Smart Tales II

This is the repository of the Smart Tales sequel, Smart Tales II. The original Smart Tales (I) is a game about Active and Assisted Living (AAL) Awareness and this project seeks to further explore the development of a serious awareness game. It mainly seeks to improve upon the pain points found in the evaluation of Smart Tales I, see the original paper springer link for context. The accompanying paperwork for Smart Tales II has been finished (spoiler: Smart Tales II did quite well!) but is currently unavailable publicly.

Work on Smart Tales II has halted for now but for anyone interested in hacking/extending this project: keep on reading!

Getting Started

Smart Tales II is written in portable C++ and was build using free tools: it uses the Simple and Fast Multimedia Library (SFML) for the audio, visuals and input handling. For creating the art Paint.NET was used, which can be found in the .pdn files. Smart Tales supports both Linux and Windows currently, offering a makefile and Visual Studio 2019 project for each respectively. Let's get to building the project so you can see for yourself. If you're in a situation where you cannot build the game yourself, grab a release copy for it in the releases. There are currently only Windows releases available.

Building Smart Tales II

Windows

On Windows we have made it pretty easy to get going, simply clone this repository and open it (smart_tales_ii.sln) with Visual Studio 2019 (VS2019). It comes complete with all the x64 dependencies, but if you really want to target x86 then grab a 32-bit copy of SFML and set it up.

Linux

Depending on what Linux distribution you're running you will have to fetch the sfml development files through your specific package manager. On Arch it is:

• sudo pacman -S sfml

But if you're running Ubuntu it probably is something like:

• sudo apt-get install libsfml-dev

Now make sure that you have:

• a C++ compiler, the makefile in the repository assumes you are using g++ but feel free to change this (alter the CC variable). A way to check if you have an appropriate compiler installed is to write g++ --version. If that outputs a version of 5 or more you should be good to go (this is the first version with C++14 compliance). For clang++ you need version 3.4 or later.
• make installed
• git installed

Now that we have all the dependencies open the repository in your terminal and simply run: make all If all went well you can cd bin and run the game ./smarttalesii.

Troubleshooting

• The game crashes after X minutes
  • This has been a problem in the past on Windows, but using the latest OpenAL binaries solved this. You can try installing the latest windows installer and renaming openal32.dll to openal32old.dll.
• The game stutters
  • Also a problem unique to Windows. It seems that any PC that uses gamepads, such as xbox controllers, have some intense lag spikes from time to time. The solution at the time of writing this was to connect a controller to the PC, launch the game and pause it, fiddle with the controller a bit and then resume the game.
• How do I open the .pdn files in the art directory?
  • For Linux: you can't. For Windows: get Paint.NET. The game itself loads in PNG and JPG assets, so feel free to alter those in the bin/texture and bin/spritesheet
• The art assets are super tiny!
  • They were all drawn targeting a 320x180 resolution and then upscaled by 400% (you'll get 1280x720). I (@TijmenUU) used this out of laziness, since SFML supports upscaling without filters as well.
• I have no sound!
  • Are you sure you're not launching with the nosound argument somehow?
• I just want to play the game
  • If you're on Windows grab a copy from the releases
• I'm getting lots of C1083 errors whilst building the project!
  • If you're using the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) you may have ran into a case sensitivity issue. Open a powershell window as administrator and navigate to the project root. From there run:

    ls -Path . -Directory -Recurse | %{fsutil file setCaseSensitiveInfo $_.fullname disable}

• The game gives an error about commodore.ttf not being able to be loaded?
  • Most likely you have your working directory set up wrong. Be sure to launch the game from the bin/ folder and have your debugger setup appropiately as well.

Where to begin?

A word of caution: this project was written with the intend to be self documenting code. This is obviously highly subjective, but that does mean there is no extensive documentation outside of the source code. I (@TijmenUU) expect you to read the source code for pointers. If you want to get an idea of the program flow, start in main.cpp as it contains the main entry point for the application.

Tip: When using Visual Studio, use the file view instead of the filter view. The button to toggle this on is called Show All Files. Using this view ensures you have the source file hierarchy structure and not just a flat list of files.

Project layout

• smarttalesii -> the repository root folder
  • art -> contains all of the art used in the game, partly in .pdn format
  • bin -> the working directory of the game
    • animation -> all animations (spritestrips and more) are defined here in .txt files. See the _readme.txt file
    • font -> all fonts in .ttf format used in the game
    • music -> all music in .ogg format used in the game
    • sfx -> all sound effects in .ogg format used in the game
    • spritesheet -> all sprite sheets used in the game (.png, but not restricted to)
    • texture -> all textures used in the game (non animated sprites)
    • difficulty.txt -> file that defines variables that affect the game's difficulty. Play around with them!
    • *.dll -> Windows dependencies
  • smart_tales_ii -> source directory containing all source files, named like this due to the Visual Studio project.
  • windeps -> the SFML x64 dependencies used by the included VS2019 project
  • .gitignore -> stuff git should not track
  • LICENCE
  • README.md -> that's us
  • makefile -> build file for Linux users
  • smart_tales_ii.sln -> the VS2019 project file for Windows users

Adding new game modes / overlays

All game modes need to derive from the base class Gamemode publicly. The expected interface can be observed in gamemode.hpp. The game uses a simple vector to keep track of the different game modes in the GameManager class. You will have to find an appropriate place to push your new gamemode onto the it using:

GameManager::GetInstance().PushGamemode(std::make_unique<MyGameModeType>(/* Constructor arguments*/));

See void Program::Load() in program.cpp for practical examples of the above.

For each gamemode, take careful note of the following functions:

• SuppressDraw() if this returns true (it defaults to false) it suppresses the draw calls of any game modes added before itself.
• SuppressUpdate() if this returns true (it defaults to false) it suppresses the update calls of any game modes before itself.

If the game mode vector contains [ A, B, C ] and B surpresses, it means that B and C get handled normally and A is not drawn nor updated. Note that to get this order A is inserted before B, B is inserted before C.

For updates the game mode vector is iterated backwards. For drawing the vector is iterated forwards due to the use of the painter's algorithm. This ensures that any game mode added later gets drawn on top of the rest. See GameManager::Update and GameManager::draw.

For reference:

• The UI overlay is perhaps the simplest overlay that the game has. Check out the source files uioverlay.hpp and uioverlay.cpp.
• The Shop gamemode is the simplest, albeit still a bit cluttered, gamemode there is. Check out the source files shopmode.hpp and shopmode.cpp.

Changing the resolution

Caution, minefield ahead. The game uses an internal 1280x720 resolution with a good reason: it was meant to target mobile devices using this resolution. If you really want to have a crack at this, expect hardcoded values. I (@TijmenUU) have tried my best to avoid them, but I can't guarantee there not being any.

You'll want to:

• Check out gamemode.hpp and change the values there of world width and height.
• Check out main.cpp and change the values there too.

Load new assets

See program.cpp and check out the bulk loading of assets there. The game expects all assets to be loaded on launch. Although nothing should break when loading assets in dynamically, I (@TijmenUU) recommend against it. The game has a single resource cache, which you can find in resourcecache.hpp and resourcecache.cpp. You can get the instance by calling ResourceCache::GetInstance().

Make new sprite sheets

Make sure to check out the animatedsprite.hpp/cpp files and spritesheet.hpp/cpp. The cleanest animated sprite around is probably the player, found in playersprite.hpp/cpp and its animations are defined in bin/animation/player.txt. Definitely check out the _readme.txt file in bin/animation too.

Branches

• master: the most recent stable version of the game.
• GameplayEvaluation: the first basic prototype of the game, for testing the fundamental game mechanics.
• ExperimentEvaluation: the version of the game used for the first evaluation round with 11 participants (Q2 2018).

License

See the license file for all the licenses this project uses.

About

This is a bachelors project for the University of Utrecht, 2017-2018. In short the project is about generating awareness of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), with a focus on the elderly. The game attempts to do this through providing a small but fun experience in the form of a small game.

The project is executed by Tijmen van Nesselrooij (@TijmenUU) and supervised by Fabiano Dalpiaz (@fabianodalp).