TURBU

New update coming later this week

Mason Wheeler — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 05:56:18 +0000

Well, it’s been a while, but I’ve made several improvements to the map editor since the last post. I’ll have a new update ready in a few days. It adds the ability to edit map properties, add new maps, and delete existing maps. I’ve got a couple issues with setting up the project on other systems to take care of, but once that’s ready I’ll get the new installer ready.

One more minor bugfix

Mason Wheeler — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:42:16 +0000

There was a problem under Windows XP where the editor panes wouldn’t redraw themselves if you dragged another window over them. I managed to trace that down to a glitch in SDL, and I patched it. So the installer’s been updated once again.

Working again.

Mason Wheeler — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 03:25:06 +0000

Well, I found the two bugs that had been reported. One was in a Delphi library that I hadn’t updated in a while, and the update had a fix. The other was in SDL, which I had just updated, and the update contained the bug, so I patched it. Then I went to test it and found every programmer’s nightmare: a bug that only happened when the debugger was turned off!

It took me most of the rest of the day to slowly, carefully track that one down, but I finally found it in some old file-reading code I had written a few years ago. I fixed it, and now everything seems to be working properly. (I hope!) So now the download link for the installer is up again. Check it out and let me know what you think!

Update on hold.

Mason Wheeler — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 17:55:48 +0000

I’ve gotten a few reports that the latest version doesn’t work right on Windows XP, and I’ve been able to reproduce the problem at my end. So until I manage to get it fixed, I’ve disabled the download link. It should be back fairly soon.

A working map editor

Mason Wheeler — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:32:28 +0000

Well, it took a little bit longer than I thought it would to get the details worked out, but the TURBU Editor is now able to actually edit maps! I’ve got a working map tree, which will take you to any map in the project, and let you edit either the lower or the upper layer.

For the moment, there’s no way to create new maps, delete maps from the project, or access and change map properties. That’s coming up in the next release, which will hopefully be sometime before the end of next week. (The Thanksgiving holiday will give me plenty of free time to work on it!) But for now, the map editor can be found at the Downloads page.

Finally an update!

Mason Wheeler — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 14:14:05 +0000

There’s a new installer posted in the downloads section. I’ve spent the last several months working on getting the map viewing functionality working, and now I’ve finally got something to show for it. Now when you import a project, it will display the first map of the project in the map window, and the tile palette off to the side. I don’t have the map tree set up yet, so you can’t switch between maps, and there’s no way to select tiles and place them on the map. That’s all coming in the next update. This one has been purely functional: write the code to make a map display properly.

I’ve written this to use the actual TURBU default map engine in the editor window. The same code that will run the game is generating the map for you to scroll around in. It’s controlled with an extra “design interface” layer of code added over the top of it, which allows you to do all the map-editing stuff, but underneath that is the real game engine, which means that when I get a bit more done, designers will be able to test-run the game inside the editor instead of having to launch a separate program.

I’ve also updated the source code repository on Google Code, and the project requirements with it. The new Delphi 2010 version contains some great new features and TURBU is going to make use of a few of them, so you need 2010 to compile it now. It’s a bit on the expensive side, priced out of range of most students and hobbyists, but there’s been a lot of discussion in the Delphi community in the last few weeks about getting a low-cost or even free edition released so more people can use it. I’m advocating and arguing strongly for a free edition on par with Microsoft’s Visual Studio Express. Thankfully, things seem to be heading in the right direction. Michael Rozlog, the Delphi project manager, recently stated that producing a more affordable edition “is a very, and I do mean a very important area of discussion. I FULLY agree with the need for low-cost-point entry products.” So we’ll see what happens.

Another update will be coming soon.

Sorry about the downtime

Mason Wheeler — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:52:41 +0000

The site was down for several hours last night due to some technical problems with my WordPress installation. I’ve gotten it fixed now, and hopefully we won’t see any more of that.

Now if I could just get some other technical problems resolved, ones in my graphics system, I’d get the next update to the editor ready and post it on here…

There will be cake.

Mason Wheeler — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 23:58:21 +0000

At work last week, at our weekly development meeting, we were talking about the upcoming company party, which was going to be today, because the company I work at turns 10 today. The boss mentioned that he’d probably order pizza, and then he said “and there will be cake.” I couldn’t help it, I started laughing. When they asked what I was laughing about, I looked around and asked if anyone else immediately thought of Portal when he said that. Only two people, in a room full of computer programmers, even grinned. A quick explanation of Portal followed.

Well, Jim convinced me to bring in Portal on my laptop today, and during the party I hooked it up to our projector and spent about an hour running a demo of the first few levels. Had everyone laughing at GLaDOS’s silly comments, and ooo-ing over the cool physics tricks. And a couple people said at the end that they wanted to go and buy it, “for the kids.”

Waste not, want not

Mason Wheeler — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 23:25:12 +0000

The map-converting code is ready and working. There’s not much that can be done with it just yet, since I don’t have any code for converting RPG Maker’s tilesets or actually displaying the map in the editor. That’s what I’m working on right now, and I’ll post an update once that’s working.
When I was testing the map-converting code, having the converter run through every map in a project, it worked but it was going slowly. So I hooked it up to a profiler, a debugging tool that watches your program and tells you how it’s spending most of its time, and found that it was spending almost half of its time creating new objects in memory. This doesn’t make much sense; creating an object is a very simple operation that takes very little time, even at the microseconds scale that computers operate at. A bit more checking and I found the reason: I was creating a whole lot of tiny little objects to decode BER compressed integers in RPG Maker’s savefiles to normal numbers in the computer’s memory.
BER compressed integers are a trick that can be used to store numbers to disc using a small amount of actual data, thus making your savefile smaller. RPG Maker uses them everywhere, and in the project I was using to test with, it was processing almost 800,000 of them in 440 maps, plus the LMT and LDB. When I originally wrote the code to read a map, several years ago when I knew a lot less about programming than I do now, I set it up to create a memory object to perform the decoding, and then throw it away once it was no longer needed. Problem is, every value gets decoded exactly once and is never needed again, so there’s no need to create a new decoder for each one.
I rewrote the code to make a single, reusable decoder object. Suddenly, instead of 800,000 BER compressed integer decoder objects, I was only creating one. Now the map converting phase speeds by, about 30% faster than it did before. The moral of the story? No need to throw something away when you could reuse it instead.

Currently in progress: The map editor

Mason Wheeler — Sun, 31 May 2009 23:24:33 +0000

There really hasn’t been anything interesting for anyone to do with TURBU lately. That’s about to change. I’m currently building the map conversion logic for the project importer and starting to work on the map engine. I should have a basic map editor working within a few weeks, which will allow users to play around with terrain. That was basically how the original map viewer got started: it would display the map, and that’s it. And then I started gradually adding in new features as quickly as I could code them, until you had a (almost) fully functional map engine. Hopefully it’ll go a lot faster this time, since I’ve learned a lot in the past couple years and I’ve still got the original code, most of which can be reused or adapted.

Also, a big Delphi update just got released last week. The latest version contained a feature called Generics, which lets you write code that can be used to do lots of very similar tasks with minor variations much more easily. Unfortunately, it was badly broken and didn’t work very well. The update fixed the Generics issues, which means I can set up a lot of new features more quickly.