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Well, I spent the last few hours working on implementing bounding box collision detection. I would have gotten farther today, but I spent a lot of time looking for a simple bug in the wrong places, which sometimes happens. Essentially for the game barricade, I have it setup so that I can see the bounding boxes in debug mode for the game. Or, at least that was what I was trying to do. All I could get it to do was draw three boxes in the center of the screen though, one for each of the different sizes of blocks in the game. So, I went hunting to see if I could find the problem. I thought maybe I wasn't drawing it right, and tried different variations of using offsets from the quads the sprites are drawn on. It didn't work.
I then realized, after setting some break points, that the data stored in the structures for the sprites bounding boxes was still set to zero. You see, I had placed setting the bounding boxes translations in the same function that generated the sizes of the blocks. This wouldn't have been a problem, except that the bounding boxes are determined by an offset based on the dimensions of the textures and the translations of the quads for the sprites themselves. So, of course the size of the blocks would need to be generated before the placement of the blocks, so the data wasn't getting set correctly. I finally figured this out after looking around for a while. Simple, simple things can cause such chaos in a system.
So, I ended up re-building the system within it's own function and had it updated after the placement of every block. This worked out great. Here's a picture of it in action.
Clicky for bigger View
Next up tomorrow will be writing the actual collision detection for block to block collision. Then it will be on to finishing the bullets class, followed by bullet to block collision. Then bot to powerup collision.
After that the only things left to do will be to code the powerup effects, the scoring system, add sound effects, and the demo will be finished. I'm aiming to get this done by the end of the month.
It's been a while since I have blogged oh blog of interest oh mine. As a new year starts I am reminded of my own mortality, of the short time that I know I have to get things going, of the relationships that I have to remember to cherish and of all the good things that are to come.
Game development wise, things have still been moving forward, slowly but surely. I was even gracious enough to help start a local game development meeting that meets the second Tuesday of every month, which is very cool. It's good to find some kindred spirits in the area. Unfortunately life has been heck tick due to some bad decision making on my part, so I haven't really had the time to build those relationships as much as I would like, but that should change with time.
Engine progress is going well, editor is coming a long too. I'm entering a design phase again currently, making sure that things are going where I need them too and deciding on the functionality that I really need to concentrate on. Also, I'm shooting to have a playable Barricade demo complete by the end of this month. Short of adding collision detection to the game demo, it's pretty much complete.
I'll be shooting to journal more once again, as I gain some stability to my interest once more. I'll need to structure up some actual interesting things to write about for a change though. :P
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.
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.
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.
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..
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well hello gentle reader and thank you for stopping by my lonely blog. It has been a little while since my last entry as I have taken the time to write out my thoughts in a while. A lot has changed since my last entry. I am now living in an apartment all on my lonesome for the first time. Mind you not being away from my folks, as I grew up more away from home for long periods of time it seems, but this is the first place I've lived where I haven't had a roommate, fun stuff. It's better to know that when I come home from work, the apartments not going to be trashed, my food will still be there ready for me to eat, and no one will keep me up jaming until six oclock in the morning when I have to be to work at seven.
Also, I quit my job last Wednesday so I am no longer cleaning buses at nights, which is a good thing. If anyone were extremely bored or for some other reason inclined to read through all my previous posts you would notice a trend of complaint about that job. So, now instead, I will be landscaping, which sounds like a blast to me. Being out doors is something that I've always loved, and I don't even to take a pay cut, and it's a tipical 8 to 5 job, so no more nights. After a year and a couple of months of working nights, with little to no time off and being isolated all the time, this is a much welcomed change.
Ahhh.... what the hell, is this guy ever going to quit yapping and get on with the game stuff?......
Keep your shirt on, .. I'm getting there.
OOHHH, Picture.....
S0 here's the first screen shot ever of T3D. Not all that impressive I know, but there's a lot more going on then meets the eye. Currently I'm still working on finishing the console for the engine. Eventually I'll be writing python interfaces for the console to interact, but I'm still working on getting the input to show up correctly. I currently have three buffers that take in a string. Commands can be up to three strings, thus the three buffers, anyways, I was trying to write my own input handlers that only processed input ever 25milliseconds, but it's been hard to get the character presses to be drawn to the screen the way I want with the current subsystems in place. So , I'm currently looking into an input alterantive. I was trying to find one that is cross platform. I've looked at a few different api's out there that handle a vastly different amount of game functionality, but I haven't seen any that deal specifcally with input. I'll probably end up just using some type of wrapper for one of the api's I've already looked at, but I still have yet to decide. If anyone has any suggestions, drop me a comment. Umm... not really a lot more going on. Well back to work on the engine. Until next time....
So, with time sober comes... a chemcial imbalance from the chemicals attempting to blance themselves out from being out of balance from the mass alchohol consumption on an almost daily basis. Otherwise known as depression. I really have no urges to drink anymore though, which is good. I do however feel like the passion is being sucked out of me. I think I mostly use my current job as a scapegoat. It does suck, I was there a year last month, and no body even said thank you, or good job to me. I didn't get a raise and infact it seems as more time goes by the more I've been neglected there, or taken for granted, or however you want to put it, so I've been focusing all my negative feeling towards that. THis of course doesn't solve anything, nor does it effect my performance at work, it just makes more depressed. THen there's the search for jobs that don't pan out, mostly because all the places that I can think I'd like to work for, aren't hiring currently. So, I just try to think positive and relish in the fact that atleast I have a job, I'm a live, and there are people that do actually care about me in my life. This subdues some of that depression, and I know with time it will pass. It just make me sluggish.
So, due to this depression, who will now be called Mr. Carmikle, in an effort to master this ever annoying pest, I haven't been focusing on my engine for the last couple of days. Instead I've been playing games to try and get my mind off of Mr. Carmikle's antics. He keeps tapping me on the shoulder, and I keep trying to ignore him, but the only time he seems to leave me alone is when I sleep a lot. So, I did that yesterday. He kind of got the hint, but he keeps poking his head in my room today and reminding me he's still here.
So, I still haven't fixed the display problem for the console window and I still haven't got it take input or display output yet. I'm trying to decide whether or not I should instead concentrate on a base class that will incorporate some timers so that anything inherited from the base class will already have to logic to handle animations. This approach would make sense and it's probably what I'll end up doing. I just have to get Mr. Carmikle under control so I can concentrate.
I've kind of been at a lack of inspiration lately to work on things as I've felt like I'm not doing any work that really means anything to the world. Not in the sense that I inspire some girl to be obsessed with an older boy in her trailer park and get pregnant because she listens to my crappy boy band song, but more a long the lines of helping people in need, or creating culture that inspires people to actually help themselves. I think that this theme is also seeded in my depression, especially in regards to my job. I mean the world is so fucked up, yet day in and day out people are apathetic as hell to one another and to the world in general. I mean if people just realized that we are the universe, the world incarnate, that yes there is the illusion of seperatness, but we are still what we always have been, which is one, then maybe we would be nicer to our fellows, instead, people concentrate on the differnces, whether they be social, economical, spritiual beliefs, or whatever bias people choose to concentrate on, and we let that divide us even more. Thermodynamics states that energy can not be created or destroyed. Energy, which in term relates to matter. This means that matter can be changed, altered, reformed, but the underlying energy is always the same energy that has always been there. Recycled.. throughout the ages. This concept is in every religion, but closed minded people choose not to look at it that way, people are too interested in feeling superior, having power, to realize that anything that has true power, doesn't look to be in control, it looks to serve.
This has turned into another long non game development related post that may just look like a bunch of jibberish. I guess what I'm saying is that I really hope future generations can become aware of how to help, love, and respect one another, themselves, enough to see where it is the previous generations have gone wrong. It's fear that propogates the negativity in this world.
As an example, look at global warming. We are destroying our world, and yet the vast majority of people don't give a shit enough to stop doing it, I fall into this categorey as well. I do care, but not enough to stand firm on that conviction. Oh well what could we do, some may ask. Answer = STOP DRIVING CARS,&STOP BURNING COAL, &STOP PRODUCING GREEN HOUSE GAS!
Well, we couldn't do that how would we get to work? Answer = Provide public transportation for the masses, walk, ride a bike, come up with alternative fuel sources.
Oh but we don't want to do that, then we'd have to associate with people we don't want too. Or we 'd have to wake up fifteen minutes earlier, or we'd have to change our lifestyles.
These things are all issues that come out of fear.
THink about it. Would the world stop if the American way of life, the way we know it, suddenly changed? If people decided to go back to basics, not commute as much, be more niche associated, would the world stop? People are afraid of change, especially if they've done things a certain way their entire life. This seems to be a taught behavior that is accepted throughout our culture and yet it is this thing that will cause this construct of organismal life form, that we call human beings, to be erraticated from the bussom of the planet. Scary.. and a long rant. I should organize these ideas better, but to be truthful I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything. THis is stuff that if anyone is able to be truthful with ones self they already know. I'm just trying to get some passion back in my own life, maybe to have a fire burn to influence something for the better, someday.
Well, we have it four days sober, and the start of an in game console for T3D. It feels good to be hard at work, focused, and back on a path that I fell off of roughly four months ago. I'm currently familiarizing myself with the process of a timestep so that the animation for displaying the console window displays correctly. I really know squat about graphics programming. Up until this year, I've mainly focused on programming in general, seeing as the only things I've completed code wise were various example applications, a quarter of a completed text game(really only lacked content, all the subsystems and systems were complete), and my first game demo that I coded in Visual Basic three years ago. SO, needless to say I'm learning a lot this year, but it has gone slow up until this point due to neglect of effort, well consistantely anyways.
I have a feeling that I will have to end up doing a complete overhaul after a while on my entire code base, but I'll have to cross that bridge when I come to it. For now, I need to concentrate on completing some lower systems and then move on to constructing my first scene graph, from there I should be ready to start concentrating on scripting, geometry, physics, and a host of other shit that I'm sure it's going to take me another year or two to complete to a functional version. It's a long road, but you can only take it one step at a time.
I managed to change my template around today. It wasn't really that hard to figure out what all the tags were for, although it has been a while since I last dived into any net code at all. So, I'm sitting here, doing this, mainly to keep my mind occupied. I've given myself a rough week as of last and well, frightfully enough, all I seem to be able to do is to through myself into something, in order to get back on my feet. I'm being a bit criptic here, but I'll leave it at that, I don't really feel a need to clarify as I know what I mean.
So, I'm still working on researching and designing a scene graph for my game engine. I haven't really done much of anything this last month, but I'm at a point in the engine work and in my life, where focusing strictly on the things in my life that need to be done is top priority. It's pretty obvious too me, just from reading my previous entries that this blog has had little to do with my actual pursuit of game development and more of a ranting on my struggle with alchohol abuse, which tells me a lot about my life these last few months. I'd really like to see this blog deal more with game design, as with my life having to deal with no more alchohol abuse.
My Quote of the day : By Me
Plans are often only as good as the convictions of those who attempt to carry them out.
Chemical Depression,.. as in depression caused from a chemical imbalance due to a use of mood altering agents, is a vicious cycle. It imbides one to continue down a spiral of self loathing and dispair, and the only way you can feel normal or good is when your not sober. It doesn't even work all the time, the chemicals to feel good. I now have twenty six hours completely sober. As mentioned previously in a prior post, the fly in my ointment has been alchohol, really for a while now. I've now officially been drunk for half of this year, and completely sober for the other half. What I've learned in the last eight months is what I've known for all too long, nothing good comes from losing ones self in an endless bout of drinking. It has, in all factual actuality, hurt me in every way possible. I've been lucky enough to not fall victim of my own antics, and have managed to be somewhat responsible and not neglect my obligations, completely. The sober part of this year has taught me that I can indeed do great things when I'm dedicated and put my heart into something. That and that if you can't spend time with so called friends without getting fucked up, what kind of relationship does that say that you have with your friends? Is it one worth pursuing simply to have companionship, at the cost of your health , wealth, and good fortune? Hypothetical reflection.................
The purpose of this blog is more for me to reflect on my current progress and direction that I'm heading in to accomplish my goals. Ideally, a development journal and a place for me to share opinions with other individuals. Unfortunately, it's hard to journal about development when you aren't doing any.
It seems that I have always been a fan of extremes in life. I believe this to be in my nature and interestingly enough I can even see this trait displayed in the actions of my three year old son. This is kind of scary, because throughout my life it has constantly gotten me into either great success, or great trouble. As I've gotten older, I have learned to better balance my decision making, but this has more so been true for about the last couple of years. At any rate, it's hard to accomplish much when your going back and forth from one side of the spectrum to the other. I feel like I've been struggling to keep my balance lately, and because of this certain aspects(mainly my projects) have been suffering.
So in the words of one of my child hood friends nintey year old bed ridden grandmother, I need to shit or get off the pot. (I'm sure many other people have said those words but she's the first person I ever remember using that phrase.)
I haven't worked on the engine since before I left for Colorado, which is sad. I've vowed to make good use of this year, and damnit, I'm going too.
In other news I've got a web server I'm working on , which is better then wasting all my time I suppose. I'm still not sure what I'm going to do with it exactly though, and should probably do some brain storming in the coming weeks. Sometimes I just feel spread to thin, others too thick. Where is that magical formula for the perfect peanut butter?
I returned from a five day trip to Colorado on Monday night. It was a much needed vacation after getting burned out in regards to my job for the last eleven months. It was very rejuvenating and inspiring. We spent most of the trip hiking through Roosevelt National Park and seeing the local sites of Boulder Colorado. It was great to mingle with some interesting people, as party members of our trip consisted of a long time friend and two acquittance's that I feel I connected with on various levels. Hopefully some good things will come into fruitation from the journey as far as future projects go.
Now that I am back home, it is time to begin concentrating on where I really left off in April of this year. I am now rearing and ready to go and will be concentrating to make this year the most productive yet.
Currently I'm studying Scene Graphs for what I am now referring to as T3D, which is the game engine that I've been working on. This is a subject that I have had little experience with up to this point. But of course as any engine programmer knows is definitely a core element in any engines design. I would like to be past this bench mark by the time I plan to move out of my mom's house at the end of August.
In other news, I saw Clerks II today and me being a Kevin Smith fan boy aside, I really enjoyed the movie. There was definitely a lot of good jokes and as stated by Smith in various writings and interviews before the movies release, it definitely did have some more heart felt moments and a did a good job of balancing the humor and deeper life messages. Definitely worth five bucks or eight, depending on the show time, so if you're thinking about checking it out, I'd definitely recommend it.
It's going to be a slow work week for me this week, which isn't a bad thing. It'll enable me to get a lot done in regards to my 3d engine and allow me to get to do something that I don't really do often enough, play some games. Next week, I'll be going on vacation to Colorado for five days. It'll be a blast, and the first vacation that I'll have taken in about seven years. I can't wait to be up in the mountains, and I'll make sure to take lots of pictures.
Of course with these two events unfolding in the order that they are, this is going to make for a small pay check come next pay day. I suppose you have to give up some things in order to receive others, money being the sacrifice here, and free time being the gain. I don't think I'm actually going to complete the graphical test bed for C.F.L. before I leave, but I did decide not to go with the idea I was going to test out, so it seems that it kind of worked itself out. Instead, I'm going to be focusing on getting my 3d engines scenegraph up and working and adding other various functionality that I had in the older version that I created earlier this year, that needs some adjustments made to it.
I do want to post some screen shots and other things before I go, and I also plan to write a series of articles (that I've been planning to write for way too long) to help younger or less experienced up and comming developers down the road to grandma's house..er.. I mean game development.
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