YourFurryFiend's Blog

Scarba camping adventure!

2009-11-10T21:20:00.012Z

This weekend just gone (Nov 5th), me and my fellow colleagues and friends went on a 4 day camping trip to Scarba; a diddy little island in Argyll and Bute. Here's a summary of the long weekend.

The total trip was from four days, Thursday to Sunday; but it lasted a little longer than that, I'll tell you why later.

I went with 4 others, 3 of which were from SCE and 1 was a friend of a SCEite.

The trip started as I got picked up by David, who very very kindly offered to drive me and Nick. The others were making their own way there. The drive time was about 9 hours and he did the whole lot, there and back, more or less in one go. Bravo to him. We hastily got all our things together, then we started the epic drive which took us through Birmingham, between Manchester and Liverpool, through Preston, Lancaster, Kendal, Carlisle then Glasgow. We stopped at one or two services for a break and a few supplies. The next part of the route took us through Argyll and a variety of beautiful Lochs through Inveraray. This was the time it got to be a real site, even though it was dark. It was great to see the lights of houses and cars reflected in the water. We even stopped a few times to take a look. I think we were also testing out the temperature :)

The dock where we were going to take the boat trip to Scarba was in a place called Ardfern. Which is a little village on the edge of the sea. We three took a look around Ardfern and decided to check out a place a local map said had a castle ruin. We didn't find too much of a ruin but we did find a dock or bridge of sorts and some old ruined buildings which did have an element of eeriness in the dark. We also found a fire still alight, where presumably some of the locals had lit a fire and shot some fireworks. We soon met up with the other two and decided to set-up camp for the night. Surprisingly this was the only time we used our tents.

In the morning we took the boat trip from the dock. The trip took about an hour and half apparently, but it seemed much shorter than that. We saw that the sea was quite active as there was a fairly strong wind, the boatmen said there was a gale warning as we neared the island. At this point the wind picked up. In fact they had some problems docking with the wind, a few of us had to get out and help secure the boat to the moorings after a few attempts at getting close to the rock. They advised we head for the bothy on the other side of the island. When we got our things off, that's exactly what we did.

The trip to the Bothy was, to be honest, long and hard with all of our supplies and kit. I for one struggled in the rain and the wind. This was of the more gruelling times we faced, and not the first time my fitness challenged me.

After some time, we made it to the Bothy, thanks to Rich's mostly faultless map reading skills. What we found when we got there surprised all of us. We all expected a bunch of stones loosely resembling a small house. What we found was a great little home on the top of a beach facing the sea. It had a bunch of rooms with tables and chairs, some supplies others had left, even some camp beds. It was in great condition. We started a fire and got settled in. We later cracked out a some fireworks and some sparklers :)

The next day we did some good exploring, following the rocky beach and cost around, finding some interesting geography, like caves, streams and pools. Lots of the caves showed fairly recent activity by other people, which I was a little surprised about. We also saw some great wildlife. Scarba has quite a large deer population and it was great to see them running around in herds, poking around on hills and steering clear of us as we potted around the coast. One of the coolest things to see was the various birds, particularly the birds of prey. We saw a few different birds, a few riding the currents staying motionless in the air looking for prey. The best by far for me was a pair of huge eagles, which I'm guessing were Golden Eagles or Sea Eagles. It was great to see these majestically swoop up past, along a small cliff-face next to us.

Next we made our way to the summit of Scarba, which I believe is around 450 metres high. Passing on the way a lake in the hills. Not all of us quite made it to the summit though. By the time we got near the summit it was getting dark, which was the disadvantages of going in the winter, with its short days. Although there is a fairly trodden path, it was made a bit more difficult to walk in the dark, especially as it was so wet and muddy.

That night we decided to stay in one of the caves we saw earlier, as it seemed perfect for it; and something to write home about. I was initially hesitant after the exhausting trek of the day, but after some food and a rest I was excited about the prospect. We collected all of the kit we needed and made a way around the coast from the Bothy. This was the route we took earlier in the daylight. Next to the cave was the perfect site for a fire. We got a great fire going and got stuck in to some of the beers and whisky we had. This was the highlight of the trip; nothing beats the warmth and atmosphere of a natural outdoor fire (alongside a touch of amazing whisky). The cave was actually very warm and we all slept fairly well and comfortably. Sleeping caves are something I highly recommend!

The next morning we woke early so we would catch the boat, sort our kit out and clean the bothy, so it would be as close as we could to the great condition we found it in. The sight of the sun over the water in the morning light was something to behold as I crawled out of the cave mouth. Unfortunately I missed the sun-rise, being one of the later of us to wake up.

That day we reached the dock for our boat trip home. We were there in plenty of time which was a relief. The boatmen soon told us that a fishing boat had called for assistance though. They gave us the choice of whether to go back to the dock in Ardfern (as we had hired their time for that) or help them and the boat in trouble by allowing them to reach them quicker. We couldn't refuse, partly to help the fishing boat and partly because of the adventure. The boatmen estimated 3 or 4 hours based on the fishing boatmen's description of their distance out at sea. This turned out to be a much longer and chillier affair. From jumping on the boat at around 12.15pm, we weren't in Ardfern until around 19.30pm, by then it was well into darkness. It wasn't all bad though, it was cool to see the fisherman's boat being tugged into the next village along the coast.

A few remarks on the trip:

I was surprised and pleased to see how well people had provided for others who would follow in their footsteps. We found useful things in the bothy, everything in good or reasonable condition, and plenty of fire wood.

The boatmen were great guys, they gave us a few coffees and chatted to us during the trip and the rescue.

It's best to go in the longer days where you have more daylight with which to do things.

Overall though, it was a great time, with lots of great sights and hijinks - and also a few challenges, but ones that made the trip all the more satisfying.

Floating point precision ... I didn't think it worked like this

2009-09-26T20:22:00.003+01:00

I thought floating point numbers were more accurate than this:

-0.48f + 0.02f = -0.46f .. right?

Nope. The answer is -0.459999979

Just some background. 0.2f is my drag factor to apply to the character's velocity, ie. gravity. The background/level is a set of horizontal strips. These are scrolled to the characters velocity each frame.

Reading around, ie. the result above should be precise to 6 decimal points. As I understand it, after 6 decimal points accuracy isn't precise.

This really screwed things up when scrolling the background, as the errors seemed to accumulate and I'd see seams. What I've got in place at the minute is to round to two decimal places, which gives me enough accuracy. Two other options are to use doubles or fixed point numbers (ie. ints).

If anyone's got a better idea. Let me know!

Glad I found a solution though, this has been bugging me for ages - this must trip a lot of people up if they have any type of sub-pixel scrolling.

Future

2008-11-04T22:54:00.002Z

Me and Gaz had the opportunity to do a Show n' Tell with the XNA UK User Group alongside Beatnik Games and their project, Plain Sight. It was really great to meet the Beatnik guys, play their project and see a few more peeps play Sumo Squash. I had fun playing Plain Sight, I thought it had some great ideas and shows a lot of promise. Having since seing Plain Sight at the Eurogamer Expo, Alex at Beatnik Games told me that they had be beavering away for the Expo based on some of the feedback they recieved at the Show n' Tell, and I like where its headed!

The Show n' Tell also gave us a chance to get some feedback for our game, as small and simple it is compared to Plain Sight. When we show our game, people always seem to have a good time playing it, and this time it was no exception. After some drinks and chat with the people at the Show n' Tell, we decided that we should spend some time polishing and adding features that we had liked to put in, with the added possibility of submitting it to Community Games in a couple of months.

Whilst doing this, we are also thinking of other game ideas for future projects, using Sumo Squash as a stepping stone to them. For the next projects we plan to start making prototypes/ white box testing for game mechanics, so we know they work before developing a full game, and to refine mechanics that we can draw upon later.

Next up on the grand agenda are plans to improve the tools that we are using at the moment. First off, as mentioned in other posts, the LevelEditor only contains the barebones, I plan to spend some time refactoring and adding features. The idea is to make everyone's life easier and take some of the work from me, as it is all to easy for me to become a bottleneck. -So there plans to create tools, or make the Level editor support the visual creation of animations and menu UI's.

Sumo Squash Development

2008-11-04T22:21:00.008Z

I thought I'd take the opportunity to talk a little about the development of Sumo Squash for DBP for anyone who may be interested.

Even though the game output hadn't got anywhere practical after Herriman: Under Pressure, I started developing a 2D framework sometime after, with one of my friends and colleagues. This involved a data-driven architecture, that was designed to provide a standardised interface for Sprite Management, Animation, setting values, Resource Management, Input Management, Level Management. After we created a stable version, I also started on a very early version of a compatible Level Editor.

Anyway ... back to Sumo Squash. So we started on getting a basic character up and running. As I remember I started off with some basic programmer art of some blocks for the level and a block for the character, with this I got the basic collision response of a platformer. Gaz later animated an early version of the Sumo and this spurred me on to better refine the control and collision response. These were suprisingly difficult to get right, this was the first platformer I had done - they were later refined even more as the feel came along for the game. At this early stage, Gaz and me debated the layout of the levels and started with the idea of a retro feel for the game and some corresponding levels. We liked the idea of block based levels, where the 'state' of the blocks could change. Gaz liked the idea of having 'procedural' levels that were created randomly within some parameters; where the position, state (such as Ice, friction) would change, and we also thought about some blocks that could have different stages of breakability. After some thought, we realised that there must be some rules to constrain the random blocks, but I couldn't foresee a simple way to do this. After some more work to polish this build/prototype of the game, as well as after the development of an early level editor (that could basically just place objects) we showed this to our good friend an trusted artiste, David Faulkner. He was luckily, up for collaborating on the project!

It was around this time, we were reading about the development and playing Braid, and as you may see this influenced the level design for the game, it also inspired us in the way to do the collision (ie. for slopes) and how to integrate it into the editor. Dave started coming up with amazing design for level objects and backgrounds. Seeing Braid (gamasutra article by David Hellman, artist for Braid) and Dave's designs made us, thankfully re-think the block idea.

It was shortly before this that the Dream Build Play competition reared its head and made us notice. We have to confess, we first entered to get the free creators club memership (we'd always planned to develop something with the Xbox 360 in mind), but we thought what the hell, lets step development up a gear and try get something playale for the competition. Although we were about 2-3 months away from the deadline, we thought we could get something up and running that was at least half fun.

For the next few months, we put our all into the project. I kept improving the editor so it was more useful, collision could be added and modified and the way it was displayed was more helpful. I added a delete and clone option and removed some annoying bugs (development of the tool was far from ideal and it was never more than the bare essentials to help the game). Me and Gaz worked after work hours when we had the energy and all weekend when we could. Dave built many levels on Snow and a more seasonal theme. Gaz designed and went through a few iterations of the UI, including the menus and the in-game display.

As all the team are distributed around the country we took advantage of Subversion (Tortoise SVN), google docs and lots of e-mail. I only had the idea or inclination to set-up SVN access midway into the project as we needed to synchronize and exchange our work more and more. I took the decision to make access read-only to simplify matters; this was the way Dave and Gaz updated their local build. Access to SVN was made available through VPN and Hamachi. It soon becomes apparent that when working over the internet that the transfer speed makes things difficult.

With Google Docs, I set-up a very rough Game Document with:
- Basic design overview/explanation
- A brief explanation of the aesthetics, control and general gameplay
- Ideas for characters, moves, pickups, game modes
- Basic, and Desired features
- A few pie in the sky ideas
I also set-up a Task list document, for both the game and the level editor. This became a visible area for anyone to see what I was up to and what I had done. I used this area to keep any notes about task and continually updated it.

When the competition was nearing the submission date, we had a few play-test sessions. They were all absolutely essential, the first one was useful in revealing many bugs. The game was played, and options chosen that were different to what I had tested by myself. A number of visual and gameplay points were discussed, by the end we all had very long list of changes. The next few play tests allowed us to improve the level design, the controls and more visual points. By the last play-test we were a few days away from submission, although we felt some features could be added, we were fairly confident with what we had made following the requirements we set out for it. Any new features by this point could have potentially introduced bugs or been a detriment to the game mechanics.

Present: Announcing Sumo Squash

2008-11-04T22:02:00.005Z

This is the new project I referred to in my previous post. After the previous project was put on hold, we spent some time and decided on doing something simple that we knew would definitely be fun and would be defnitely achievable. We had a random idea to do a game based around a great freeware game called Jump n' Bump.

We felt the core mechanic behind was very solid, but somewhat simple and under-utilised. As we hadn't created anything of much worth by then, we decided to go with something simple, achievable that would help us on the road to something more innovative, complex and altogether richer; once we had proved ourselves with a bigger project than Herriman: Under Pressure. The general idea was to make it wacky, so Gaz and his near infinite creativity came up with the plan to use sumos as the battling characters.

Once we had got a working prototype up and running, David who worked with us on the Herriman project agreed to join forces once again. Development was roughly about 3 months. Here's are link to a video.

Game object component system

2008-11-04T21:50:00.002Z

In this system, the idea is to replace the traditional hierarchical game object system based on inheritance. The need for this system was inspired by the disadvantages of the traditional system, the biggest one being class explosion. Normally, you would start with a base Object or GameObject class, in a 2D game, you might call it Sprite. This would contain the basic functionality of a game object in the scene. Each time you want to have different or more specific behaviour, for example, you may want to Draw or Update an object differently, such as with a pickup, a collidable piece or the scenery etc., in this case you will override these equivalent methods with your own or added behaviour. In a complex game with many different types of objects you may have to start creating and subclassing from a myriad of classes. An example of this would be, where you might create a Character class than will move and collide a particular way in the world, you then might have a Player class for characters that users control, that inherits from Character, then you might also have a Enemy class that inherits from Player or Character. Then, when you want a new form of enemy, some people might create a new class for each. If you had an enemy that, say, tracks the player in the world and another than moves randomly, all though its not a good example, you might create a class for each, then you might later want one that has behaviours and inherits from each (a better way would be to use the Strategy pattern, and use composition rather than inheritance to determine the new behaviour; you just swap a MovementStrategy object that an enemy calls). This could apply to many game objects, and if you do this, your class hierarchy may become large and unmanagable. A big problem you might meet is the Diamond of Death, where you trap yourself into a corner. -In this case you might start duplicating code or hacking around, just so you can get your new game object type in the world. This is never a good situation to get in.

One solution to this is the aforementioned GOC system. The idea with this to use composition, rather than inheritance to form your game objects. In this design, you start with a base object that contains a list of components that will get called either when the base object is Updated or Drawn each frame. Here's a description of how the Tony Hawk team used it.

The way I tried to use this system was by having a hierarchy of components for movement, control, drawing. Also at this point, I was thinking about integrating a physics system in an engine, so there was a component type that governed how the phyics reacted with the composed object. I've always designed my games systems to be completely data driven, so the public properties of an object can be set from a data file, this allows integration with an editor, which was one of the things I was implemeting at the time (Winforms app with XNA window). The obvious use for this is to speed up creation of a game, enable re-usability and allow artists to design levels and games (if you start adding events) without digging into code.

While I still like the idea of this system, it is, in concept, the ultimate in flexibility, and its this generality that software designers aim for, to make the possibilties of an application all the more wider, data-driven, and re-usable. There were though, a number of problems I ran into with trying to implement the system. It was too flexible. I think all software systems are a comprimise between flexibility and specific function. Flexibilty allows the function of a system to be changeable, whereas specific functionality can be more targeted. Specific systems are easier to write, as you don't need to think about the general case, just the task that needs to be currently satisfied, this allows for more performant systems.

The problem I found, was that I had to start knowing specific things about my components, especially when physics were concerned. I was implementing it in C# at the time and came up with a system that used reflection create and initialise the properties of each component. For the games that I was intending to write at the time, and the same now, this system, (even though I got quite far on the implementation) would have been far too complicated for its own good. Coming up with a reliable interface so that components could reference and call each other, while keeping them independant would have taken me a long time to achieve, and I'm not sure if it is even possible with intertwined needs that are bought about by the use of things like physics. Maybe I will return to this system, sometime in the future, but I don't think my previous use of it beats the design of the current, traditional game object hierarchy.

Past, Present, Future

2008-11-04T20:58:00.002Z

Past

After some free time on a train, I've decided to write a set of updates on the progress of the (yet un-named) team that I belong to, what I've done in the past, what we've done recently and what we've got planned for the future.

After Herriman, way back last year I started writing an admittedly overly complex engine and editor based around a component system, or GOCs (game object components). I'll post a bit more about this system and my experiences soon.

Sometime after trying to prototype a game with this system and it proving to be unfruitful, me and Gaz had came up with another idea. We are both big fans of 2D platformers, and Gaz is primarily a 2D artist and animator. We had the idea to cross the character, story of a traditional platformer with the speed of a top down shooter, as I never seen it done before. This evolved into an acrobatic lead protagonist with a whole backstory (who shall remain un-named for now). We came up with a prototype, which demonstrated (very roughly), the lead character, running and sliding around, climbing and grabbing platformers and shooting in directions that was reminiscent of Earthworm Jim.

By this time I had landed myself a job after the Herriman project and was working full time, as was Gaz (as well as through the Herriman Project). The general direction we were going, was very demanding on both of us. One of the biggest problems, was that, unlike Earthworm Jim, we wanted the player to be able to shoot in the air, while climbing and grabbing at all all times. The requirement for fluid movement was at odds with this requirement, so we put this project on hold for a while. I would very much like to re-visit this idea, perhaps with a simpler character and a prototype in the future, hopefully when we finish with the current project (more about this later). This also inspired us to think about a game that was more focused on puzzling and acrobatic platforming rather than shooting action ... but this is also an idea to concentrate on for the future.

Guitar Hero - Guitar Pro -> no chasing the dragon needed

2007-11-11T18:07:00.000Z

So I've not long watched the South Park episode "Guitar-queero". It's a very good episode, and I would go and watch it if you can. What it did though is hit home something that I've been thinking for a while and that's how much I've been neglecting the real guitar (very sad I know), so I decided to properly try out Guitar Pro and find some tabs for some of my favourite songs from guitar hero. These ones give you a real buzz even in GH . I decided to download them from iTunes no less (my first time!) - that'll make the record labels happy!:

The Allman Brothers Band - Jessica
The Sword - Freya
The butthole Surfers - Who Was In My Room Last Night
Alice Cooper - Billion Dollar Babies
The Rolling Stones- Can't You Hear Me Knocking?
Kansas - Carry On, Wayward Son
Police- Message In a Bottle
Ozzy Osbourne- Bark At the Moon

So I'm real glad I tried the program out properly, I've just learnt the rhythm for Freya and it really didn't take me long at all. I've just got to make time to keep using it. Guitar Pro does fit the gap somewhat. Cheers to Gaz for recommending it to me. It's good to get away from programming all the time, and it's really enojyable when you learn a new part and nail it down. Learning music is meant to be good for the brain and the soul, so its good to keep it up :). On another note though I am looking forward to Rock Band, and as many people, to the drums, especially if everything people say is true about it being comparable to real drums. Think I'm going to skip GHIII for the moment and concentrate on real guitar and work on getting those achievements ;).

I've also been busy working on the new project this weekend, it seems to be going pretty well. I've lots of classes from my other XNA projects that fit pretty well into the project straight away. A lot of time was spent on getting the jump for the character just right with the physics engine I'm using (Farseer). There was also some niggles with the collision detection and logic involved with jumping that took longer than expected, though I'm sure this will crop up when the scenery becomes more sophisticated.

I've managed to translate the physics co-ords to local tile ones, using a rendertarget method I've come up with, it seems to work - and the performance seems to be good. Some screenshots should be forthcoming when I've got something more interesting on-screen. A few tweaks to make to the Tile Manager then I'm going to work on projectiles - that means weapons and ammo, then I think I might pull out a particle system I've wrapped up in another project and put that. Animation is a priority, theres some ideas that I've got to improve it over Herriman.. so we'll see.

A post! - a sign of things to come?!

2007-10-28T15:18:00.000Z

So long time no posty ... I gots me a job, yay! So busy, busy, busy!

Me and the Herriman team have been eager to work on a new project. Gaz has been concentrating on a few ideas on a long time theme, but we've decided to put that on the back burner for a number of reasons. We all still need to learn a lot so we're just going to experiment on a few ideas and see how they turn out.

All that I can say now is that it involves Monkey's .. possibly of the albino variety .. yes we are mad :) Should be a lot of fun

IGN mentions Herriman: Under Pressure! and the XNA User Group

2007-07-03T15:43:00.000+01:00

Even though Gaz has mentioned it on his blog I feel obliged to say that Herriman: Under Pressure! our winning XNA game has been mentioned on IGN: http://uk.xbox360.ign.com/articles/800/800923p1.html

The prestige is really great, especially as I read the site nearly every other day. Now if someone would notice and give me a job, that would be great!

Moved blog

2007-07-02T13:21:00.000+01:00

Just to say that I've moved my blog from www.theblog.net (while I'm waiting for things to compile). Blogger is much more user friendly and has much less (no) broken links. Blogger also has more functionality as well, although my images aren't displaying correctly... I'll have to work on that bit.

Dan: Under Pressure!

2007-07-02T05:10:00.000+01:00

I knew about the competition on the afternoon of the 5th June - so we had quite a few days of catching up to do. This started with a frantic brain storming session that outlined some of the foundations of the game, the game mechanics, the characters and the artistic direction, nearly all courtesy of Gaz, one of the artists on the project. The game mechanics were to later change as we saw and played the game in its development state.

The late start was compounded by the fact that I had only worked very minimally with both C# and the XNA framework, coming from a C++ background ... still I had some confidence that we could pull it off or at least enjoy trying to.

A day or to after the brain storming session we enlisted another artist who later came to focus on the level; its design and layout. Dave did a fantastic job on the level design, art wise and the position of the enemies and pickups. I started coding like a man possessed, starting with the animated sprite and pixel collision samples. During this time I learnt/remembered how to use C# and the XNA framework, simple things like using and iterating containers! I had some dodgy collision response for a while and I was panicking a little, as it all rested on it - in the end it works nearly 99% the time which is surprising!

Some days later we recruited a sound artist that made some great music tracks and started on some sound effects, unfortunately we didn't have quite enough time to incorporate them all (or time them correctly!).

I felt my productivity was on a all time high during the next 10/11 days, I was working at every opportunity (mmm.. caffeine) coding and learning more about the framework. The only thing that let it down was time wasted on unimportant things near the end, the pressure (pun intended) was taking its toll and my fingers/brain couldn't work any faster. Its very much against me to not test a piece of software and put good error handling code in, but there was no time for it. I would have also liked some extensive gameplay testing so we could tweak all the numbers as well as the character behaviours.

There's a few obvious bugs in the final version, mostly to do with sound, at the moment the sound API seems very bizarre, especially working with the XACT tool. Another thing that I'm not happy with is the horrible performance (particularly at load time) and horrid memory usage, things I have since fixed surely to everyone's chagrin.

Most important though, I have really enjoyed working on the project and gained many things from it. I think C# and development with XNA definitely allows for an ease and speed improvement in the development process, I've enjoyed using them and I'll definitely use them again.

The team did some sterling work on getting a playable, nice looking game within that time frame and I want to thank them all for there hard work; it would have been nothing without them. I'd also like to say I was amazed by some of the sound and art entries - I felt we were spoilt for choice.

I've been working on correcting/collecting all the bugs, introducing a few optimisations, and incorporating all the artwork from Gaz that never made it in. You can try out the game here: http://www.divshare.com/download/1117858-df0

You'll need the .NET framework and Microsoft XNA Framework Redistributable to run the game. Enjoy!

If you have any problems see this post.

Win of the XNA user group competition, best overall game!

2007-06-29T13:10:00.000+01:00

I've just heard the news that our team has won the best overall game category for the XNA UK user group, which is excellent, excellent news! In the next few days I shall try and detail the time in development, which resulted from the 11 days that we had available from hearing about the competition. This is just a brief post but I would like to thank the team who really pulled together for Herriman, thanks guys!

I'd also like to thank the hosts of the competition; the UK XNA user group and of course Nescafe.... for now I'm going to celebrate and let it sink in!

New Project - Ion Core

2007-05-30T13:09:00.000+01:00

As usual its been a while since I've updated this blog, I'd like to take the opportunity to talk about my latest project; Ion Core. As well as the few tons of report that accompanied it, Ion Core was developed for my Final Year Project at Uni which I've recently finished and waiting for my results. I am really happy with the game and have gained a lot of good feedback. I am currently in the process of improving the game; first ironing out the small bugs or inconsistencies then new features will start to be added. Hopefully I will describe some of the new features here. You can read about Ion Core here.

I should probably mention my previous C++ game project; 'CastleWall'. Although software wise it was going fairly well in my spare time on my work placement I feel the game design has hit a brick wall. As a first project I think it was a bit to much to manage especially with the unfamiliar and unexplored game dynamics. I have learnt that you've got to start with a firm idea, usually described in a design document which to expand on in order to make a good game. Although I am proud of the progress in the game I feel abandoning is the best thing to do because I can work on more sure and feasible projects. I feel at the end of the day it was a good test bed for exploring some game components and features of the Ogre3D engine.

View More photos

"CastleWall" 0.2 progress

2006-05-16T13:06:00.000+01:00

So its been a while since I've updated me ood blog, especially on my c++ projects front - which I really should do, as not only does it help me show off ;) which everyone has to do a little of now and again.. it helps me keep track of my own progress and solidify it in my mind. Here's a biiig update to make up for it.

I've been working on what I've been calling 'CastleWall 0.2', though I feel the iteration should be a little higher, which shows I'm not setting any milestones for myself, oh well I'm learning it all for the first time.

So what have I done? Well I've got two castle's made up, with full opal/ODE physics. Its a lot of bricks, so I had to make them larger and fewer, and they had to be box primitives unfortunately as ODE doesn't support trimesh-trimesh collision, which was a bit of a blow when I found out.. The primitive shapes do anything for any semblance of realism as you might imagine, I plan to try using a random selection of materials to add more variation and/or some offset mapping to see if that helps. The good part is that all the bricks are loaded from a .scene(xml) file from blender and a method just adds physical attributes to the mesh used. This means that all sorts of structures can be made, and characters placed within Ogre. Though I'd like to add scripting to pick up the object names in Blender for use without re-compiling

Performance is still low when certain parts of the castle's get struck and the collisions get complex, I'm going to have to work on this part. I've made the current player's castle static geometry and that helps tremendously, its when a big proportion of the castle 'bricks' have a force acting on them that causes the slow performance problems, perhaps a good solution would be to limit the amount of objects that can be physically effected for each major collision, such as cannonball striking.

I decided to go for a multi-speculuar bump mapping shader, which I admit I from the Ogre sample, I really want to learn how to write shaders, but I'm concentrating on C++ and general game programming and anyway, why re-invent the wheel? The performance difference doesn't seem to be that bad either between that and a more basic material.

I've got terrain with a splatted texture, not PLSM2 as when I first tried it I couldn't for the life of me get it to run, though the latest version works a treat. I don't think it would be an advantage as my test level is very small anyway.

I've also added a skybox of rolling green hills and somewhat blended the terrain into in, which I'm quite proud of, I just have to alter the terrain to round at the edges in the correct way to look like it is completely another hill no different from the skybox ones.

Another feature (its not a bug, honest!) I'm proud of so far is when the current players turn is up, an animation track, takes the camera to the other player, I bit like Battlefield I've noticed though without all the post-effects (can't wait to dig into the Ogre compositor framework!)

I've also managed to integrate/modify a class so that player names can be displayed above players heads, I've made it so they appear central out visible at a sensible height to be read at a distance, its a pity I'm still using the Ogre Head, which is the biggest sore thumb of the artwork at the moment. I'm hopefully going to take a bit of time out to model some reasonable looking wizards.

I've also made use of the GameState manager to create a menu state after getting through a lot of my own mistakes. This has just a ocean, skybox and working menu items for New Game and Exit Game. I'd like to get some in-game options in there at some point too. The ocean needs and big island of rolling hills that I can fly to and around, I think that would look super cool. I'd like a water shader in at some point, one that will work on my ancient temporary Nvidia Tnt2 (ATI 9600 finally melted).

Theres also a feature in their to build, that is create shapes (currently based on tetris shapes) that can be moved and rotated on all axis via a menu and then made physical. These will be surrounded by swish magical effects with particles.

I should mention that I've managed to implement these features thus far: a simple sound manager in via Audiere, physics, a working CEGUI interface, particles, scripting, OIS input, a process manager and a game state manager. So I guess I shouldn't be too hard on myself with my progress. As most things though its turning out to be more of an undertaking than I thought. Though I've been learning lots of OOP and C++ and things about game programming, so its been very useful. I think my brain would have rotted at work by now if i had not started this project.

If any of you are interested out there, check back with any updates I hope to add soon

Check below for some screenies!
(Don't take these as an example of Ogre's real graphical prowess!)

More Pictures

General thoughts 101

2006-01-19T13:06:00.000Z

Wow this blog is getting to be an ecletic mix. You see I sometimes have a hard time explaining my meat-free diet. I consider all the crap thats happened in the past to a unintelligent barbarianism, I believe in progess, the development of self and society. Not far out concepts I'm sure many will agree.

To attach any kind of value to this strife of all these lives and the progress they've made as well as attaching any meaning to ours we must value life itself, or everything we do is in vain. Therefore very simply I value all life, especially so because I have the faculties to not only empathise with fellow human beings, but the progress made by our fellow living creatures parallel to our own. It is not the 'be all and end all' of all progress that can be made, just one of the great many things that I urge others to do, to simply better every beings value.

I think its important to realise that we all play a part however small in the long but arguably enjoyable march of the human race. It is important to have confidence in oneself in knowledge that we can improve and affect this reality in small but significant ways.

I have no religion so I find my value in life, in the universe, right now in this reality. To make sense of this life, firstly I believe in progress, progress of people, of humanity. To progress, I have come to think that we must start thinking more of the value of the products, the inventions and thoughts of mankind. This progress for me is what defines mankind, it is what we are good at, what we have excelled at for millenia. Progess is tightly linked with creating a better more comfortable, fairer world for us all.

Xbox Live Gamertag

2006-01-19T13:03:00.000Z

Surely MS has enough coders/designers working in various departments, why hasn't Xbox live Gamertags been integrated with MSN messenger or custom pages yet? I would have thought that would be a very sought after feature. Though probably like many gamers I could be accused of showing of my (pityful) scores too much

Xbox 360 thoughts and Frame Rate

2006-01-18T13:02:00.000Z

So, I've just completed Perfect Dark Zero on Secret Agent (as well as PGR3), yes it was fun for a while but I started getting a *little* tired of the same pop and take a shot gameplay, and I find the forest levels a little tedious as I tend to just sit at a distance with my RCP90 heat vision and poke my head out now and again. I don't know if its the mood I was in or its the fact that I've been playing Project Gotham Racing 3, with its brilliant smooth gameplay, I don't recall ever seeing any slow frame rates and also(I forget the technical term..I should really know..) seeing the split you get in the middle of the screen between two frames,something to do with writing to the graphics card's backbuffer too late.

Perhaps its mostly me, I'm a sucker for having a smooth frame rate, as drops ruin the immersion for me. Though we seem to be constantly reminded that they didn't have long to develop the games, not utilising three cores all that good ... its seems shame that the same company that produced Goldeneye.. Goldeneye! for godsakes couldn't make a better game with all of today's technology, perhaps they just couldn't pull it off. I don't find the levels as immersive, interesting or exciting, though now I remember it Goldeneye had frame rate drops, so perhaps its just my dashed expectationm I don't know. I prefer the theme and artwork of Goldeneye as PDZ seems a bit too fluffy at times.

Some other gripes I've have with PDZ are the dodgy physics.. ok perhaps they were only included on the advent of the developed 360 version, but sometimes it looks like a playful invisible giant has one of the characters legs, which it begins to spin and fling around, well like a rag doll in mid-air. Sometimes a hit with the plasma rifle will cause a character to spin and bounce on the spot indefinitely. The physics have seem to have gotten worse since I've started to use my Joytech vga cable into my widescreen monitor, unless its my imagination. Its likely that I'm comparing the physics to Half-Life 2, FEAR and the like, which are pretty dam good, perhaps I shouldn't excpect that a new game's technology will be better than a game nearly a year old running on my decrepid(! .. well..) 4 year old PC. As well as the physics ome of the animations when characters are shot also look very familiar....

While I've brought up Goldeneye again, where are all the options that Goldeneye had for multiplayer, the personal reward you recieved from unlocking those options were immense.

Its not just PDZ that has frame rate problems, everything with an ingame looking cut-scene (ie. All the bloody checkpoint intros in PDZ!) skips every half second or so (check out the kameo game intro, Need for speed and Quake 4). Though I have to admit apart from the in development bugs, the Fight Night 3 demo doesn't have any frame rate problems.

But I can't help thinking that developing games is such a Mammoth task, its kind of luck whether development goes smoothly or not. Perhaps we should be congratulating Rare on making a very good game with the time with dev kits, and pulling off the amount of fancy graphics... though still the length and quality of gameplay vs. the total develop time seems a bit off.

Though if you've read this, don't take it too much to heart as PDZ is a good game, the 360 is a good console, just don't expect too much from PDZ and from the 360 .. just yet.. and after all I've managed to get some of the gripes of my chest :)

About my Flash projects

2006-01-15T13:02:00.000Z

I'm currently on a Work Placement from Uni, I work at a school near Birmingham and Dudley. We are currently developing for DigitalBrain a VLE(Virtual Learning Environment) that we share with the Dudley area. I currently am working on a VLE game as part of my job and have picked up from the previous technicians/web developers who were on a work placement at the school. Its giving me a good start in simple but solid game development and I'm loving developing in flash, (probably just because it is so easy).

The game is centred around two characters who get pulled into a portal and have to complete a series of interactive and educational games to get out. At the moment I have completed two sub games (minus some other additions like missing sounds, incomplete links etc..) and am now working on a point and click game in a Monkey Island vain based on the book Of Mice And Men.

The point and click is a much bigger task than the last two, and I only get time to work on it between technician jobs and between yabbering at me (sorry :p ). This in turn contains sub-games, three of which I have completed which are a Horseshoe throwing game a Jigsaw, and a collect the rabbits game(like Whack the Mole). Though I'm making it up as I go along :)

Ones of the hardest part is the script/structure of the game, I see myself as being best at graphics and programming, I really don't know where to start on putting dialogue and interactive items in the game. In monkey island for example, you had to steal a red herring behind a kitchen and give it to a troll guarding ...so perhaps I should just put some similiar tasks in like that.

You can see some screenshots here -the fonts are not displayed .. I'll have to look into embedding fonts

About my C++ projects

2006-01-15T13:00:00.000Z

Well, I've started a few months ago learning C++ game development, I have a background of C++ for Uni and I am trying to further this in preperation for my upcoming final year project. After failed attempts in just DirectX, I have managed to get a good (basic) foot hold in the Ogre3D graphics engine(open source). I hope to use this in my final year project, although I'm still mulling over various projects to use it for. It is keeping me actively learning c++ and game development over my placement year

At the moment I've got a basic game in mind that I hope to complete as a basic start in learning to use the engine better. I will probably discuss this in another blog along with some pictures of early development.

More Screenshots