<><> <><>

Building an editor takes time. It has been taking me a while up until recently. I guess I really haven't spent that much time on it up to this point either, but it's becoming more pressing as the engine moves along. Design has been rather slow, but things will be picking up this week. I took some time off from game development, about a week, after having to drop out of said competition mentioned in the previous post.

It did give me some interesting ideas to continue to move things along however, so it was not all in waste. I think I'm going to continue to make the game I started developing resources for during the competition as I develop the editor as well. This way I can hopefully find any bugs that may come along and have something to keep me busy as I work on back end python scripting for the engine. I hope to have that and the editors GUI and menu's finished by the end of next weekend.

I haven't been working on Wrath of The Scarecrow the last week either and one of the books I ordered from amazon was canceled so I'm still waiting on some material. I'll start back to work designing WOTSC tomorrow as well.

Clearing some Cobwebs

It's been a little bit of time since I wrote anything in this blog, which is something that I should put an end to this week. I don't really have a lot of time though, and as such I've been blogging over at my GameDev.net Journal
a lot. In regards to the issue with the sprites, I fixed the issue the same week as my entry. Essentially it came down to texture filtering. So graphics look great now. For anyone who may not know. The game that I was working on, Barricade, with Phyersoft has essentially been indefinitely postponed due to the designer not having follow through with the project. So, I've been working on a little project that I like to call Wrath of the Scarecrow. Check out my other journal if intrigued I'll be posting some stuff in here about work on the engine soon as well.

A Quick Entry

I'll have to update this blog later in the week. In the meantime check out the Taming the Beast link to the right over there. You'll find information about the project I'm currently working on, if you're interested. Which if you're here reading this, you might just be. Barricade is on hold indefinitely as far as I know, but an equally, if not more exciting project is underway. More later.

The wonderful headaches of precision sprite animation.

Well, I was hoping to have already been working on the demo for the comic book convention by this point for Barricade, but time flows a lot faster then I would like in a day, or at least it'd be nice to

A. Have enough wealth so I wouldn't have to work to earn a pay check for the rest of my life, I could dedicate my time to that which I wanted(I'm working towards this one.)

B.Had more hours in a day.

C. Could manipulate time with my mind so that I could get more accomplished.(I'm working on this one also)

So, I'm not really that far behind schedule all things considered. Only a couple of weeks of what I was shooting for to get done in the month of march, but now I'm running into some other issues, that I recently had to solve, and are in the process of now being resolved.

The main issue, had to do with animations for my sprite class. I have no idea how other people handle this in their code. I haven't bothered to ask or do research, but the way I've been handling it is simply loading a sprite sheet into memory as one texture and then mapping the sections with the individual frames to be shown at the appropriate time.

Some pseudo code might look like
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
LoadTexture
Sprite->Animate

Call to Animate Looks like

advance function hit count
get active frame

if enough hits have taken place advance the active frame number


MapTexture
for frame one show these texture coordinates

for frame two show these coordinates

ect..
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

My actual codes a lot better structured and is organized object orientedly and works great. The problem is that when I go to manually map my textures in my current editor
(I'm concurrently building a new editor as these issues and the demo are being built)
I have to go in and manually manipulate the textures for the frames to show up correctly on the quads. This is where I'm sure it isn't the best approach, but I don't really know another one, (Aside from having the graphics artist create the sprite sheets very precisely, which seems to be as much trouble as I'm having on my end anyways.)There are slight shifts in the textures do to slight shifts in the textures when I'm going in to map them, and while the anomalies are small and would even possibly be unnoticeable to someone playing the game, they are pretty damn obvious to me.

The solution I've come up with thus far is to increase the precision of movement for mapping the textures and also come up with a more precise grid for aligning the texture on the quad. I'll be trying this out in the next couple of days when I have a little bit of time this weekend.

If anyone out there can make some suggestions or offer any similar experiences up, I would be thankful, although I'm not sure if anyone ever reads this anyways, but if you do thanks in advance for the comments.

An April Fool is better then an Idiot in general.

The title of this post has nothing to do with anything specific. I just couldn't come up with an idea for a general direction for the content of this post, and thus no appropriate title, which kind of makes the title appropriate.

So.. it's another Sunday and it has been a while since my last update. I've been extremely busy the past few weeks with work and family and have gotten small amounts done on T3D. It's been hard for me to be motivated the few hours I have each day to do anything other then relax, but some days I have managed to push myself to get things done. This weekend has been the first weekend I've had free to work on things for almost a month, unfortunately today has been the only day that I've actually sat down to accomplish anything. At least there is today though.

So, I've finished up the animation class and sprite classes today as well as went back and fixed a few things in a few locations that needed to be cleaned up. I am hoping to get started on an external editor today for levels as well as completing some additional classes for the editor itself. These include a generic mouse event handler, a generic game state manager (ie.. menu's, levels, credits, ect..), and possibly a few other things that need to be done. Actual production of the game Demo should start by the end of this week if all things go well. I am essentially awaiting the arrival of a design doc and other resources for the demo, which is supposed to be completed by mid June, and if not started soon I have a feeling that deadline won't be met.

I really wish I had more time to work on the engine and the upcoming game, but that just doesn't seem like it's something that going to change for a long time. So I'm really going to have focus on time management again.

I am going to have to write another demo to test the sprite class out sometime this week, and when that's completed I'll upload a video of it. Until then, remember that the challenge isn't knowing what you think you want, but challenging what you want to think. That even though you may feel that you're doing all that you can, that there is usually a part that feels you can do all that you feel.

March Madness

It's been a little while since my last update. I've been meaning to be more consitant at updates, but I usually end up being pretty short on time. Family, job, projects, and then blog updates in that order. The first two usually take up most of my time, which is fine, it's good to have both, but until things get out of march, which is a month full of birthdays and other things, it will be kind of hard to find the time to update.

T3D

Trodlodyte Version 0.2.0 was finished a couple of weeks ag0w When the sound was finished. I then took too documenting the code base which was taking me quite a while. I ended up being pointed too Doxygen which is a great piece of software that automatically write code docuemtation for you based on comments that you make in your code using specific character sequences. So my documentation process went from about a week to around three hours. I can't thank
Ravuya enough for inadvertly pointing me in that direction.

For the past couple of weeks I've been working on reorginizing my design and code process and coding an animation and a sprite class. It took me a few attempts to really get things designed correctly as first I was attempting to structure everything into one class, but after a while, I soon realized it would just be easier to break the animation features up into a serperate class.

The next few days, when I find sometime, I need to sit down and create a demo for the Sprite class, and also that will be a stress test for the engine itself. I'll really get to see how good my code structures are. The engine has seemed to run very well on all the systems I've tested it on so far, but the demo's I've made haven't really had a whole lot going on. I'll find out soon how things stack up.

There is still a lot to do before the demo needs to be ready for the comic book convention this June, but I think I'll have enough time to get it all completed.

What's that Sound??

So, a quick update. I ended up working on the engine quite a bit last week. I got the sound initialized for the engine using OpenAL. I just built a class to manage the audio context and listener device and one for sources and buffers. I started a new job last week as well, so time management is going to become more and more important. I have to catch up on documentation of the engine and then I'll really be concentrating on developing classes for the up coming game with PhyerSoft. More on that as it develops.

The Snowball effect

I haven't ended up blogging as much as I've been meaning too, but that's ok, as I've been doing a lot of work on the engine. Last thing I completed was an animation demo here are some screen shots of the engine in action. Click on them to make them bigger.

:-Animation Demo-:




:-Command Console-:





:-Texture Mapper-:





The graphics being used are for an upcoming game from a partner of mine called phyersoft. I can't say much more then that about it for the time being though.

But moving on, You can get an idea of how things are progressing. I'm currently finishing up some additional tools for initializing the game settings as well as have to implement sound, add additional support for labels, and once again a lot more to work on. I was initially going to go into some more technical details about the engine, but I've already wasted a lot of time posting on forums and reading and what not today. Hopefully I get a chance to do a more formal discussion later.

Distribution

So, I have made some pretty decent progress the last day or so on the engine. I finally finished the in game command console keyboard input handling. I simply added a repeat feature for keys being held down as well as encapsulating the functionality into a class. This also got me thinking about how to structure the rest of the states.

Ideally, when the engine is complete, I want it to be able to be sort of a generic piece of software that the developer can use to extend things upon. Of course for my current level of skill this is very challenging for me to come up with concrete designs to actually implement. I have general ideas of how to accomplish certain design goals, but at the same time the more complete versions of certain features and the way things are handled with be an evolutionary development process. This also comes down to me wanting to start dealing with game objects, getting shit on the screen, as well as diving into data management and eventually developing into the engines scenegraph. All of which I have no experience with at this point.

On top of these issues I was finally able to get an understanding of side by side assemblies and packaged an application for deployment for the first time today. It was pretty educational. Up until this point in my coding career, most things I've written have been standalone console applications so I never really had need for a deployment system. Also prior to windows xp it wasn't a requirement to use such a distribution process.

Anyone out there having similar issues or wanting to learn more about the process in VS2005 should check out Deployment Walkthroughs

Looking a head over the next couple of days, I am going to be concentrating on finishing up some base object classes, after which, I will have to make a decision either to build a game prototype(demo) with the engine in it's current state or continue to add more functionality into the engine. I also still need to begin writing the interfaces for python scripting, write the camera classes, light classes, and a host of other things yet to be completed.

Delayed Response

So, Happy not so New Year!


It is my resolution to actually journal in more of a technical standpoint in this blog from here on in. No more rantings and musings about being a twenty something looking to find their place in the world and understand the universe around them.(AFTER THIS POST ANYWAYS)


Instead I will be concentrating on the design process that I will be continuing to go through in regards to the game engine. Oh.. and the screen shot in the previous post was wiped out due to some hardware failures on my end of things, so just use your imagination there.

Later today I will be concentrating on bringing my design focuses back up to par. I will be mapping out a plan of attack and really be looking to get as much done as I can this year, in a consistent fashion.