Godpatterns

Return if

2011-11-23T15:12:00.001Z

I'd quite like a return-if construction in lua, or at least I'd like to experiment with one. It would have the form of something like :=

Then you could do things like function someFunction() local everyThingHasGoneWrong() end // code return if everythingHasGoneWrong() // more code return if

Asynchronous non blocking curl multi example in C++

2011-09-16T23:15:00.000Z

The curl documentation makes me want to cry. The library seems nice enough and if you want to do some blocking synchronous http requests (and print them out to the standard out) then it's extremely straight forward. But who wants to do blocking requests? There are very few programs that can get away with locking entirely until a http request is done. Also one my internet pet-peeves, when

SOIL Great little image loading library

2011-09-15T15:04:00.000Z

After messing around with dds textures for far too long I found SOIL. Simple OpenGL image loading library, and it is. int channels = 0; unsigned char* image = SOIL_load_image ( filename, &width, &height, &channels, SOIL_LOAD_AUTO ); if(image == NULL) { isLoaded = false; return; } GLuint tex_2d =SOIL_create_OGL_texture ( image, width, height, channels,

Lua and C++ Binding

2011-09-09T16:10:00.000Z

I've been playing around with Lua lately. When lua code is executed it runs on a lua state (a c struct called lua_State). The lua state contains all the information lua needs - the variables, functions etc. All that is stored in the lua state. You can have several lua states if you want to nicely separate some functionality. Multithreaded programs will generally have a lua state per thread. I'm

Oh python

2011-06-18T12:55:00.001Z

print {True: "hello", 1: "good bye"} This does not print what I'd expect. {True: goodbye} True isn't a special case? It's just a typedef to 1. >_< How do Json importers handle this type of thing? Edit: Apparently Json doesn't have number keys. Unfortunately this doesn't really fix my problem.

Excel Wrapper Dot Net

2011-05-19T11:45:00.000Z

I hate working with Excel files, especially in C#. This wrapper makes things a little easier. http://excelwrapperdotnet.codeplex.com/ But if you want to save as an xlsx rather than an xlxm then you'll get this error "This extension can not be used with the selected file type. Change the file extension in the File name text box or select a different file type by changing the Save as type." This

Minecraft Coding

2010-12-13T08:33:00.000Z

http://codeflow.org/entries/2010/dec/09/minecraft-like-rendering-experiments-in-opengl-4/ This is pretty interesting read about doing something that looks like minecraft using shaders.

Computers

2010-09-29T09:56:00.000Z

My development computer's harddrive died - it's back now but I've lost a little code and it's taken far to long to get working again. This is good pdf about OOP and why it's not necessarily the best model for modern architecture.

Plans

2010-08-23T18:27:00.000Z

I think I've finished messing with adventure games for now. I've added a link to the article in the sidebar and it's something I do plan to return to, the hardest part is done - walking around a scene, adding an inventory and interactions is relatively simple. One item of point and click adventure games that does keep popping up in my mind is creating a design tool that brings up a matrix of all

How to make an Adventure Game

2010-08-12T18:16:00.030Z

This article will cover what goes into the programming of an adventure game. The ideas will mostly be implementation agnostic but where code is provided or implementation specifics are discussed they use the Engine project from my book C# Game Programming as a base. All the code is available online under the MIT license. The ideas covered here are widely applicable, navigation meshes very much

Little Man

2010-08-11T15:23:00.004Z

I added a little man that can walk around the nav mesh. The man comes from kafkaskoffee as a template to build characters from. I changed it to png with alpha and removed the borders. In walk test mode you can click an area and the little man will walk to that position. This will work with any nav mesh not just the small box above. One issue I've notice is that sometimes that man doesn't walk

Trundle

2010-08-09T19:11:00.001Z

The second image has had a bit of post processing added; the white doesn't really have a border or a drop shadow. The code now lets users test out paths, so it's getting closer to the idea of a simple walk around adventure game. Of course path smoothing can be added by using a spline to connect the nodes, more nodes could be added to each edge (or even the Funnel algorithm which I eventually

Amazing Teapot

2010-08-08T08:50:00.001Z

For my current project I'm playing around with the basic code needed to make an adventure game. A game genre that's fallen by the way side a little. In the most recent commit (code available here using the simple Engine code explained in my book) I've added loading and saving of the navmesh and layers. Layers are, for now at least, just going to be sprites a little like Photoshop's layers. The

An Editor

2010-08-05T09:43:00.000Z

Two weeks ago I decided I was going to just play around with the start of making an adventure game. There have a been a few detours but I'm going to stick with it until I have something very simple complete - perhaps a character that can walk around a scene and a simple hidden key / door puzzle. Most recently I was writing the code to allow the character to navigate the scenes and I've now

PathFinding Mark 1

2010-07-25T12:52:00.000Z

Pathfinding now works. The above shows a collection of convex polygons with their joined edges connected. Click once inside the polys to start the path and again to end it and a line will be drawn respecting the polygon bounds. The funnel algorithm could still be implemented on top of this to make the path more optimal (but it would probably hug the edges more and look a little unnatural for an

Lines

2010-07-24T14:00:00.000Z

I played around with my nav mesh trying to get the funnel algorithm working. I had it working in most cases but now and again the part that works out if the next funnel is contained in the current one got confused and while the funnel algorithm was cool it was not getting me much closer to have a walkable-area system for an adventure game. Thus I started a new game state. It allows the player to

Dungeons

2010-07-18T14:33:00.001Z

I've stuck A* path finding on the top of my, I guess, nav mesh thing now. It let's you make a nice big convex polygon, triangulates it and finds all the triangles centroids. Then you the user can choose two centroids and A* is used to plot a path. I started doing this thinking a little about adventure games but this nav-mesh type code is quite general and could probably be used for all sorts of

Pink is as a debug color is the one true way

2010-07-17T15:33:00.000Z

I've been playing around with the poly-tool thing I made last weekend. This time I've given each triangle a node and then linked adjacent nodes. Which forms a very pretty graph. This type of graph can be used as the basis of a path finding system, which seems to be where this is heading. My method of finding adjacent nodes is inefficient and possibly a little bit wtf but it works and it's a

Torchlight

2010-07-15T10:00:00.000Z

I was reading this article about the making of Torchlight and was suprised to see they used the Ogre 3D engine. “We ended up using the Ogre 3D engine, which is open source,” says Baldree. “It doesn’t really cost anything, and it’s got really great support for older hardware. And given the size of the development team we didn’t want to spend a ton of time developing the latest pixel shader

The diving board

2010-07-11T16:07:00.001Z

With the release of C# Game Programming: For Serious Game Creation, I've got a nice code base to create cool new examples and experiments and recently I've been thinking about adventure games. Adventure games, the red headed step child of gaming, once so popular, now living in the basement, rarely making an appearance. Lucas Arts used to make some excellent adventure games, until they went

C# Game Programming Book

2010-07-10T11:08:00.005Z

My book, C# Game Programming: For Serious Game Creation, seems to have now been published and is available on Amazon! Learn how to use OpenGL and C# together. Learn how to create the fastest game loop for C# using a Windows Form. Dive in C using Interop to get useful game functions such as timers. Learn how to use the latest versions of C# to write tighter, leaner code. Lightning Fast

Electric Sink

2010-06-28T08:03:00.000Z

It's summer, and I'm not really feeling in the programming mood after work, though there are a lot of projects that I'd be happy to start. I've always be interested in Constructive Solid Geometry but never written an implementation. This pdf seems to be a good introduction.

Bonus Content: Kerning

2010-06-05T16:33:00.059Z

Bitmap fonts and text were both handled in the C# Game Programming book but kerning wasn't. Kerning refers to the amount of spacing between characters in text. Without kerning the letters in words may appear to be spaced out oddly. The code in the book produced text that looked like this: Rather naively, I assumed this looked a bit funky due to kerning issues (hence this very topic to make

Momentum

2010-06-02T12:52:00.003Z

I've repointed the godpatterns url so it's pointing to this blog now and I'll slowly move across any good articles and content from the previous wordpress blog.In the meantime:Sublime - this is an excellent text editor that has recently appeared on to my radar. I'm using it at work to edit Lua and at home for a little Scheme and basic text.Free GDC Talks - yay, can't beat that.Recently I've

Besting a Rhino in hand to hand combat

2009-10-30T08:12:00.003Z

One of the things I've always wanted to be able to do is create nice game creation tools. A nice syntax highlighted editor etc. So a while back I started writing something simple using Scintilla. Then at work a lot of Lua coding was required so last Sunday night, yesterday night and a bit this morning I made my own lua editor / IDE and released it open source http://code.google.com/p/monmon/ (

Sounds for Games

2009-04-23T09:53:00.003Z

Recently I wrote a quick post about the awesome sfxr. A great little utility for creating bleeps and bloops.But that's not all today I stumbled on http://www.freesound.org. It has loads of sounds, all free and easily searchable.

Quickie Rotations

2009-04-22T09:10:00.003Z

In my C# codebase I have no rotation code - which may be a little surprising but as I'm making a 2D game it's not been a issue until now.I just want to be able to rotate my sprites around other sprites. A nice general solution would be to allow matrices to be be applied to the four vertices that make up each corner of my sprite.But I didn't want to write a matrix class. So I just implemented the

Sound for all

2009-04-18T19:56:00.003Z

I'm not really a sound person, I know nothing of it. I liked fruity loops when it first came out but that's it. Like so many children the recorder was forced upon me when I was very young ... perhaps these things are related.But games need sounds!That's why Dr Petter's sounds effects tool is so awesome. You press one button and it makes a sound. If you like the sound you save it. That's the kind

Data bindings

2009-04-11T10:16:00.004Z

Data bindings in C# are something I've totally ignored because I've always assumed they're boring database related code.Yesterday I ported my simple particle system from C++ to C#. Previously I'd defined particle systems in my own special file format and then used that to create them. So I'd edit the file then load the test program and see what it looked like. (I may even have had a quick reload

Fiddly bits

2009-04-05T17:34:00.005Z

Finally, I've written some code that I've been meaning to for a quite some time - the frame.By frame, I mean an in-game window. A good example is the final fantasy screen shot below. It has a blue box with text in it. The blue box is a frame. If you are using 3d acceleration the way to write this is to split the frame image up into a number of quads. So the corners are each a quad, so are columns

Let's do something C++ can't

2009-03-29T19:31:00.006Z

Recently I was writing some code to load levels. This is a common task but I think I ended up with some pretty neat code that can be used in a variety of ways.My levels are rather unusual. A level can be generated totally by my code. So I can be as a vague as 'make a level' or I can say 'I want a monster here and here and walls here' and describe everything down to the last detail. I'm still

system.badimageformatexception

2009-03-28T14:37:00.002Z

The errors are slowly trickling in. This time Nunit. I tried to load some of my assemblies to unit test and recieved this exception: "system.badimageformatexception". So I ensured all the projects in my solution where compiling using the same CPU. Still I got the same error.It turns out this is another symptom of developing on 64bit Vista system. The assemblies I was testing were x86. The nunit

An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format.

2009-03-27T14:57:00.004Z

I'm updating here until I resolve what I'm going to do withgodpatterns.Recently I setup a new dev machine, while I'm back in the UK searching for a new job (I'm hoping to get something to do with C# if possible). Anyway I moved my SVN repository over along with my most recent code check outs.As I mentioned in my last post I'm developing using C# and Tao (which, among other things, is an OpenGL

A quick note about game development in C#

2008-05-22T12:46:00.005Z

As I know this site still generates quite a bit of traffic - I thought it would be a good place to update my current feelings on C# game development. As before I think it's great :DBut I've moved away from DirectX as my API of choice. I don't have Vista (or intend to get it anytime soon.) so I'm not going to be developing under DirectX10. DirectX 9.0 pixel to texel mapping just doesn't seem to

Cheddar Roads

2007-01-23T18:31:00.000Z

I was doing some einfall programming today but I got massively massively side tracked. I need to get some hosting for my portfolio, so I did that and since then I've been tinkering ever since. You can check it out at http://www.godpatterns.com/, though there's nothing much there at the moment.I'm going to have cv as a subdomain but for some reason it's not working at the moment. I'll probably be

Methods and dynamic casting in C#

2007-01-19T17:18:00.000Z

I remember a month ago I was trying to do something similar with C++ and it doesn't work (suprise suprise :> ). I thought I'd see if it'd work in C# - and suprisingly it does. Ok, so what I am I babbling about?Imagine you have an object Item and another object StackableItem : Item, that inherits from Item. Now imagine I have an array of Items. I can put Stackable items in here and I can put items

More news as it happens

2007-01-18T12:44:00.000Z

Now you can open the chest and there are coins inside! Yay! Then when you open the chest again, they've gone. (You've taken them.)The code's quite nice but still needs generalizing. (Currently there's no way for stackable items, such as coins to be combined). The "you've found coins" message actually appears in the center of the screen, in the screenshot it looks a little lop sided. At some point

Why is it so easy to work on my projects when I should be revising.

2007-01-17T22:37:00.000Z

Now when you open the chest, the game tells you that you've received 29 gold coins. This is a lie, it will also tell you this if you close the chest the open it again.To me though, it feels like progress!I rejigged my mouse user interface, so it uses a state system (covered in one of the programming for monkeys tutorials). There's a message state that currently displays a label. At some point I'm

The mojito is a descendant of the Draquecito, named after Sir Francis Drake and said to be his favorite drink before pirate battles

2007-01-16T18:16:00.000Z

My chest is opening and shutting, and I want to give the character *prizes!*. First in a crude, text box manner. You've found blah, blah in a text box.To do that I need to know how big text is. Will the text fit in the box, how big should the box be, what are my options for decorating the box and so on.This leads to a bit of problem (a problem I vaguely remember having before), that is that using

Irritated like the tail of a horse

2007-01-15T15:32:00.000Z

Maybe one day, I assume it will be in the far distance, I'll stop writing pieces of timing code because all my timing woes will be completed once and for all. Until that day:class TimeEvent{ double waitTime; double timeCount; bool set = false; public TimeEvent(double waitTime) { this.waitTime = waitTime; } public double WaitTime { get {

The most uncommon of uncommon vernaculars

2007-01-09T15:04:00.000Z

This http://tlundmark.blogspot.com/2006/11/identities-of-industry.html is a really cool list of all the key game's industry key players with pictures and quotes. It's very a pleasant way to spend a few minutes. It's a little disturbing how unhealthy most of them appear.Einfall will probably fall once again to the back burner as University work starts to appear thick and fast.

The true meaning of Christmas

2007-01-06T12:34:00.000Z

It's been some time since the last update, I've been taking things nice and easy over Christmas and playing a few games. I'm going back to University tomorrow. There I'll be working, at some point I may find myself free to work on my coursework again. Once the camera works correctly and I'm happy - it's something I'd quite like to make avaliable for download. Dirge of CerebusI completed this game

The moon on a stick

2006-12-24T12:41:00.000Z

Gah, I've slapped in my path finding library. So now, with a few tweaks, mouse movement and path finding, is hacked in.There's a problem though. I split the world into multiple maps and path finding across these maps, probably means changing my path finding code. The multiple maps buisness has always been a headache.For now I'm happy to get path finding working on a single map. And worry about

Old blue cake hat

2006-12-23T13:45:00.000Z

I had to update from my source repository yesterday as things went horribly wrong. Entites can be teleported around various maps with out problem. It's all pretty horredously inefficent.I'm adding smooth moving between tiles now. Somewhere down the line I'll bolt on my A* library and somewhere after that I'll finish my modest goals for this small project. (You can walk to a chest open it, recieve

High Density

2006-12-19T09:54:00.000Z

Currently I'm implementing the entity management system for einfall. It's a little tricky. I want to be able to process / render my various entities. So I should be quickly able to determine what's at a particular x,y tile position and z height.Any entities on map-1 should be able to be selected as a whole and removed easily. Also entities can be moved from map to map. Yes moving, when moving an

The small grey children, who stand by your bed and watch you while you're sleeping.

2006-12-06T18:50:00.000Z

Sometimes we need pointers to pointers. Today was one of those days, it's used to pass back information. If you want to pass back info and just pass in a normal pointer, then a copy is made and the pointer outside of the function is never changed.This is my *arghh* how does it work code.#include "stdafx.h"#include using namespace std;int b = 3;void func(int ** i){ *i = &b;}int _tmain(int argc, _

This buffer is for notes you don't want to save,

2006-12-02T01:48:00.000Z

Another Tightmap checkin. I pulled some code over from Einfall, simplified it a bit and added it. Now when you run your mouse over a map, each tile is highlighted as you hover over it. Which is just what I wanted so yay me.I noticed this small function seemed to destroy my frame rate ... but on running it a few times - it bounced back up, maybe the JIT stuff?

Don't tell me to put my pants back on, they're my pants, I decide when and where ok? ok.

2006-11-26T17:19:00.000Z

I feel I should make posts with content, but it's been a while ... so here's a content light post just letting you know what's going on.Working on coursework for my Game Programming Masters. In C++. The main thing I've learnt is how to use a profiler correctly, I wrote a particle system from scratch in an afternoon. It makes me wonder if I could oragnise my time this well independently.

Ice cubes and the elderly

2006-11-04T12:46:00.000Z

This is where I am in rewriting the Einfall base. Things are going slowly but they're going :D I feel very strongly that it's important to get as game-like as possible as soon as possible. So I'm working on mouse control, something I don't have in my main Einfall branch. After mouse controls added I intend to make a simple game. Along the lines of a text box saying "Find treasure", there being a

Room!

2006-11-02T12:38:00.000Z

Coursework's not going to badly - behold the room!This is all done in C++ and openGL. It currently supports axis aligned planes, that are subdivided to the correct complexity on start up. There's still a long way to go. Oh the black dot represents where I've put the light.Also the frame counter can be ignored, as the frames are locked to 1/60th of a second. I need to update the FPS counter to

The varied mysteries of the inner mouth society revealed at last!

2006-10-27T19:31:00.000Z

Nanowrimo's going to be starting up again soon. If you fancy trying to write a short novel in a month then register! I did it last year, and though I've never gone back to the awful sprawling draft I gave birth too I'm quite happy to create a new one. Last time it was some generic, steampunkish fantasy, this time it's a modern time travelling thriller (or similar). Novel writing begins on the 1st

Burning houses in stinking fog

2006-10-25T19:14:00.000Z

So I've just managed to get cxxtest working in visual studio.As I'm still not at home in C++ this took much longer than it should. I had no idea where it wanted the PERL environmental variable defining. (I defined it for the system) but it turned out it wanted it defining in the makefile.Which ended up looking like thisPERL = c:\Perl\bin\Perl.exe# Where to look for the testsTESTS = H:\

Beware Of Shadows

2006-10-12T17:17:00.000Z

I'm doing about a scheme sample a day and "something on Einfall". Yesterday I evaluated an entity library and decided it was totally unworkable. (It was quite inefficent and far too heavily skewed towards NPCs rather than just plain items.) Also I'm doing the lab tutorials. The last one was procedurally generating a cylinder in vertex and index array and then spitting it out. It was hard and it

Suprises

2006-10-05T07:44:00.000Z

So I thought when I took this Game Programming course I'd happily blog along what I was learning while I learnt but this looks unlikely. There's just too much stuff and too much of it is just a list of stuff to learn. I'll defintely write some things up. But at the moment we all go the labs in the morning, bash our heads against openGL (which is made much easier by having an oo wrapper that just

The reasons behind guinea pigs

2006-09-30T13:18:00.000Z

Still going through the little schemer, one of my programs called for the "to the power of" operator. I couldn't find scheme's definition, so I wrote my own! Yay me. (define ^ (lambda (x y) (cond ((zero? y) 1) (else (* x (^ x (sub1 y)))))))Today I'm going to polish off another chapter in the scheme book and hopefully two in the C++ book. Last night I added the FPS counter to the

atm confidential dances

2006-09-28T10:10:00.000Z

Working my way through Accelerated C++. This book is great! It teaches C++ not C in a C++ compiler with some classes thrown in, like so many other books seem to do. Started a new subversion repository where I'm creating a final version of my tight map, which will be fast (like the old version) and handle such things as users logging out and in without crashing (unlike the old version).EDIT: More

Dank Cat Paw

2006-09-26T13:59:00.000Z

We're expected to make a game by Christmas and to be extremely proficent in C++ by Christmas. It sounds fun. My C++ is rusty to the point of collapse. So I'm going to work through one or two of the C books I brought along. Then I'll find what are a few good reference books for C++ and order them. As for my simple tile rendering stuff - it now persists even if you log out and then log back in. And

In Hull

2006-09-24T17:52:00.000Z

And tomorrow lectures start. A year of game programming goodness.Today I've added some small bits of code to reset the vertexbuffers when the device is reset in the RenderPrimitives dll. Also polished off another chapter of the little schemer.

Living in a refurbished slaughter house

2006-09-21T10:37:00.000Z

Back to poking at my .Net code this morning. Seeing as I'm on a new computer I'm also going to see if blogger will allow me to upload photos, in the past it's always been quite fussy. I think that it's because I had firefox force any pop-up to load in a background tab. Well looks like it's working now!Anyway I thought I'd talk a little about DirectX devices and forms. This relates to creating

Additional Scheming

2006-09-20T21:04:00.000Z

Up to chapter 4 in the little schemer now. It's interesting to see that most loops are actually done by using recursion ... and it reminds me of another programming language I was taught in University, probably prolog.I'm not finding the book too hard going and can work out most of the answers to the questions. But I never seem to get the brackets right (as Jani pointed out this is the intially

Scheme scheme scheme

2006-09-19T08:44:00.000Z

Here's my first scheme (that I've written off my own back rather than copying from the text book) function it's very very simple. If you pass in a true value it returns hello, if you pass in a false value is return goodbye. Goodbye and hello aren't strings they're more like unitialized variables.Anyway behold: (define test? (lambda (a) (cond ((eq? a #t) 'hello) (else 'goodbye))))

Removing the close box from a c# form

2006-09-18T08:33:00.000Z

I have a child of a MDI container and I don't want the user to be able to close it, or maximize, or minimize it. But I do want the user to be able to resize it and drag it around and will. So I want to get rid of the close, minimize and maximize buttons but retain the blue strip.If you write some code like so:this.ControlBox = false;this.MaximizeBox = false;this.MinimizeBox = false;Where "this"

Chasing down bugs.

2006-09-17T20:19:00.000Z

I'm still having issues with some of my program that display maps missing a pixel or two on each tile - this only happened since I've switched the programs to my desktop machine rather than my portable. Also it doesn't happen with all my programs - suggesting, the somewhere, in certain programs, I'm doing something stupid. So I'm hunting that down. I just built a very simple program that

Scheme, Petite, Emacs and the error message; spawning child process invalid argument

2006-09-12T12:22:00.000Z

This errors been giving me a headache for a while but I've now found the solution!So I've Gnu Emacs 21.3.1 running on windows and I'm interested in learning scheme. I went into the Control Panel > System > Environmental Variables and edited the PATH variable to include petite. So if I typed petite in a command prompt - up would come the interpretter - great! Or so I thought.Next I wanted to have

Ebichu

2006-09-11T21:26:00.000Z

So I'm still hacking away at the old map editor, DirectX is now playing nicely with windows forms. In fact this is such a useful thing to do that I may as well explain how (briefly).Using DirectX, C#, Windows Forms, to create a non-flickering interactive form application that also has a render loop for DirectX.Now there's a smooth, smooth title.