Doing a bit of research on dependency injection frameworks for AS3 to retain loose-coupling of classes and boost our re-usability of code. I've been looking heavily at RobotLegs. There's a whole lot I still don't understand about the framework but it seems ideal for our regular Rich Media apps but has anyone used this framework for AS3 games? if so is it a good framework for games or should I be looking for another framework? I've heard that the MVC pattern isn't ideal for game design but would love to be set straight on this :)
I'd love to hear from anyone who's used a dependency injection framework for games, how it faired for them!
Cheers,
Anton
I used RobotLegs for a game that required integration with a few different backend services. One service gave me a multi-player lobby area to allow players to challenge each other, one handled the head-to-head gameplay after a challenge, and one allowed players to access information from their social network accounts.
From the beginning, I planned the game's architecture as if I were building a Rich Internet Application. The game itself was an implementation of a popular turn-based board game. Thinking about how to run a local game vs a network game definitely helped me stay on track with the MVC framework approach to game development. There was a ton of code that could be reused, and the difference between interpreting a local player clicking with their mouse versus receiving a message through the network to indicate that a remote player did something similar helped me see what logic simply couldn't be tied to the view at all. I was able to use models, commands, and mediators very smoothly, and in the end, it made the game's code more maintainable and easier to understand when I delivered it to my client.
I think most games will have a basic model that tracks the "board" whether it be pieces in a grid or enemy ships and asteroids out in space. Once you're thinking of the model as a separate entity from the view, it should be easier to imagine how player interactions through mouse and keyboard could trigger commands from controller to make changes to the model and notify the view of those changes. For some simple games, that might end up being a lot more work. For others, such as those where long-term maintenance or multiple input methods are required, it can save some headaches.
Let's think about the different views in a game for a second. Views can include a title screen, a settings/options screen, a multi-player lobby, high scores/leaderboard screen, and the main game itself (which could consist of many smaller views!). Many of these views can have models, like the list of high scores, the various settings (which should be shared between the options screen and the game views), the list of players waiting for a game, and the current state of the game, etc. By the way, need a way to save the game so that a player can restart where they left off? It's way easier to do that when the data is in a model and not tied directly to the view.
I think that too many Flash developers look at games as hugely different beasts from Rich Internet Applications. An MVC framework can be appropriate for a game, especially for multi-player and for games that you intend to iterate on over a longer period of time to add new content and features. The biggest challenge is making yourself remember the fact that cute, little furry critters running across your screen is just a visualization of data that might easily be displayed in a different way using DataGrid or a chart... though it may not be as fun to play with them that way!
RobotLegs is brand-new, so you'll struggle to find many people who've used it in production. They finally moved from release candidates to a first stable version last week. However, it has been created by a whole bunch of extremely well-respected coders and if your project is across the middle-to-long term, you will see adoption of RobotLegs explode during the lifetime of your project. It is going to be what all the cool kids are using! :)
(I have no stake, other than having occasional communications with some of the authors via Twitter and across the blogosphere).
HTH
AS3 is not my business at the moment, but game-frameworks are ;)
So, yes and no, MVC pattern are not your first choice, because you do not create that much views, controllers and models.
You have something more like an interface, some generic "engine" processing the game mechanic, and some database tables.
I currently use some aspects of MVC but not the complete pattern - "just the benefits".
EDIT:
You "can not say that:" MVC is not designed to be used inside a game (engine), because the MVC pattern only describes a logic, and not something pre-defined, like "the code always has to contain $x and must begin with include($y)".
It is just a design pattern, which does not directly affect the quality of the code, rather the progress and how you go on with your game design.