I want to make an interactive fiction game editor, in this type of games a story has many story-lines where each gamer can finish the game with a different story. For each section of a game story we need a node that tells the story and interacts with player.
I will make an editor for drawing story sections (nodes), that every node can link to minimum one node and maybe many, also each node has some properties (like text, photo, sound, ...) and variables (like gold on the ground, HP reducer, ...) that must be used in the game story.
What's the best way for saving this story-line (nodes) in a file for loading with my game player?
If you can write a code example in C++, Pascal or PHP it is better for me.
You want to do a couple of things:
Figure out what you need to reconstruct a saved node completely enough to use it again.
Prepare all that data you need.
Look into file i/o. There are loads of tutorials online, search for "c++ file i/o" or something similar.
Now you implement file saving/loading.
I'd guess you'll end up with something like this for saving.
write number of nodes
for node in node_list:
write node info
And then for loading
read number of nodes
for i in range(0, number_of_nodes)
read node info
If you run into a specific problem ask a new question.
I think you should take a look to xml.
There are a lot of libraries to work with it, personally in c++ I prefer pugi but you can take a look to libxml2, xerces, etc...
Pugi XML
If you don't want user interaction you can always encrypt the xml before save it.
Related
I created a book app and used Cocos2D and physics engine (Chipmunk) to create it. I would like to add "read aloud" feature to it.
So far I found instructions/books and tutorials how to add read aloud feature when book is created with iBook Author (but I couldn't use iBook Author due to some limitations) using Epub3 and SMIL.
I also found a good tutorial from J. Shapiro how to make narrated book using AVSpeechSynthesizer. This helps, only that I would like to use recorded voice, rather than synthesized sound. I don't know if this approach can be modified to do so?
I also know how it can be done in Sprite Kit framework.
The only info that I couldn't find is how to add "read aloud" feature to the app written using Cocos2D. Could it be done within SimpleAudioEngine, or it can be combined with some other engine (possibly from Sprite Kit framework)?
I would appreciate very much if somebody can give me some references/pointers or tutorial links where to look for some answers how to add this feature.
Thanking you in advance.
I would like to use recorded voice, rather than synthesized sound
Good. Add your voice recording audio files (caf, wav or mp3 format) to the project. Play it back at the appropriate time using:
[[SimpleAudioEngine sharedEngine] playEffect:#"someVoiceRecordingFile.wav"];
Define what read aloud means to you because I find that a lot of terms, especially semi-vague ones like this, are used differently depending on who is using it.
When you say read aloud book do you essentially mean a digital storybook that reads the story to you by simply playing narration audio? I've created dozens of these and what you are asking has multiple steps depending on what features you are going for in your book. If you mean simply playing audio and that is it, then yes you could do that in cocos2d using SimpleAudioEngine (as one option) but I assume you already knew that which is why this question has a tab bit of vagueness to it. Either way you probably wouldn't want to play narration as an effect but rather stream it. To do that along with background music you'd stream background music via the left channel and narration via the right. You can easily add a method to SimpleAudioEngine to make this nice and neat. To get you started something similar to this can be used to access the right channel:
CDLongAudioSource* sound = [[CDAudioManager sharedManager] audioSourceForChannel:kASC_Right];
if ([sound isPlaying])
{
[sound stop];
}
[sound load:fileName];
Also use the proper settings and recommended formats for streaming audio such as aifc (or really all audio in general). Although I believe you can stream mp3 without it being decompressed first, the problem is with timing. If you are using highlighted text or looping audio then aifc is the better option. Personally I've never had a reason to use mp3. Wav with narration is something I'd avoid even if just for the file size increase. If the mp3 is decompressed even for streaming (which I'm not sure if it is off the top of my head) then you'd have a huge spike in memory that will be both highly unwanted and at times down right bad.
There are many other things that can go into it but those are the basic first steps. If you want to do things like highlighted text, per-word animations, etc then that will take more work of course and you'd need to be comfortable with cocos2d, SpriteKit, or whatever you decide to use. I'll be doing a tutorial series on it one day soon so I'll cover all of that stuff.
On the other hand, if you are talking about recording someone's voice and having it playback i.e. a mother recording herself reading the story so her child can hear her voice whenever they are using your app, then you'd simply record the audio like you would any other piece of audio, save it to the device, and play it back when the page is displayed in the proper reading mode (or whatever you personally call it). One place to look is the AVAudioRecorder that is part of the AVFoundation framework. Simply Google "iOS audio recording" for examples if you need them.
Basically as part of a team I have had to create a pacman like game for my university course, just zombies instead of ghosts.
We have built all of the game so far and it seems to work really well. Our current problem is that we have to Save a game (with a username and score), Load the game into the position it was once saved, with the correct username and score, and finally be able to offer a replay option where the user can see all the moves that they have previously made (as well as the moves the zombies have made). The zombies will always make the same moves that the user makes as they are designed to chase the user.
My question is what would be the best way to do the save, load and reload options? We cannot use vectors, stacks or queues. We can only really use strings, arrays and other basic variables.
We were thinking to do the reload first by adding everything onto the end of a string and then popping the last value off the string. We could then delay each one by a second and the user will be able to see his/her moves.
As for Saving we were unsure, there are also holes (0 symbols) and pills (* symbols) to take into account. So the position of character, zombies, pills and holes will need to be saved. The character can start from any random position and pretty much everything else is placed after.
The way we do the loading will depend on the way you suggest we do the saving.
Does anyone have any suggestions of the way we should do save, load and replay?
thanks
The simplest way I could think of is saving the user inputs.
This way you could easily replay the game by sending the inputs to the game engine (this may require a lot of restructuring depending on the design of the game engine). To accelerate the loading you could also save the game state at the time of the save (through serialization).
That's the idea, how to do it... you need an ever-expanding array to record the user-input, so let's use a linked-list.
struct Node {
T data;
Node* next_node;
};
//Google for the rest of the code, it is a reeeaaallly
// basic/fundamental data structure.
The data would be the user-inputs and the time they happened.
To save the data, you simply have to iterate through the linked-list and append it to a std::ostream& (to be generic, a std::ofstream& to be specific).
You may add some other useful information (such as the game state and the highscore) before or after the user inputs (or even in another file, which would really make sense for the highscores).
You'll need to read up on some serialization. I wrote some articles on it here, but this is going to be overkill for you guys: http://www.randygaul.net/2013/01/05/c-reflection-part-5-automated-serialization/
You can use some very simple serialization to write out the moves of each zombie into a file. Then when you want to reload this information you deserialize the information in the file. Each move will likely be stored in some form of a linked list so you'll have to come up with a way of recreating such lists upon deserialization.
Your question is really broad so my answer has to be quite broad as well. Really it's up to you to research a solution and implement it.
I want to create levels in my cocos2d game and I do not know how to do that with .plist files ... I searched the Internet but unfortunately I couldn't find significant information on how to implement these property lists. Can you please help out ?
Check out Tiled Map Editor. Tiled's TMX format is supported by Cocos2D.
As with any Apple technologies, the first place you should start searching for is the developer.apple.com website. In this case, here's the Property List (plist) Programming Guide.
However, I find property lists very awkward to work with, specifically if you want to create them manually and whenever they contain more than just a few entries. It certainly can't hurt to evaluate rolling out your own file format, text-based plain and simple. I would always rather work with simple text files like these rather than messing with property lists:
X=10;Y=10;Tile=30;
X=12;Y=11;Tile=28;
X=16;Y=19;Tile=22;
It's a different story if you actually design the data with a tool or within an app, where you'll be able to make use of the various collection convenience methods that save and load property lists, for example to and from a dictionary or array.
Because the open source geo-coders cannot begin to compare to Google's or even Yahoo's, I would like to start a project to create a good open source geo-coder. Just to clarify, a geo-coder takes some text (usually with some constraints) and returns one or more lat/lon pairs.
I realize that this is a difficult and garguntuan task, so I am wondering how you might get started. What would you read? What algorithms would you familiarize yourself with? What code would you review?
And also, assuming you were going to develop this very agilely, what would you want the first prototype to be able to do?
EDIT: Let's set aside the data question for now. I am going to use OpenStreetMap data, along with a database of waypoints that I have. I would later plan to include other data sets as well, and I realize the geo-coder would be inherently limited by the quality of the original data.
The first (and probably blocking) problem would be: where do you get your data from? (unless you are willing to pay thousands of dollars for proprietary sets).
You could build a geocoding-api on top of OpenStreetMap (they publish their data in dumps on a regular basis) I guess, but that one was still very incomplete last time I checked.
Algorithms are easy. Good mapping data, however, is expensive. Very expensive.
Google drove their cars all over the world, collecting this data among other things.
From a .NET point of view these articles might be interesting for you:
Writing Your Own GPS Applications: Part I
Writing Your Own GPS Applications: Part 2
Writing GIS and Mapping Software for .NET
I've only glanced at the articles but they've been on CodeProject's 'Most Popular' list for a long time.
And maybe this CodePlex project which the author of the articles above made available.
I would start at the absolute beginning by figuring out how you're going to get the data that matches a street address with a geocode. Either Google had people going around with GPS units, OR they got the information from some existing source. That existing source may have been... (all guesses)
The Postal Service
Some existing maps(printed)
A bunch of enthusiastic users that were early adopters of GPS technology who ere more than willing to enter in street addresses and GPS coordinates
Some government entity (or entities)
Their own satellites
etc
I guess what I'm getting at is the information was either imported from somewhere or was input by someone via some interface. As my starting point I would look at how to get that information. In an open source situation, you may be able to get a bunch of enthusiastic people to enter information.
So for my first prototype, boring as it would be, I would create a form for entering information.
Then you need to know the math for figuring out the closest distance (as the crow flies). From there, try to figure out how to include roads. (My guess is you would have to have data point for each and every curve, where you hold the geocode location of the curve, and the angle of the road on a north/south and east/west vector. You'd probably need to take incline into account, too to get accurate road measurements.)
That's just where I'd start.
But in all honesty, I wouldn't even start on this. Other programmers have done it already, I'm more interested in what hasn't already been done.
get my free raw data from somewhere like http://ipinfodb.com/ip_database.php
load it into a database, denormalizing for fast lookups
design my API
build it out as a RESTful web service
return results in varying formats: JSON, XML, CSV, raw text
The first prototype should accept a ZIP code and return lat/lon in raw text.
I went in late in a project of gamedev of a simple text game in C++.I studied the project and I think I know how to do everything but i get stuck on a thing:how to save and load the game as proposed.I don't want to have the thing done for me,only you show me a way to do it.
Well the simplest way I can think of is to have a structure/class which represents the whole games "state." And on save you simply write this entire structure from memory to disk. Loading would be the opposite.
What format it is on disk is entirely up to you, if your state consists entirely of simple data types, you may just want to write a binary blob. Or you might want to go with something more versatile such as serializing it to XML, it's really up to you.
I've only taken a quick look at the post but here's my suggestion:
You game state might consist of a couple of structures and a few arrays of data. The structures would define the player(name, health, money, whatever), a weapon (attack, chance, etc), armor etc and so on...
First you would write the player's state by saving his structure. Next would would be the number of weapons owned by the player, followed by an array of weapon structures, the same for armor...
The file format would then be
STRUCT player
INT num_of_weapons
STRUCT weapon
STRUCT weapon
STRUCT weapon
INT num_of_armor
STRUCT armor
STRUCT armor
It can be easily done using fstream.
The process you are describing is known as "serialization"- that is, taking an in-memory object and converting it into some form that can be saved to disk. It could be as simple as a raw memory dump, or something complicated like XML.
I suggest taking a look at the wikipedia article on this subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serialization
I didn't read the website you linked to, but you'll probably want to write code that reads/writes to a basic text file in order to load/save your game.
First, figure out how to format your text file. For example, if I'm writing a pacman game that allows the player to save games, the text file might look something like this:
5
54700
3
I would write my code to read the file one line at a time:
Line 1: the level the player is on.
Line 2: the number of points the player has.
Line 3: the number of lives the player has.
Do a Google search for C++ file input/output to figure out how to write the actual code.
XML serialization seems the easiest solution. With small lightweight libraries such as TinyXML it's even easier. As for making the files unreadable you can use simple XOR obfuscation with a short key. Or you could try JSON.
It all depends on how complex your save files would be. If it's just a few integers than it's probably pretty easy to simply write a couple of functions that would write those values to a file in a specified order and then load them in the same order that they're written. If it needs to be more complex and handle saving the values of multiple objects than serialization is your best bet. If you're looking for a human readable save format I would suggest XML Serialization, otherwise you may want to look up some non-human readable formats.