Well of course there is gonna be a good old engine in the background at this point probably powered by XNA development. Its gonna draw all kinds of graphics and other stuff on there. But lets say you want to add a new animation or picture for a new item you just added. How are you gonna get that stuff in the pipeline.

Well for graphics it will be easy just adding a image tag to you xml will import the image in png format. But for animations it will be more difficult thats why there is gonna be a whole slew of stuff to make it more easier. Animations will be like commands you will have movements in all directions related to a specific command. You will also have animation list commands which is basically a custom animation list. You could put a direction animation and group it will a animation list command. In the animation list command is a an actual list of graphics with timings and a name.

The parser will be able to link this stuff together so that when you move the graphic to the left it will go down the pipeline look at for the animation left. After it found it, it will look for the animation list matching the name. Then it will increment that animation list up one which will grab the next image in the interation. Tada an animation is done and its ready for production.

There will also be special animations ones not assigned to specific directions but just simple executed at a given point in time. End of quest etc… In order to use there you would simple need to call <animation>name</animation> at the correct point in your quest, item, or whatever. You can even put time conditionals and other stuff on it.

Also remember if you put an all animation basically run this animation always it will only show up when the character is actually within view distance of the object. There is alot to say about the graphics engine I have instore for the game but that is a ways away. For now I hope this gives you idea of what to look for in BlackFire Scripting for Graphics

I am saying it now but end of this week I hope to have a functioning Dink Dmod out with a couple minutes of playtime in at least! Stay tuned for more information. Oh and tomorrow another update to the BlackFire Scripting Language I will be talking about graphics engine and how it will work in with BSL.

You set the start date and put in the current satisfaction, population, and resources for three towns. Then you set the Population Capacity and your on your way. Set up the number of people you have on each resource and then hit update. Your spread sheet will track over time things that change and can give you estimates on future date by using the simulation date. Set the simulation date to some future time and and hit Simulation update and it will tell you your resources and population at that time. Hit the regular old update and it will go back to normal.

Next step is to add Building information which I started with Academy. Also there is a transaction place where you put transfers and imports to your various cities. You can also put what you spent on buildings there too and it will be factored into your totals. Building decrease is the percentage the building requirements are dropped.

As far as gold and researchers that has not been finished but since thats the most straight forward thing I will leave that to last. Buildings is a really big pain and it would be great to see what I need for resources for each building and what level each building in my town is. Thats the next step but also the hardest. If you want to look at the excel sheet go download it in my downloads section. I promise new updates on that as time goes by.

BlackFire Script Language part 3 Command Tree, today I will be talking about the Command Tree. The command tree is the heart of the system and is hot swappable with game states. So lets first talk about the basic command structure.

Commands are setup just like Command Patterns, when another command creates an event or anything else in the system creates an event it gets put into the Command Tree/Stream. An event will have a name of command its trying to access along with appropriate data.

The Event enters the top of the Command tree and drops down into through the tree until it finds something that matches its event name. A single command can also be made up of multiple commands. This is all done in the linking process talked about before. For instance lets talk about the new character command. It goes down and is caught by the new character command. In the new character command is a list of commands that need to go through. First is name, then class, etc… down the list of the command. With this approach you could easily move the stuff around so that name goes last and class picking first etc.

This is a great segway into game states. Game States is the ability to save an entire Command tree and essentially backing it up. So you can have an entirely different command tree at any point in the game. Lets say there is a command tree for battles which don’t allow saving(just an example). This command tree would be the same as the normal one with save command removed from tree. This would essentially disallow saving.

So lets talk about some example Commands. There are commands like save, new character, level up character, monster battle, quest related and many more. There will also be generic commands like add to generic stat. These can be used over and over repeatable with scripts. In your xml file you would say you want to use the generic command then give the stat name and the amount to increase and the name of this implementation of the generic command. This will essential give you a new command based off the generic command that will add your amount to stat when called. Then add your new command’s name to the end of some other command like the level up command and it will be called at every level up. Or you could have it called as part of a quest completion command.

Sorry this took so long to get out but thats it for now on Command portion of BSL. Look forward to animation and graphics next!

I have also decided to create a dmod prequel to BlackFire entitled BlackFire: The Rings of Destiny. It will merge the story of previous dmod to the BlackFire game and reveal some stuff. If you don’t know what a dmod is I suggest you check out DinkNetwork link.

Thats it for now!

Since you haven’t seen the old Sudoku Solver program its all new to you. You can download it on the downloads page. Sorry there is no readme but if you hit the RunMe.bat file it will run the program in the command window. If you look at the SudokuRunner.bat you can see the arguements to the SudokuSolver.jar and if you look at the hard.txt you can see how to input a puzzle.

If you want to look at the source code then open the jar file and take a look. Inside the jar file is too more txt files medium.txt, and easy.txt they correspond to respective puzzle’s difficulty. There is no comments on any of the code so it maybe difficult to understand. I will be optimizing it alot but as it stands now its pretty optimized. Comments will also come in the future as well as abstracting the algorithms so that they are handled better. New algorithms will come as I think of them which may be never. If you think of any more algorithms then send me an e-mail and I will take a look. My e-mail is igloo15 at igloo15.com

Finally some warnings in rare cases Hard puzzles can take an extraordinary amount of time to solve. Epic puzzles may take hours. Occasionally the solver will catch a break and solve and Epic fast but most times it will take a long time. The hard puzzle i put in with the solver usually solves in under 30 seconds sometimes as quick as 1 second.

Basically I will have a XMLFactory that can parse documents and directories at will. It will keep an internal list of all XMLDocs and return what you need. If a given file is already parsed it will send it out to you from its list.

A single XMLDoc will contain multiple top level XMLElements which each can possible have their top level elements in a list. All XMLDoc, XMLElement inherit from abstract XMLAbstract which will implement the basic methods and properties of each. As far as Progress goals I assigned a point value to each class. XMLAbstract is 2, XMLDoc, XMLELement, and XMLAttribute are 1 point and XMLFactory is 4 points. for a total of 9 points in this UML. I then said that this is about 25% of the project thus assigning 36 total points to BlackFire Parsing Project.

Its the weekend so SudokuSolver is one of my biggest projects this weekend. I really want to get all my functionality from my original sudoku solver into my new sudoku solver so that I can release it here! First I have to figure out how to get an executable jar file to work with a command prompt. I have just been unable to execute the jar file and thus I am really unable to get a version people can just use without compiling. Certianly the source will be available and people can just compile it but thats not much help for others that don’t know how to do that.

So here is my goals for this weekend finish functionality of Sudoku Solver, write up a specific detail report of what is needed for BlackFire. With this I will be able to establish guidelines and start the project.

Sorry this is late I promised this yesterday but I got bogged down working on a website thing. Anyways its here now and I hope you enjoy reading about my game language.

In the second part of the BlackFire Script Language discussion I will be talking about Parsing. Parsing is the first step in constructing the BlackFire Script Language. Parsing is what handles the creation of the BlackFire Script Langauge backend. Its also what sets executes or at least sets up BlackFire Scripts. So parsing is important and the first step to the Parsing part is the linking files or config links. This will be the first step in the BSL.

Linking refers to linking together files this is done on a folder basis. A link file will point to a folder and claim all files in there to be on one link. Multiple nested links can be made where by a folder has more folders in it so each folder in a folder will be a nested link. Massive links can be compressed into zip files for either protection of modification or other reasons. I will talk about protection of data later on.

Now in each folder is a group of xml files that can be linked together in the commands folder is a bunch of command links, same for animation, ai, and others. Now the first link to be put together is the parse links. The parse links will be needed to continue the parsing after the parsing of links is done.

Link parsing will simply organize the order in which each action is executed. While linking it will also parse each individual file that is being linked. This happens for everything except parse linking. Here is the order it will go if your confused.

ParseLinking -> CommandLinking -> parse command -> link command v
^  <————————————-

When it completes this loop it will move on to animation and other linking followind the same pattern. It will do this for every file in the folder.

When a file is parsed it is very similar to what I talked about in command pattern. An file will enter the top parser which is an xml parser. This xml parser will seperate the files elements and attributes out and send them into the parser pipeline. The pipeline is what was created during parselinking. They travel down until the reach a point where something in the parser pipeline can handle them. For instance lets say we have an item and in the item we added a new stat called itemlevel. The item object will be split up and sent down the pipeline. The element itemlevel will eventually reach a point where a parser will recognize it and handle it. The parser will grab the value and the item and assign it.

So how do we go about handling a new stat. Lets say we want to script in a brand new stat for a quest. Lets make it questcategory how do we add it without adding a new class? Well there are a couple of things you can do. You can piggyback off an existing general element like stat. Heres what you would right
<stat name=”questcategory”>old quest</stat> the parser will grab the stat parser and then grab the name and value and process it. This doesn’t do much for you but it does create a variable in the quest called questcategory. Now in any other command or file you can reference this by doing <questname>.<stat>.<statname> this will give you the variable you need or an exception if the variable doesn’t exist.

But lets say you want to parse something alittle more complex well you could string multiple parsing together like a stat and image. Well you could make a stat that is an image. So lets see it would look like this. <stat name=”questimage”><image>blah.jpg</image></stat> There you go when the stat is called above it will give you an image. The parse will go through and parse that stat and when it sees the image tag it will go through the process of parsing the image file.

Now lets say you want to make something totally different never seen before. Its gonna require a new parse class. What do you have to change inorder to setup this new parse? First you need to right the class and drop it into the mods folder so that the exe can grab it. Next you need to create the parse config file. Simple drop it into any of the parse folders and it will be linked when the game starts. In the parse config file just right the name of the class and the name of the parsing. Then when parse linking occurs it will get the config file in the folder grab the class and link it with the others. Now you can use it in any thing it implemented in your other files. Its that easy! You don’t have to modify any existing code and you only had to create two files.

You have to be careful about multiple element names because if there are two places that handle the element tag <item></item> only the first one in the pipeline will ever be reached. Also the C# code you write in your new parse must implement a generalparse. Also it must have no errors or you could screw up the entire game.

Thats all I will be talking about today thanks for listening and keep looking out for more information.

This program unlocks files that you can’t move or edit because something else is using it.

It will also download a config file that is uses to check again the version on the server. If you have the same version as on my server you won’t download anything. If you don’t then it will download it and provide you with a run button. The run button executes the unlocker installer.

To download just go to the download page on the left and click BlackFire Patcher v0.9

Its a small program I wiped together today but it does represent good momentum. The second part of BSL series should be up tomorrow and I will be talking about parsing files and how that will work!.

Thats it for now talk to you all later!