I despise especially the printers. They're all creaky old laserjets that don't support a lot of PostScript, and take almost 10 minutes to warm up if you haven't printed on them in the last half hour or so. So there tend to be big lines near the printers to pick up the printouts. Why haven't we eliminated paper yet?
Not to mention it's a huge pain in the ass to have print quota at all; I mean, were these idiots printing off terabytes of crap and running the computer science department into bankruptcy? Pfegh.
Racing Game
Here is a screenshot of me driving around. My self-hacked physics are really weird: the car accelerates to maximum speed almost instantaneously, turning while backing up is really slow, and the friction is too aggressive so I can't drift. Blah!
Will take a lot of tweaking and jiggery-pokery, I suspect. Either that, or using actual physics equations instead of just adjusting the inertia vector.
Actually, come to think of it, this is the same problem I had with the game physics bits in Sunrise until I asked Superpig about it. He said to use two vectors. This is probably a good idea. I will have to rewrite this code.
Any semblance to the SpriteLib racing demo and other free assets are purely coincidental.
I hear if I make it up to part 63, I get a free muffin. For some reason I don't get much disk space (200MB) as part of my NFS at the university, so I have to plod along hoping that my log and temporary files don't fill up the entire disk. Despite being told it was easy throughout the previous three years of my career, getting new disk space is like pulling teeth because a bunch of engineers have now requested more disk space for their CS accounts, which they never use, probably because they don't know how to minimize their Firefox cache and turn off core dumps when their poorly-written C applications blow their shit all over the disk.
Amazing 2D Game
I hooked up the input system, but the messages aren't propagating to the vehicles yet. Soon.
Guerilla Ravuya Marketing
I've noticed that a lot of people in #gamedev tend to be interested in Propane Injector. I don't think I'm that big of a whore, so those of you who are pushing it are much appreciated.
The code for v1.0 is mostly done; I have to simply get this 2D game done within the next month, clean up some of the old useless files from previous versions, and then pack it up. Does anyone know how to make a VS2005 project template? Would be cool if the installer shoved one in, set up your include and lib paths and then added the PI source code to your project. Of course you'd still have to install the SDL_* libraries, but...
Oh god now they're doing construction again so I get to hear impact drills going through the concrete while I'm in my lecture.
Big things from yesterday:
Started on the racing game tilemap editor. I'm suspecting that at some point in the future, I will have to implement a general tilemap editor because I'm getting sick of re-implementing this for my tile based games.
Got collision with the "checkpoint" lines working. This is actually much simpler than I originally thought; box-line collision is just an AABB if you think about it.
Hooked up the input to a car; right now I can hold down space to make the car accelerate in the proper direction. Gonna get steering working later, and then hook up my Xbox360 pad and make sure analogue steering is working.
Not much is really going on, but we'll see what it's like. I got home pretty late last night so I didn't have much time to do work between 24 and being surprisingly freaked out by this TV pirate's antics. I suspect I haven't had enough sleep, because watching it in the morning makes it hilarious, instead of terrifying. Weird.
Anyway, screenshots tonight? Okay? It's a date. Here, drink this. That's right. Oh, you're sleepy? Well, let's go back to my place. You can crash on the couch.
Blarg they are all so loud playing their World of Warcraft while I'm trying to get work done but I can't because they don't have a proper NFS setup. Blarrrgh.
Take pity on me or I'll club you and eat your bones!
Amazing 2D Game
No, I haven't decided on a name yet.
I do, however, have some sprites going around in the game and are now working on a simple editor so I can define a track and set checkpoints. HopeDagger gave me the idea; I was wondering out loud how racing games manage to "know" you're coming around for another lap instead of just driving over the finish line in reverse. The answer is (according to him) invisible checkpoints.
And so my track has many invisible checkpoint "tripwires" that are triggered as you drive over them. As soon as you drive over all eight in order, you are considered to have completed a lap. I wonder if this is how they did it in the "olden days".
Next up is loading the racers from disk, and allowing the player to go for a drive. Whee!
Propane Injector
Bugfixes this week. Lots of 'em.
Vector
Some more methods made const-correct
Fixed signed/unsigned flaws
Added typedefs and constructors for Vector2, Vector2d
Joystick
Some methods made const-correct
Upcoming, I'm going to take a look at re-namespacing and modernizing the sprite manager and sound managers; the music manager is doing weird stuff and so it needs a cleaning up.
Novarunner
I suppose my new inverter is still in transit for my laptop, so until then I guess I'll be working on my 2D game example instead.
Once my laptop arrives again, I'll be spending a few weekends adding the stuff I have on paper to Novarunner, such as universe loading, per-pixel lighting and FINALLY getting the player hooked up again.
Ludumdare Warm-Up
I'm going to try and do a Ludumdare 8.5 24-hour game here as a warmup. Expect something neat and Pygamey if I do. It was supposed to be done this weekend, but I also expected to have my laptop. So I'm gonna do it this week instead.
The themes for this weekend/week are "moon" and "anti-text". My idea is a game where you deliver the moon on a stick to illiterate managerial staff.
I'm still working on the Game2D example after spending a few minutes working on the vector class and some other content, and doing a bunch of assignments and stress here and there.
I'm enjoying how easy it is to build an initial game with PI2D; I've already got a physics-boosted actor I can kick around with the joystick.
Seems like I could probably clean up on the side producing some sort of powerful 'game maker' style application. Too bad that would be more work than just writing my own damn games.
Next up is probably throwing my prototypical IMGUI stuff into the menus to see if I can rig up a decent front end for it. Won't that be awesome?
LIIIIFEE
I'm definitely starting to feel the punishment from not having my laptop around; it's a pain to trudge back to the lab to get trivial computation completed. The repair jockey says Apple sent him a "dead" part, but I'm suspecting it's really the wrong part, or he discovered his original diagnosis was wrong.
On the plus side, I keep getting offers for research and office jobs. Hopefully I'm rather productive.
Anyway, as my browser informs me, "Are you still here? Beer O' Clock has been and gone..."
So I've been working a bit on the Propane Injector GUI features. It's basically an adaptation of Molly Rocket's IMGUI concept, and looks pretty ugly right now. I'll be adapting it to Novarunner when that game starts going full-bore again.
Speaking of Novarunner, I'm looking for someone that can do good static meshes of space ships; ideally this person would be able to UV-map the bastard things as well so I can sketch some textures on them. I'm no good at this LithUnwrap thing.
That said, I've started considering the game I'm going to build for the Propane Injector 2D game example: a semi-remake of Combat Cars, a simplified Death Rally for the Genesis. [Screenshots]
So you should see some pretty screenshots soon, assuming that Propane Injector is as good at making 2D games as I say it is.
I dunno what I'll call it; the working title right now is War Buggies. That name sucks. Suggest a new one.
Well, yes, I haven't updated in a while but that doesn't mean I'm dead. You people are so mean! Why are you so mean? That's mean.
Novarunner
Laptop's still in the shop. Yes, still. I've been doing most of my work on paper, so when it comes back I should be able to do some serious work.
Regular visitors to the journal of pain will identify that I could probably just compile Novarunner on Linux and work from it that way. Sssh! That's extra work.
Propane Injector
Now here's where actual work is getting done. Lots of it. Since the last update, I have mostly done:
A lot of the Propane UI elements; this is basically IMGUI stuff like the stuff that SimmerD is using in his game.
Propane::Font patches
FBO support for all specs of machines, including an improved version of the Glow "slow" render-to-texture support for all supported computers and a super fast FBO option that works on all sorts of OpenGL 1.5 and 2.0 hardware,
GLee,
Shaders that rock,
Several examples and Doxygen changes.
As always, keep watching the roadmap to see how close I am to releasing Propane Injector 1.0, the "big daddy" release that will force everyone to use it.
Hey, I can dream.
I'll post a screenshot later tomorrow. Too tired now. Must smeep.
I'm considering starting work on the 2D game example, but am not sure if I'll have the time. We'll see. Leave a suggestion of what simple 2D game I can try to make for the example.
I got FBO support finally working on my 5200. The moral of the story is to RTFS. If I had bothered to read the ARB_texture_rectangle spec, I would've noticed that UV coordinates are [0..w], [0..h] and not [0..1], [0..1]. Damn! The second moral of the story is to always check for npow2 support before assuming you have it "just because" you're on OpenGL 2.0.
I ended up finding it on the GPGPU FAQ after many frustrated googles -- the code itself was fine but the example was broken because it was using the wrong texture coordinates.
In any event, this works now, and the FBO example is quite attractive. Woo woo! This party train keeps marching on.
So, uh, my Mac is in the shop again (it's partially my fault. Yup, partially) so I'm working on Propane Injector under Linux.
Also, the semester started again, so I'm busy! I'm taking an artificial intelligence course focused on search, a compiler construction course focusing on the front-end of a compiler (semantic/syntactic analysis and parsing), a human-computer interactions course that uses C#, and a course on algorithmic analysis so I can finally and truthfully say P = NP.
Stuff I've done in the past three or four days for Propane Injector (judging from SVN):
Example code added to the documentation for some of the classes (font, FBO, shaders, materials)
A material that uses shaders has been added
I finally re-built the shader class, so it's awesome now -- has all kinds of methods for passing various 'native' Propane types like vectors and matrices to the card through a translation layer
I re-built the FBO class, but it needs some refactoring to deal with bizarre OpenGL 2.0 implementations like the 87.76 driver for my FX5200
2D classes are getting moved into Propane::Game2D, a namespace for game-specific functions. All future game engine stuff will go into the Game3D/Game2D namespaces.
Massive enhancements to documentation -- almost every method of every class is fully documented. More example code on the way.
Linux shader demo, and Linux general support added. Linux howto on the way.
Spheremap material added.
IMGUI support has started.
VBO support started, then canned when I realized that I don't really know what a VBO is good for. I'll write some example apps and get more familiar with it before I try to push out tools.
I have to finish up the FBO support before I can justify the 1.0 release; check out the Propane Injector Roadmap to see how close I am to the 1.0 release. Now that I've decided on the Game2D/Game3D engine classes, I'm going to start planning out those and working on the 2D game example to show nooblars how it's done with Propane Injector in tha hood.
I'm really excited by this -- and I've got plans for Novarunner once my main computer comes back from the shop.
I've started work on some of the content for Novarunner, now that I've figured out how to use LithUnwrap. I wish I had known about this tool a long time ago; it makes 3D modelling like painting those little papercraft toys.
Which I was never good at, but whatever. So far I've made a poorly textured space station, and are working on the player's initial craft. I might just pop a bunch of untextured meshes in there; art's not really as important as getting the fun down.
I've also started work on the menu system; it'll work like Glow, hopefully. One of the things I want to do is allow the game to continue to simulate itself while the menu is active, so you can "look out the window" in space stations and see the game play itself in real time. This feature might get axed, though -- it looks to be a lot of work.
I really want to get the input hooked up to the player, and then I'll start on getting the joystick hooked up to the input and the physics hooked up to the player as well, so we can start flying around the current system.
To do:
Get camera locked to player actor
Get input hooked up to player actor
Make joysticks emit input events
Get joystick hooked up to input
Get physics hooked up to player and other actors
Hook up the star system loader again
Render loaded star system: create "dockable" actors and populate their inventories at spawn
I got models, actors and materials working again. Next up is to hook up the input system once more and get the camera locked to an actor. I've really retooled a lot of the game (and most of Propane Injector) along the way, so it should be fascinating to merge the modified PI code back in.
Here's a screenshot of me looking at a model in my new 3D realm of pain:
Yes, I know. Not much to look at, but it's there and it's starting to come together again. Expect some nicer screenshots while I try to get system jumping working and input messages firing.
Then you can expect some gorgeous screenshots of my menu editor and front-end when I get started on that -- looking forward to doing another attractive front-end like the one to Glow.
Oh, damn. I need to get shader materials working too.
Propane Injector
I'll probably have to postpone the release of PI 1.0 -- I've just started on the joystick input stuff. Since I obviously need a good gamepad to do this, I've purchased an Xbox360 pad. I wonder why the official Windows driver doesn't report the "Home" button as being another joystick button -- the third party OS X driver sure does.
I also need to retool some of the files (most obviously, moving some of the more illogical code to other files and re-namespacing everything, as well as the new shader/program separation).
One of the big benefits of moving to PI 1.0 is that I've also got some examples in there showing off the new features I've been writing:
New font class,
Joystick demo,
Materials demo,
Quake3 Map Loading/Rendering (TODO)
Smart Pointer demo,
Subdivision demo,
Vector and Matrix math tests,
"Mega Demo" featuring input, stencil outlines, and a few other features I've been fiddling with
I want to write a Mario-style game to use as an example (certainly a good use of the joystick/gamepad support, I bet!) so maybe that'll happen in the next few weeks.
I also want to get around to retooling the Sprite/Texture Manager and the sound managers, as well as clean out some of the old cruft that's been kicking around and is completely worthless.
The Propane map format (PIG) probably won't be released for awhile, since I haven't had a chance to do the functional requirements and then set it in stone. That'll probably be a project for Propane Injector 1.1.
I wonder if perhaps I should just start over from scratch, actually. The "old" 2D PI and the "new" 3D PI don't really share a lot of functionality.
In the meantime, I'm working on a Roadmap page for the official Propane Injector page to show what features I'm currently working on and what needs to be done.
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