February 18, 2007
I've been reading "Rules of Play" when I've had the chance in the last few days and it is very much a text book so the text book pricing fits. I'm only through the first 4 chapters but I like it so far. Up to this point it's very ethereal, and I half expect it to stay that way, but I still find i…
February 16, 2007
I've decided to get off my butt and do some formal reading around game design. I am a self confessed horrible game designer and I don't intend to ever be a rock star designer but I figured it would be nice to at least understand game design theory. I bought the book Rules of Play a while back for…
February 15, 2007
To help me with my latest game play ideas I've been doing a lot of playing of games that have similar mechanics. The thing to keep in mind with anything creative is that there are hardly any truly original ideas anymore. Hardly any game comes out that is totally mind blowingly new. But there is …
February 14, 2007
Glad to have GDNet back.
In the time off I finished up work on adding LUA into my engine. I now do smart caching of scripts in memory. You can also load a script from the disk or an archive file. I still want to add scripts to my general resource manager so one instance of a script can be shared …
In the time off I finished up work on adding LUA into my engine. I now do smart caching of scripts in memory. You can also load a script from the disk or an archive file. I still want to add scripts to my general resource manager so one instance of a script can be shared …
February 01, 2007
I don't normally like to quote the A-Team too much but things are going so well with the scripting sample that I just had to. This morning I threw together a quick sample to test out my scripting integration work. All I have is a simple textured quad being drawn on the screen but that quad is cal…
January 31, 2007
Kudos and rate++ to Tallitus for his suggestion on using nmake to solve my build problems around ToLua. I got something set up last night in a few minutes and it works like a charm. What's even better is that I changed it from having one uber batch file that built all of my package files to havin…
January 30, 2007
Today I started on getting ToLua into my engine. Adding the code to my objects to call scripts is the super easy part. Using Lua as a whole is a breeze. Also deciding how my objects would utilize Lua was also the easy part. You can see where this is going :).....
The hard part was figuring out h…
The hard part was figuring out h…
January 29, 2007
This weekend I made the switch from LuaBind to ToLua++. Big improvements in a lot of ways:
1. Smaller. My test app which just has a single class that is called by a Lua script was 250k smaller with ToLua++. Also compile times were a breeze.
2. More straight forward object passing. ToLua has some …
1. Smaller. My test app which just has a single class that is called by a Lua script was 250k smaller with ToLua++. Also compile times were a breeze.
2. More straight forward object passing. ToLua has some …
January 27, 2007
So I've decided to check out some alternatives to LuaBind. Ends up the library is super power and huge! It also affects compile times in an ugly way with the way it handles C++ templates. I'm checking out ToLua++ tonight to compare.
Today I survived my first trip out with the baby by myself. It …
Today I survived my first trip out with the baby by myself. It …
January 26, 2007
So as I stated in my last journal entry one of the new features I wanted to add to my engine was scripting. Up to now all of my game objects have a method call DoWork() that gets called once an update. This makes it easy to add behaviours to individual objects and have it encasulated with the obj…
January 25, 2007
Wow journal entries 4 days in a row. I might actually be back in the groove. :)
With all this new functionality going into my engine I figured I'd give a little insight into my work processes around adding new stuff.
Usually the desire to add functionality to my engine will show up while I'm worki…
With all this new functionality going into my engine I figured I'd give a little insight into my work processes around adding new stuff.
Usually the desire to add functionality to my engine will show up while I'm worki…
January 24, 2007
Well as you can tell from the top of my journal page I've finally gotten around to joining the GGE. So far it looks pretty neat but I still have this nagging feeling that someone is going to try and sell me a timeshare sometime soon. I have no problem with Garage Games products. I think they're …
January 23, 2007
As promised here are some fantastical screen shots of my particle system in action. The particles are currently white opaque 3x3 quads. As ugly as you can get. But you get the idea. In the first shot the firework rocket is being launched from the bottom of the screen where it arcs and then expl…
January 22, 2007
Well I'm still not spending enough time coding but I'm getting there. The good news is that my cold is starting to finally go away. Nasty, nasty bug.
This weekend I got some more work in on the particle system. The first step was to have particles be affected by the physics system. This was easy…
This weekend I got some more work in on the particle system. The first step was to have particles be affected by the physics system. This was easy…
January 19, 2007
Well my theory about having more time to code isn't coming true very fast. My mother in law is visiting right now which means more entertaining time and less coding. I am slowly getting into my new sleep routine thanks to the help of some robitussin to help my lingering cold. :)
I finally got part…
I finally got part…
January 16, 2007
While having a new born child might not be condusive to sleeping I think it actually is good for coding. I find myself awake and guarding the fort for a few hours at a time while my wife grabs a nap. Often it's at some odd hour and the house is quiet as there's a sleeping baby. That means no lou…
January 09, 2007
Well I am adjusting to my new life and I'm totally happy about not having as much sleep as normal. It makes me feel like I'm back in my younger glory days of coding late into the night. :)
In amongst getting used to being a father I've actually found time to do some work as well. I wrapped up the …
In amongst getting used to being a father I've actually found time to do some work as well. I wrapped up the …
January 03, 2007
On New years eve I was busy working away on the integration of ODE into my engine. I'm not normally that lame of a guy to be doing something like that on the one of the big party nights of the year but my wife was 35 weeks pregnant so we didn't really have much of a choice. :) Around 1:30am I fina…
December 30, 2006
One of the things I did this year to motivate myself to keep working on things was to form an LLC for my business. This cost a little money to setup and was a little bit of a pain but it made me keep focused as I didn't want to get to the end of the year and have to deal with taxes for nothing. A…
December 29, 2006
So I've been slowly working away at getting ODE integrated into my engine to replace my own lacking physics functionality. Getting it plugged in was fairly painless. Amazingly I didn't have to rip any of my engine apart to make the switch. I guess I did a good job of separating my functionality …
December 26, 2006
Well I'm slowly working on getting ODE integrated into my engine. I read through the samples and documentation and it appears to do everything I could want for my casual games and does it in a way that it would easily plug into my current engine architecture. I'm taking my time plugging it in to …
December 23, 2006
I've finished up writing unit tests for the major systems of my engine. There are still plenty of objects that I haven't touched yet but I'm going to tackle them slowly over time. As it is I have more test coverage than a few weeks ago so it's better than nothing.
Next up on the agenda is to check…
Next up on the agenda is to check…
December 19, 2006
This weekend while I was without cable I resorted to going to the video store to rent a DVD. I brought home a movie called Two for the Money, a flick about sports gambling. Being a red blooded North American male I know and love sports betting. You name the sport and I've probably bet on it at o…
December 16, 2006
In the last few days I've been without proper internet service due to the wind storm we had here Thursday night. I have power back but no cable. I'm writing this at a local coffee shop with Wifi. I didn't realize how addicted to the internet I was until it was gone. It covers being always attac…
December 14, 2006
A couple more answers for Jason.
First off big base classes:
One reason why you might not want big bases classes is if you want to replace some of it. You could imagine that you might want to change graphics APIs at sometime in the future. If you have all of your graphics stuff encapsulated into a …
First off big base classes:
One reason why you might not want big bases classes is if you want to replace some of it. You could imagine that you might want to change graphics APIs at sometime in the future. If you have all of your graphics stuff encapsulated into a …
December 12, 2006
Quick post to answer Jason's questions.
1. Do tests look for exceptional cases or functionality of the class?
Unit tests are meant to tests the core functionality of the object. I go by the mantra of writing tests to cover parameters going in and return values going out. By that I mean for every pa…
1. Do tests look for exceptional cases or functionality of the class?
Unit tests are meant to tests the core functionality of the object. I go by the mantra of writing tests to cover parameters going in and return values going out. By that I mean for every pa…
December 10, 2006
Mushu is right that a lot of people find unit tests annoying. Mostly because it seems like a waste of time to test something that hopefully already works. This is the case when you go back and write unit tests for old code. The point is that even if your test doesn't find bugs now it might in th…
December 09, 2006
I had a request for a post on how I handle unit testing of my engine so here it goes. I'm going to go fairly high level on this entry showing what tools I use and why I chose them. If anyone has any more detailed questions feel free to post them and I'll try to address them in a later post.
Tool C…
Tool C…
December 08, 2006
So I've been diving back into my unit testing when I realized that I have a bunch of platform specific classes that really don't need to be.
I have a bunch of manager classes that essentially act as a loop. I have the physics manager that processes physics updates for a scene, an animation manage…
I have a bunch of manager classes that essentially act as a loop. I have the physics manager that processes physics updates for a scene, an animation manage…
December 06, 2006
It's been a while since I've made a real post. I'm not hiding or staying away on purpose. I took part in the GDNet Seattle 24h game development get together which really wiped me out coding wise so I've had to take a break the last couple of days. I think this is a good thing. I'm pretty sure I…
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