I've been working on a representation-independent serializer. The first task was to develop a way to go from XML to the serialization tree.
I build up a TinyXML serialization tree, then convert it over to my native representation recursively. It's incredibly slick, although I worry about performance hits and possible overflow conditions with recursively building very wide or deep trees.
Right now, I'm using this functionality to build me an animation set component from a filename -- it's very fast and it builds a nice, re-usable animation set that uses the minimum amount of VRAM. I'll have to take a look at it and see if I should be sharing animation components or if I can get by with a few hundred bytes of overhead for each actor.
It's all super-slick. I wish that I had something visual to show off, but this is one of the steps to getting things rendering on screen. Sexy screenshots will be sooner or later.
I also rigged up the last yard of the input system to accept the mouse and pivot the player actor towards it (as well as pitch the camera component's offset), which is also pretty cool. I'm heartened by what I'm going to be able to do here once actual gameplay starts being under development; I've already created a set of very nice tools I'd like to carry onto future endeavours.
Back to work tomorrow. I do so hate Mondays.
In other news, my constant indecision about buying a new or used Subaru has forced Imtiaz to go and test-drive a used 350Z. It's a sexy beast of a car, and I wouldn't mind it myself, although it would be undrivable in this climate considering we got a huge dump of snow today .
Also, from my GamerCard thingie up there, you will notice that I have spent enough time playing PGR4 to earn over a million Kudos, which I then exchanged for an exclusive gamer picture. PGR4 informs me that it is for the "gamer with more Kudos than sense." Regardless, it gave me an achievement so I went for it. Now I can't afford a Ferrari.
I've been working on the message handling component. It's weird, because it sort of breaks componentization by requiring you to pass all of the Actor's components to it. Why not just write a convenience method? I'm not quite sure.
Anyway, once that's done and dusted I can make the actors run around and we can gaze at the map in awe. Then... screenshots! Finally.
Other stuff that's been going on -- I've been playing a lot of videogames still, because my stuff at work is both shallow and torturous. Hopefully that will change soon.
Seeing as almost everyone else seems to be getting juicy front-page love, I figure I should start posting in this thing again.
Unfortunately, I have no pretty screenshots as I'm still working on the infrastructure for Afterglow. I started work on the component system today, and ended up with a few re-usable components, a lot of skeletons and the skeleton of my Actor type. Tomorrow I'll probably throw in a few minutes of working on making a "Renderable" component, which I should be able to bolt onto almost any game object to make it draw in the world.
The asset system I mentioned in the last post is more or less done, and it works pretty well. I was worried about the overhead of using smart pointers, but it's relatively minimal according to my profiling step. We'll see how it gets as the game progresses.
I also moved the map code over from the editor into the Afterglow solution and I've started pulling out bits and pieces to make it fit with the rendering pattern in use in the game, as well as cleaning out the immediate mode stuff to make it faster. Hopefully soon I can go back to the editor and make it so I can actually build levels (or at least geometry) with it. That would be awesome, especially since I've been building the Afterglow executable with plans to make it usable as a slave from the editor -- so I can do a run/test loop from the editor without having to restart either program. But we'll see how that goes.
Like I said before, no pretty screenshot this time. If you're good, I might work extra hard and pop out a screenshot of the map rendering to the MRT buffer through my "old TV" shader.
_
I'm also playing a lot of Sins of a Solar Empire and PGR4. If you've got either, I guess we should be having either a space battle or tire-squealing fit.
Still working on the asset system (I can load sprites!) so pretty soon I'll actually have something.
I have to drag the map code over from the level editor, and then work up my motivation to proceed again. I think my burnout is lifting, but it wasn't exactly at a small personal cost. But nobody cares about that.
Went to a Microsoft .NET event today -- got some free stuff, although the content was mostly either stuff I'd already heard about VS2008 or web stuff I don't really care about. I expected them to go over Silverlight.
I did run into Moe and Tape_Worm, though, and they're always nice to be around.
Afterglow? I'm working a bit on the main game layer, and have done some more work on the input management. It's a process, but once this infrastructure is in place it should be cleaner to write the full game.
I did a bit of work on asset management and game loop functionality in Afterglow today. In lieu of an in-game screenshot, I hit a fairly large achievement:
Posted - 3/31/2008 12:32:13 AM
I do so hate Mondays.
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Posted - 3/28/2008 1:15:42 AM
Unfortunately, I have no pretty screenshots as I'm still working on the infrastructure for Afterglow. I started work on the component system today, and ended up with a few re-usable components, a lot of skeletons and the skeleton of my Actor type. Tomorrow I'll probably throw in a few minutes of working on making a "Renderable" component, which I should be able to bolt onto almost any game object to make it draw in the world.
Posted - 3/14/2008 1:06:00 PM
Posted - 3/11/2008 6:04:41 PM
Posted - 3/8/2008 11:35:25 AM
Posted - 3/2/2008 10:10:01 PM