Quick Backup

In addition to my weekly full backup, I also created a small BAT file for my daily backups. I run it on Windows using Task Scheduler every day at 15:00 (3 PM) and it copies changed files from projects I'm currently working on to another drive.

The major downside is I have to specify everything manually, but I tend to store all my code in just a few directories anyway, so it doesn't change that often. For files I use xcopy and for database I do mysqldump and then zip it using 7zip:

1. xcopy D:\path\to\files\*.* E:\path\to\backup\ /cdirsy >> D:\_bkp.log
3. CD /D C:\path\to\mysql\bin\
5. mysqldump.exe -umysqldump -f -pmysqldump db_name > E:\path\to\backup\db_name.sql "C:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe" a -tzip "E:\path\to\backup\db_name.zip" "E:\path\to\backup\db_name.sql" -mx9 del "E:\path\to\backup\db_name.sql" >> D:\_bkp.log

The /cdirsy flags are: Ignore errors, Copy all newer files, Create folders, Copy read-only files, Copy dirs and subdirs, Overwrite without prompting.

I wanted it to run silently and the trick is to use the SYSTEM user. In such case the CMD window is not opened and the whole thing runs in the background.

Don't forget to use /D when changing drive letters in CD command. It took me a while to learn that.

You can use CMD (as Administrator) to create this task:

1. SCHTASKS /CREATE /SC DAILY /TN "QBackup" /TR "D:\qbackup.bat" /ST 15:00 /RU SYSTEM

asdf

Qard Track Tiles

If I fail at some task I gave myself, I tend to return to it after a while. In the meantime I gained some new ideas, skills and perspectives, so I may succeed this time.

Tiles

Despite my intentions to make Quly in 3D, I still would like to have it as a tiled game. I love OpenTTD and I simply want something like that in Quly as well.

Crafted curved tracks to occupy as few tiles as possible, while keeping fidelity.

The TileGen system will know what tiles can be next to what tile. Of course tiles would need layers, at least for background (surface – grass, concrete, sand, water, dirt...) and foreground (tracks).

Tracks will need some navigation metadata, like directions, type (rail, road, offroad) and I'd like to add stuff like name (streets). I will go with a set of waypoints for each direction on the tile, setting target rotation and position. The intermediate positions and rotations of the travelling Qule will be interpolated from these values.

From foreground and background a rolling sound will be derived, so it can be different when Qule is rolling on asphalt or grass.

Each tile will also need some collisions baked into them, also because I want to create not only exteriors, but interiors as well, probably in zoomed manner.

Another layer would be for sprites – player, NPCs, items, movable or destructible objects, scenery etc.

..in 3d merge them together for better performance

Perspective

During the whole design of the track tiles I kept thinking about perspective of the game.

I quite like isometric graphics (and those tracks in the previous picture looks awesome in “iso”), but I want at least three degrees of slopes, which are in general quite an issue in tile games.

Out of curiosity I tried to convert isometric back to the square form and it doesn't look ''that'' bad, but it's still a compromise and slopes looks twice the height.

Isometric hill converted to... whatever-metric that is :-)

There is also a dimetric projection, used by games like Baldur's Gate, Diablo II or StarCraft. Especially the latter has actually been a great inspiration for me, since I always liked StarEdit and it's editor of mission objectives.

Zelda-style (3/4 perspective) is usually the way to go for tile games and I especially like how MiniDayZ looks like and plays. Even I don't like it, it's the most practical solution.

It's possible to use tile engine to create a first person 3D game, similar to Wolf3D, as excellently demonstrated by Xibalba, WebGL game using ImpactJS engine.

Infestation

I've been satisfied with the general state of Qedy JS for some time now, but as I implement more modules, I keep finding many tiny bugs or glitches. Even though I try to be diligent during inital development, there are still tons of them.

Some are oversights in the code, others are oversights in the design and the rest are pure coding bugs. Like sometimes I use || instead of ?? or vice versa.

Other times, in Elem Converter I forget to work with the element instance (for a particular parent Component) and end up working with the element directly.