Toni Westbrook dot Com

The Joy of Computer Science and Engineering

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here yet, but I’m currently in the middle of developing a new Blackberry game that I hope to have on App World when I’m complete (as I get closer to completion I’ll put some screen shots up). I’ve always wanted to put an application or game up on one of the mobile stores, not so much to make any significant amount of money (which I won’t), but just to get the program into more people’s hands easily. We’ll see how it goes – but until then, onto the point of this article.

One of the things I ran into on this game (and others) is the need to generate binary files – specifically in this case, level data that dictates where and when objects are in the game, their effects, behaviors, etc. While there is always the option to create a text file to hold this data, this can be problematic in many ways. First, the data you need to store may actually be binary data that doesn’t lend itself to text conversion – also, more handling to read the file (encoding, line feeds, parsing), larger files (which is a concern on devices with little storage like older Blackberrys), and no obfuscation to the end user (which kind of takes the fun out of the game if they can open up this file easily and read where everything is). Binary files are definitely the way to go. And while sometimes it makes sense to make a level editor that will generate the binary files, in some instances you may not have the time or resources to accomplish this. It would be nice to have a tool to generate these files so you don’t have to go hexediting for hours to make a 1K file.

Excel at Creating These Files!

I find Microsoft Excel to be an extremely useful tool in so many situations, especially those where I need to bang out results quickly. Past the normal math, accounting, and analysis capabilities, Excel is awesome for generating files that depend on working with lots of imported data, such as script files and, in our case, binary data files.

In my example, each object had 7 values associated with it. And with some of these values being 2 bytes in size, this came out to 12 or so bytes I would have to enter hex code in with an editor, per object. If I wanted 500 objects, thats 6K of writing hex values. No thanks. It would be much easier to write these values into Excel cells (even auto-generating many of them using Fill-Down with an equation). Then, using VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) that’s built into Excel, dump the contents of the cells out into the binary format I want them in. So let’s see how to do that.

Settings Up Your Sheet

This is the simple part. For this example, I have created a fictional game called “Just Desserts” in which each level consists of a screen filled with desserts and vegetables, and you must eat the various cakes, pies, and puddings but avoid carrots and celery. Our data file that describes each level has 4 values per entry.

Value 1: What level this food is on
Value 2: The ID of this food (E.g. 1=cake, 2=pie, 3=pudding, 4=celery, 5=carrot)
Value 3: X coordinate on screen of this food
Value 4: Y coordinate on the screen of this food

Here’s what an example spreadsheet would look like:

So each row is an object, and each column is one of the values. In our example above, we see on level one we should create a cake at coords (25,70), a pie at (50,20) and another at (10,10), and a celery at (400, 400). On level 2, we should create a cake at coords (250, 30), a pudding at (20,160), and a celery at (70,90). You can manually enter your data in, or use the power of excel and generate the data using a formula – it’s up to you. Once your data is in your spreadsheet, then comes time to turn it into a binary file that can be used by your game.

Macro Time

The power of Excel is increased 10-fold by the ability to include programs in your spreadsheets. Excel uses Visual Basic to accomplish this. By creating a new macro, you can attach a Visual Basic function to it that gets called whenever your macro is. In Excel 2007, Macros are under the View tab. After you create a new one, you are presented with a code editor where you can write your VB function.

Below is the example VB function that would work with the above data and pump it out into a file. Please note – one thing you may run into depending on what language you’re working with, and what architecture, is a little/big endian conflict. VBA pumps out little-endian, but since I was creating a BB game in Java, it expects big endian. I included how to do this inline below, though you could make a function out of it as well.

Sub GenDatFile()

   Dim TempByte as Byte ' Holds 1 byte
   Dim TempInt as Integer ' Holds 2 bytes

   ' Specify the path and filename of the binary file.  You could turn this into an input to specify it at runtime as well.
   Open "C:\temp\objects.dat" For Binary Access Write As #1 ' Open it for binary writing with the handle #1

   CurrentRow = 1

   ' Keep reading the spreadsheet until we come to a blank row, then we're done
   Do While Not IsEmpty(Worksheets(1).Cells(CurrentRow, 1))
      'Level of object
      TempByte = Worksheets(1).Cells(CurrentRow, 1) ' Get the value from the first cell in the current row
      Put 1, , TempByte ' Write that byte to the data file (handle #1)

      'ID of object
      TempByte = Worksheets(1).Cells(CurrentRow, 2) ' Get the value from the second cell in the current row
      Put 1, , TempByte ' Write that byte to the data file (handle #1)

      'X Coordinate of object - this is a 2 byte value since it can be greater than 255, we need to swap endian
      TempInt = Worksheets(1).Cells(CurrentRow, 3) ' Get the value from the third cell in the current row
      TempByte = TempInt \ 256 ' Integer divide by 256, aka shift right 8 bits and put that into TempByte
      Put 1, , TempByte ' Write that byte to the data file (handle #1)
      TempByte = TempInt AND 255 ' Mask the data to grab the first byte and put that into TempByte
      Put 1, , TempByte ' Write that byte to the data file (handle #1)

      'Y Coordinate of object - this is a 2 byte value since it can be greater than 255, we need to swap endian
      TempInt = Worksheets(1).Cells(CurrentRow, 4) ' Get the value from the fourth cell in the current row
      TempByte = TempInt \ 256 ' Integer divide by 256, aka shift right 8 bits and put that into TempByte
      Put 1, , TempByte ' Write that byte to the data file (handle #1)
      TempByte = TempInt AND 255 ' Mask the data to grab the first byte and put that into TempByte
      Put 1, , TempByte ' Write that byte to the data file (handle #1)

      CurrentRow = CurrentRow + 1 ' Move to the next row in the spreadsheet
   Loop

   Close 1 ' Close the file (handle #1)

End Sub

And we’re done! A very simple program, with only a tiny bit of magic to flip the bytes when we need to make little endian into big endian. But a simple program which saves us hours of tedious hex encoding, plus the power of Excel gives us data storage and manipulation that we didn’t have to take time to manually program ourselves.

Next time you’re faced with a problem that deals with working with a lot of data, keep Excel (or it’s open source brethren) in mind – it can definitely save you a lot of time and headaches.

I have quite a lot of RIM and Blackberry topics swirling around in my head – but those can wait for another day and blog post. I got my Tour a few days ago, and I have to say: I absolutely LOVE it. And though I’ll be the first to admit, I’m a die-hard Crackberry fan, through and through, the device does have some issues (AHEM WI-FI – also, the back is kind of hard to open, I think). However, I really think it’s some much needed love for the CDMA networks, and combines together some great aspects of the Storm, the 8900, and the Bold. It’s definitely an improvement over my 8830, which had seen much better days. It’s nice to have a camera finally, and the speed if phenomenal. I couldn’t have more than a handful of MP3s on my 8830 because the media player was just too slow to categorize. I bought a 16gig micro SD card and loaded that bad-boy up with about 1000 MP3s, and the 9630 didn’t even blink. So sweet.

Any other Tour owners out there, or people hoping to buy the Tour soon? What do you think? Likes, dislikes? What do you think of the keyboard and more recessed trackball?

ALSO, if you haven’t yet, get the beta release of the Blackberry Messenger 5.0 – it’s AWESOME. Avatars, barcode friend adding, proximity to friends, etc. Check out the full details on CrackBerry.com

A lengthy title, but one of the most memorable lines from one of the greatest computer games ever created. I speak, of course, of “The Secret of Monkey Island”, a point-and-click adventure released by LucasArts (then Lucasfilm Games) in 1990. For the uninitiated, The Secret of Monkey Island and its 3 subsequent sequels chronicle the adventures of Guybrush Threepwood, a slightly bumbling but well-intentioned swashbuckling neophyte in his quest to become a pirate. Along the way he fights the undead pirate LeChuck and marries the beautiful Elaine Marley, governor of Melee Island. If you haven’t played these games, do yourself a major favor and purchase them right away – they are some of the most enjoyable and funny games ever made, thanks for the genius of the game’s original creator, Ron Gilbert.

A New Chapter

Until recently, the last game to come out of the Monkey Island franchise, slightly before LucasArts had decided that adventure games were no longer profitable, was “Escape From Monkey Island” in 2000. Nearly a decade later, many fans had lost hope of there ever being a continuation in the series. There were a few home brew attempts at games, and lots of artwork, fiction, and messages back and forth, but never an official title… Until now.

Telltale Games (My favvvorrite developer), in cooperation with LucasArts, has released the first in a series of 5 episodic games, continuing the Monkey Island saga. I recently completed the first chapter, “Launch of the Screaming Narwhal”, and as a long-time, die-hard fan who has been with the series since the beginning, I can honestly say that this is a gaming dream come true.

A True Return to Monkey Island

Telltale continues to take classic IP and do the job right. We see the full cast of characters return for the new game, with much of the original voice cast, including Dominic Armato as Guybrush Threepwood. The locations and storylines are right on, with LeChuck again causing mayhem upon the seas deep in the Caribbean. Telltale makes use of their “Telltale Tool” and game engine, and I have to say, it looks fantastic. One of the issues I had had with the fourth in the Monkey Island series was a jump to 3D graphics when 3D wasn’t visually there yet. When comparing the beautiful cartoon illustrations of the third game to the blocky, polygons of the fourth, it just seemed ugly. But no longer is this the case – Telltale did another bang-up job and beautifully rendering both the environment and characters.

Guybrush Admires Flotsam Island

Look Behind You! A Three-Headed Monkey!

The true test of any adventure game is the puzzles, and in Monkey Island’s case, the laugh factor. Launch of the Screaming Narwhal does a great job at both, though the puzzles are probably easier than the those found in the rest of the series, due to the length of episodic games. I only found myself majorly stuck once, and after taking a night’s break and coming back, I figured it out fairly quickly. I did find myself smiling and laughing quite a bit though, and definitely felt like I was experiencing a true MI game. The jokes were very “Guybrush”, true to his nature.

Issues

One thing a lot of people had moaned and groaned about on the forums was the control scheme. Telltale has chosen to control Guybrush using the Wallace and Gromit scheme, which means use of the keyboard as opposed to clicking for his destination. Many have gone so far as to declare such a control scheme would ruin the game. While everyone is entitled to their opinion, I found this kind of silly, especially since using the keyboard is not that bad, and probably works better considering all the camera movement there is in the game (well done movement). I did notice Telltale added in a secondary control scheme using the mouse to point in the direction you want your character to go, but honestly I preferred the keyboard.

Really, I had no qualms with the game at all, except the ongoing issue of voice volume – for whatever reason, Telltale continually sets their music much too high to make out what is being said during scenes with a musical score. But after a quick re-adjustment to the music volume, all is good again.

Like all TTG productions, I highly suggest you check it out (on PC or Wii), even if you’re new to the series. Need more convincing? Check out the trailer!

Visit Telltale Games!