Weekend again. I pushed on and finished the basic implementation of alignment behavior, and with that flocking (separation, cohesion and alignment) is up and running. I'm not perfectly happy with it but it's a tweaking issue and I want to draw a line here and push on to more critic…
Now there is both separation and cohesion steering behaviors in place, so basically the ships follow the player, move as a group but without colliding with each other. Their movement is still very jittery and "moth-like" and I've experimented with angular physics to keep them fro…
Finally after two months of all work and no play I've managed to get a few days off. Really off. Lately having a day off has still meant working for a couple of hours plus the irrational worrying that comes with studies. I don't think I've had a free weekend since the easter holidays …
The entity-component design that I'm working on is slowly but steadily growing. I've taken a lot of influences from the notable thread Outboard component-based entity system architecture started by Sneftel a while back. I'm using a similar model where there is a strong…
Today's insight is short. Don't go crazy with the shared_ptr template. It's got its uses but don't overuse it. I did it. I'm paying for it. My code looks horrible and I get extra work overhead cleaning it up. The lesson is simple:
Only use shared_ptr when responsibilit…
I'm stuck working on a seemingly infinite series of programming assignments and reports for school. Parallel Programming, Image Analysis and OS, they're good courses but they all lean heavily on assignments which makes them a meaty combination. So no technical progress on Citizen, my c…
I've spent the last couple of days doing a little bit of this and a little bit of that around the game, not really pushing any boundaries. I put a lot of strain on the design while pushing the release of P1 so naturally there was a lot of patching and pinning to do.
Some thin…
Some of you have already seen this. Sometimes the combination Vista + nVidia card + Direct3D Debug runtime causes D3D applications to fail without hope of recovery. The message "Direct3D9: (ERROR) :Lost due to display uniqueness change" is given by…
I'm back after some absence with a fresh Citizen update. And this one is big. In fact I'm ready to present to you the very first project prototype.
Citizen Prototype 1 [Download]
If you haven't tried it yet, now is the perfect time to do it. P1 features all the things…
Since last update I have worked on details mostly. Like adding an engine trail to the player ship, tweaking the explosions a little and adding batching of sprites before drawing them. I think the engine trail is necessary in order to get a better reference point of player ship motion…
Hi everyone. It's been a while since my last post and I've been keeping busy, mostly Citizen-busy. Here's the latest presumably-stable build. Please try it. [smile]
And here are some up-to-date screens.
A lot has happened to the game and I'm about halfway through my…
Before joining the Snow Hard team I hadn't worked with the singleton pattern at all. I had picked up stray pieces from an ongoing debate on whether or not to use it, but I hadn't picked up any facts about it. I tampered some with singleton classes during my work on …
Hello. I'd like to ask you guys for some help. I'm in sore need of anyone who could check if Citizen executes on their computer. All you would have to do is to download the ZIP file below, unpack it and run Citizen.exe. I would be immensly grateful if y…
For debugging purposes I wanted to add some intormation on the running system to the log file during program startup. This information would be OS version, processor name and speed, physical memory installed and graphics adapter. Basing the program entirely on the …
Since last time I posted I've worked on the graphics system, trying to isolate as much API-specific code as possible. Before I began my GraphicsDevice class which is the graphics system motor was littered with DirectX9-specific code, and some of it even leaked out in…
First off, as you might have noticed, I've changed the project name from Citiz…
School ate most or all of my time during September and October. I literally…
cosh(x) - sinh(x) = ii
where i2 = -1
Solve for x.
A rating cookie to the first one who gives me the correct answer. [grin]
I got a nagging feeling today th…
