I realized I have this blog set up and I don’t really write much, I hope to fix this by doing something that is worth writing about. This post won’t be about anything in particular.
Modding For Arc System Works games
I haven’t put out many new updates to the tools I recently released, that’s because they work for most things I care about in the game and I plan on shifting my effort towards making a hitbox editor at some point. I think a hitbox editor is the last piece in the set of tools needed to make real, complex mods for ArcSys games. Unfortunately I am bad at programming (read: starting to make the program, actually typing the lines of code), and this means it will probably be a while before I have a real product of any kind, there’s a lot more stuff that a hitbox editor entails vs a simple CLI program, and rust (the language I use) doesn’t make 2d rendering stuff as simple to write as say, lua with love2d (and I won’t just port all my file parsing stuff to lua).
Fighting game motion inputs
You’re probably surprised to see me write about this very simple topic yet again, but I like thinking about it for some reason.
Motion inputs are a regular grammar, and I struggled for a while trying to internalize that because I couldn’t actually determine what a “character” in that regular grammar was, but I think I figured it out, and while I don’t know how to verify that this is 100% the correct way to think about it, the intuition I’ve developed when learning to parse them is that you can describe them as a regex where each “character” is a set of bitwise operations. For example, a simple (non-lenient) 236 input is something like this:
down AND NOT right <- This is a single character!
down AND right
right AND NOT down
Now all that’s left is to write a regex engine with a new syntax that lets you define these things somehow. I’m definitely not going to do that right now but maybe someday I’ll want to.
Guilty Gear X2 #Reload revival please
I’ve been absolutely loving this game for the past few days, it scratches the itch that Xrd originally did for me, but it’s actually playable online thanks to Fightcade. I hope more people start playing it now that it has good netcode, I would love to see the game get revived and I think it absolutely has the capability to be revived. I don’t have experience with any sort of TO work or anything like that, so I don’t plan on hosting any tournaments, but I do plan to keep trying to play the game.
If you are reading this, please download a certain zip file and put the contents inside of your Documents/Fightcade/emulator folder so that you can play the game online.
Maybe I should try to make a shmup
I am bad at getting the motivation to program things, I want to learn to make something like a game using a fancy new engine that looks nice to use, but game development feels hard to get into because of the complexity of most games. I’m thinking I can get the usual incremental steps of learning this by making something really simple, and Bevy has a great ergonomic ECS at the core of its design, this seem perfect for making a shmup, because a shmup is a big screen full of objects that are moving around. Things I would need to learn to do this are whatever is required to make the objects move around in those patterns that shmup games usually have them moving in (seems like you just need to learn to rotate a direction vector around from the point that the “enemy” or object spawner is on), and maybe some sort of UI for it, also character movement won’t take much effort because shmups have up/down/left/right and two buttons, so I can focus on experimenting with the actual bullet patterns instead of anything like fancy input parsing solutions that I don’t use for anything.