Thread: Farmer JoeBot - first project in a LONG time

Thanks to going back to finish my bachelor's and taking a new job that required me to learn code AS/400 apps, it's been a LONG time since written any code for the "fun" of it.

Every one of my previous projects fell prey to the same problem: biting off more than I could chew. So, since things have settled down at work and I've gotten past Critical Thinking and Algrebra II, I decided to start a new, bite-sized project.

Instead of trying to make a complete, robust game, I'm working on an interactive screensaver; kind of a mini-game.

It's going to have a little robot farmer who starts out with a bare patch of land and works it to produce a crop. He'll harvest and replant as needed, and I'm probably going to throw in some kind of antagonist (crop-eating robot bugs, maybe?).

The idea is that the farmbot will be completely autonomous, but the user will be able to control things that affect his environment. Almost, like a robotic pet that just so happens to farm.

Right now all I have is some basic features in place. At this point it's more of a simple demo. You control a box (in the "game" it will be an invisible bounding-box; it's only textured here so you can see it), that is limited in movement to the "farm" so I could test my collision detection.

*you know, writing SO much for such a simple demo feels like overkill*

uses DX8
Get the zip here

Hey jdinger, glad to see you back! S'been a while.

The game works pretty well so far. One thing I noticed is when the mouse moves, I kind of see it flicker on the screen for a bit...not sure if that's my comp or not.

Hey, Jeff! I just noticed that was your 666th post! Scary!!!

Thanks for the welcome. My life over the last year has been quite hectic on all fronts (I had forgotten what college can be like). I still feel bad about the way my hosting company messed me over (and in turn messed you over). I checked your site(s) out and I'm glad to see you've got things going still with your projects.

As for the flicker, it may have something to do with the fact that I'm still using the Windows cursor and using basic API calls for input. Since, I know the DInput stuff will be fairly simple to implement, I decided to tackle the harder stuff first and save the simple stuff for later. Get the headaches out of the way earlier on.

Today, I'm going to optimize the collision detection to use AABBs. What I'm using now is VERY rudimentry (not much more than what the Windows IntersectRect function does; I just wrote a 3d version of it; very crude).

TWIXMIX, thanks! I learned a ton from just studying other's code and reading through the appropriate docs (MSDN and DX SDK help file). I plan to write some tutorials as I go with this project, showing how/why each step took place. Once I get them up and running, I'll let you know. Hopefully, you'll find the helpful.

Jason

Agh!!! I hate philosophy!!! Had to take a long break from working on my little project to make sure that PHIL251 didn't ruin my GPA.

I'm working on my own model format, but for the time being I'm using MD2's. This is pretty basic. Got the robofarmer added. Just a basic anim sequence of him waving at you.

The final screensaver / game will be a study in meaningless perpetuation. A robot who spends all of his time farming wheat to use it as fuel so that he will have the energy to farm more wheat for fuel....

A fitting theme for a screensaver. I guess the intensity of studying philosophy affected me more than I realized! :-)

I'm without any FTP-ability right now, so I'm going to have to post the files as several zipped attachments. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Jason

Thanks, Lucky. Yeah. I noticed that too. It seems in my input checking code I had an if with nothing following it. basically:

if( wparam == VK_UP )
{



and that was it. Oops!