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Posted - 3/6/2007 5:48:26 PM | Not really a whole lot to update. I started a new job as a plumbing/heating/cooling technician on Monday, so I've been pretty swamped with training and will continue to be for sometime. I am setting aside two hours everyday still to work on stuff though. Which should be enough to keep things progressing. I'm also finishing up playing NeverWinter Nights 2 and playing battlefront 2 again (the pc version is so much better then xbox). I don't really have a lot of time for that stuff, but in the coming weeks as I start working on the tools more ( I'm hoping to have the first complete set of tools for the current stage of the engine by April 1st), I want to make some mods using the NWN2 toolkit and the battlefront 2 toolkit as well. I've done moding in the past to some extent and looked at tools, but I've just kind of been winging it on some of the functionality I've currently implemented for my engines toolset, so I figure I better do some research by playing around with some of my favorite games toolsets and seeing if their is anything that I can learn from them.
Oh yeah if you're a starwars fan and you haven't seen it check out A Clone apart It's a continuing series written and produced by a couple of brothers, and it's pretty damn funny. Actually inspired me to play battlefront 2 again.
Quote:shadowcomplex wrote : Wow, that texture mapping/animation tool is really nifty. I have actually envisioned something like that for my next project to use. The scrolling across the texture to locate a frame gives me a lot of ideas.
So I don't know much about your project... care to summarize in a brief reply? I'll look into your older entries for more information too. |
Yeah, the idea came to me when I realized that it sucks to sit there and try and plot textures, so I wrote that up real quick for helping me with the animation demo. A more complete and full version of that same concept is going to be added to the tool set, where that was just more of something I through together in about an hour without much more then a thrown together design. Kind of like the demos in general that stuff that took the longest was actually writing the classes and what not.
The game I can't say too much about because of a contractual agreement. What I can say is that it's a puzzle game involving robots, kind of similar to something like tetris attack if you ever played that game, but at the same time the game mechanics are a hell of a lot different. Wish I could say more, but it'll become more evident as time progresses and a demo of the game will be out by Mid May sometime.
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Posted - 3/4/2007 2:31:49 AM | If anyones interested there's some short video's of the engine in action. They are rared in quicktime format, they are on the server else where in mov format for streaming, but the bandwidth speed is pretty slow so it'd be a lot faster to download these. One is an animation testbed for the game that I'm going to be working on. The other is a sound demo for the same game. The animation one also shows a texture mapping type app that is part of the tools set being developed with the engine.
AnimDemo.rar 1.12mb
SoundTest.rar 25.38mb
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| DYSD! | |
Posted - 3/3/2007 10:41:54 PM | So.... yeah. A voice from beyond ,"Use the Journal Luke."
So...yeah. So...yeah.
So . . . yeah .
S o . . . Y eah
Hum.. Hum..
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I'm Kind of bored Right Now----------------------------------------------------
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I've been working on sound for the game engine this last couple of weeks and finally finished things up yesterday. I ended up using OpenAL for sound and I'm fairly impressed with the ease of use of the API. The only complaint is that the documentation isn't the best for someone who is trying to get an understanding of it coming from the standpoint of a complete NOOB as far as sound went. But the tutorials on DevMaster (RIP) regarding OpenAL, coupled with the programmers reference, after a couple of solid days really dissecting everything, really helped me to get a good solid footing on using the API. I am also very satisfied with the sound classes that I ended up writing to manage everything. Essentially I just divided the sound context and listener object into one class and the source and buffer control into another. When loading a file I parse for file types and presto the appropriate logic for different formats is executed. It's very straight forward and has some nice interfaces if I do say so. This brings me to my next note.
I was recently looking over another coders code. This coder was the type of person who works alone, and doesn't use many comments. That's not a horrible practice, especially if you're dedicated and have a very intimate understanding of your code, and your interfaces are clearly named. And of course you don't expect to share it with anyone else. This on the other hand is not the case for this specific code. The interfaces were overly complex so much so that without proper documentation you would have to spend hours going through the source files to figure things out. If you have to write something more then Object->OnMoveNegx() to make an object move on the negative x plane, I think that you should definately take a look at your code. Also, if you are going to make your interfaces overly complicated and you ask someone to take a look at your code, at least have the courtesy to document the code as well as take the time to isolate an area where the problems you're having might be. If you have coded something that is giving you problems and you seriously are saying "I have no idea where the problem could be," then it's pretty obvious you've probably one either tried to do too much at once and didn't make sure that what you did worked correctly in the first place, 2 got lost in your own code because of the overly complex name schemes and interfaces, 3 didn't take the time to really understand what it was you were trying to implement in the first place and just tried to make a copy and paste Frankenstein type application.
This is some pent up stuff so I'm sorry for the long rant.
This also brings me up to what I'm currently working on, which is getting the documentation for my engine source caught back up. It's been a long while since I wrote any formal documentation and the code base has grown a lot, but my files are structured well enough that it's a fairly straight forward process to document it. The current code base is about 25,000 lines of code and 38 classes. But because of the structure of the code, it'll probably only take me 3 to 5 days to get the documents caught up, and that's only working two to four hours a day. The code itself is well commented and I believe that things are named fairly well, but the plan is that eventually others will be recruited and or hired to help with development sometime in the future. So it's better to do this as the code base grows so that when the others come, everything can be available in hard copy.
So.. I guess the lesson and theme of this post is that good documentation is important and sometimes hard to come by. It can however help to reduce the overhead with getting things going, so document your shit damnit!
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