Journal of Aardvajk

Vague rambling with the occasional tangible result
1,927 comments
21 followers
744 entries
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Aardvajk
February 20, 2015
Thought about PIMPL
Was just thinking about using some PIMPL in a project I'm working on and had a thought about avoiding the (probably irrelevant) cost of having to new the implementation for a value class.

Would this work?// thing.hclass Thing{public: Thing();private: classs Imp; Imp &imp(;; char imp_data…
2,041 views
Aardvajk
February 15, 2015
Me and my shadow...


So I finally got to working on the shadow mapping and making it a bit more sophisticated. Previously I was only casting shadows directly down from above and only casting onto surfaces which were fairly flat, which was nice and simple…
2,575 views
Aardvajk
February 07, 2015
It Lives!


Its been a busy week for both me and my game. In real life news, I have finally managed to find myself a nice flat in a very nice part of our town, for a reasonable rent and will be back to having my own space again in two weeks, aft…
1,929 views
Aardvajk
January 28, 2015
Staying Grounded


We all know how important staying grounded is in life, and it is as important for a character controller, especially in an environment with sloping floors.

The problem with constantly applying gravity to a character when using an algo…
1,397 views
Aardvajk
January 27, 2015
GJK musings


Thought I'd write a post about the GJK implementation that I'm using in my game to deal with collision detection between implict shapes today.

Above is a screenshot from a 2D test bed I wrote when I was originally working out the algo…
2,248 views
Aardvajk
January 24, 2015
An update a day...


Might as well keep doing these little journal updates, keeps me off the streets.

I've added in support for a [font=tahoma]Capsule [/font]shape to the physics system now and got the character controller just doing simple collide and se…
1,734 views
Aardvajk
January 23, 2015
Early days (again)


Back to basics again and have:

  • modded the level editor to work with 3D levels again
  • got the editor exporting the physics shapes and a single mesh for the level
  • got the game loading the physics shapes into a physics system
  • got the game lo…
1,436 views
Aardvajk
January 21, 2015
Statement of Intent
Quick entry, no images, nothing much to show except that I wanted to formalize my current plan.

I'm fed up with battling against everything else in a game to get the idea of a grappling hook working. Its ridiculous. I went from having a cool 3D platformer to a 2D physics based game to support it, an…
1,687 views
Aardvajk
January 03, 2015
Move back to 2D underway


The move back to 2D physics is now underway. I have:

  • Added back support to my level editor to add and manipulate 2D shapes
  • Ripped out the old physics code and replaced with a 2D version
  • Built a player character than just moves around wi…
1,157 views
Aardvajk
January 02, 2015
Switch to 2D
Attempting to write a journal on my phone. Not going to end well.

So I've decided that rather than scrap the grapple idea, I'm going to instead scrap a spatial dimension :)

I keep thinking about Little Big Planet and how cool a 2D game with 3D graphics can be. The recent indie game where you play the…
1,285 views
Aardvajk
December 31, 2014
Project fail


Well, the grapple hook idea has failed miserably. As soon as I put a chase camera in place and started trying it out, it turned out to be unplayable. Can't see where you are firing it, can't figure out where the hell you are once you…
1,660 views
Aardvajk
December 28, 2014
Some more game musings


Hope everyone had a good holiday period.

Been a period of musing and experiments with my game over mine. I wanted to at least try first person perspective to see how bad it was.

I'd previously used mouse messages and the reset-the-curs…
1,534 views
Aardvajk
December 09, 2014
Winding things up


Started experimenting with having the grapple rope wind around objects in the world, and got a bit carried away :)

I think it is working okay, although hard to be sure. At the moment there is no way to unwind the rope, so a little har…
1,302 views
Aardvajk
November 29, 2014
Swinging on a Spring


I've got the basics of a spring mass working as a rope now. It needs a fair bit of tweaking but it works okay, as evidenced by this poor quality video:



The maths is actually quite easy to implement for this. In among the other code fo…
1,225 views
Aardvajk
November 24, 2014
Project Restart


Having a day off work today and have decided to dump my 2.5D grappling hook game and restarted my 3D platformer.

I'm doing all the physics myself in this one. I have the levels loading from the editor and a functioning kinematic chara…
1,120 views
Aardvajk
November 04, 2014
The Right to Bear Arms (now with meshes)


Bit of progress since the last entry. Now, instead of generating a model for the player on the fly, I'm using a very quickly thrown together rigged mesh from my 3D modelling software and modifying the skeletal animation to make the a…
1,166 views
Aardvajk
October 30, 2014
The Right to Bear Arms


The player object now has arms that the grapples visually attach to. They smoothly move from the rest position to the correct position when grappling and rotate towards the correct point.

I've had to decide that the player can't turn …
1,366 views
Aardvajk
October 27, 2014
Project Update
Just wanted to post since the obligatory eight to ten weeks since last entry have passed :)



The Grappling Hook project is alive and well and continuing apace. I've got the level editor at the point where I can make basic levels now, s…
1,317 views
Aardvajk
September 21, 2014
Grappling away...


Still grappling away in my spare time. Been focusing on making the rope behave correctly with moving objects, which has proven to be a bit more complicated than I expected, but seems to be working now.

The grapple bends correctly arou…
1,311 views
Aardvajk
September 07, 2014
Grappling Hook game, now without blobs


Decided on a bit of a change for the grappling hook game. I ditched the blob, as it was more trouble than it was worth, didn't work properly and was detracting from the main point of the game, which is classy grappling hook action.

I …
1,385 views
Aardvajk
September 04, 2014
Blob Grappling Hooks


Just a quick update on the soft body game. Now have the basic prototypes for the left and right mouse button grappling hooks working in terms of the physics. No idea yet how I'm going to render these arms in a decent way but it is sh…
1,553 views
Aardvajk
August 20, 2014
I, Blob
Just a quick post. Have been fiddling with the graphics in my soft body game, and have implemented some basic shadow mapping and some specular highlights on the blob.



Seems to add a pretty nice sense of the 3D-ness of the blob, which …
1,776 views
Aardvajk
August 13, 2014
New Game Prototype - Soft Body Physics
My article on varadic template implementation of signals and slots is now up waiting approval, for those who asked last time so nicely.

Started working in a new game project now. I decided what the world needs is a soft-body swinging physics game, much like my old Squishy project, but rendered in 3D…
3,330 views
Aardvajk
July 31, 2014
C++11 variable args applied to signals/slots system
Quick snippetty post today. Been looking at making a clean signals/slots system using varadic templates. This is only tested with GCC 4.7.2#ifndef DELEGATE_H#define DELEGATE_H#include #include template class Event;class BaseDelegate{public: virtual ~BaseDelegate(){ }};template class AbstractDele…
1,969 views
Aardvajk
June 03, 2014
Varadic templates and signals/slots
Been playing around with a typesafe signal/slot system (yes another one) using varadic templates tonight. Its so much cleaner than the existing approaches pre-C++0x. It's a real demonstration of the usefulness of this awesome new feature:#include #include #include template class Signal;template cla…
1,275 views
Aardvajk
June 01, 2014
Improved Edge Shimmy


Decided to rip out the grab and shimmy system and start again because the previous version was buggy and wouldn't cope with corners very well. It is important to me to maintain a smooth velocity as you shimmy from one shape to another and this was impossible with the old system.

The approach now is …
1,096 views
Aardvajk
May 27, 2014
Edge Shimmy


About time I updated here. Been working on edge grabbing and shimmying. Animations are a bit pants but the basic actions are working okay.

Shimmying thankfully uses the same edges I generated for the edge walking in previous entries here. I just use a closest point to line method to check whether bo…
1,497 views
Aardvajk
May 18, 2014
Support functions in a model editor


Adding a rather nifty set of functionality to Charm, the model editor, this morning. Generating shapes based on support functions rather than explicit geometry.

For those not familiar, a support function is a function that, given a sh…
1,504 views
Aardvajk
May 15, 2014
New Level Editor


Got the new level editor working to the point that it can create maps for the game now. Its a lot more flexible than the last one and more easily supports non-polyhedral shapes, such as the cones here. Should be much easier to extend…
1,507 views
Aardvajk
May 08, 2014
Christmas Trees (apparently)


Seems to be Christmas in my game world at least, if not in the real world.

Been working vaguely on adding props to the level i.e. meshes that are not just shapes created in the level editor. All the infrastructure is in place in the g…
1,464 views
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