Mirlix

Today I finally installed Ubuntu 9.04 on my EEE Box and installed Synergy on it. Synergy is a small app which is fantastic. It allows you to share your mouse,keyboard and clipboard across several computers. Now I can control my development machine with windows and my surf,chat,everything else machine with Ubuntu using one keyboard and one mouse. Also it feels like using a dual monitor setup but with two operation systems. Of course moving a windows from one system to another isnt possible and playing games on windows using a mouse which is connected to the linux machine isnt working either. The network just isnt fast enough. But besides this it rocks, it toke me 10 minutes to get everything up and running. Now I only need a bigger second monitor and everything is fine.

The Gamedays where a great experience. A lot of people where interested in our game and we got a whole lot of new ideas. The next thing on my list is to improve our work flow. For this Im started to develop a model viewer which will help our artists to test their models and help me to tweak shaders. Right now I can only see them ingame and thats simply isnt working.

Right Ogre has some modelviewers, but often they are buggy and dont work like I would like them to do. Dont know if my model viewer will be of any help to others, I simply have to see.

Here some screenshots.
This one was taken on sunday mornging.

This one was taken on sunday night.

This one was taken on monday mornging.

This one was taken on monday evening.

This one was taken on monday evening one hour later.

Right now we are having a nice little developer party and preparing our game for the Gamedays. Already I have slept way to short and this post is quite possible full with typos and grammaticalerrors.

But all in all the prototype is proceeding quite fast and I think we will be able to present a decent game in 4 days.
I will also post some photos taken during this weekend with some really tired developers.

In two weeks I will present the first prototype of our game at a local game developer convention,local game developer convention. So now Im in crunch mode ;).
I hope that we can present the first two levels with some decent artworks and maybe a 3d printed version of you monster.
Im a bit thrilled because this is the first convention where I preset a game. And now Im off, to much to do

Today I wrote a normal mapping shader for our game project and it was much easier than I thought. Once you get your head around this damn 3D math, basic shaders are quite simple. Getting ogre to work with my shader was a bit tricky but the ogre wiki has so much examples and code snippets that I found everything I needed. Once again ogre proves to be an awesome render engine.

The next thing on my list is to write a small shader creation tool for my artists. Then I dont have to tweak everything myself

Today I started to write my own logging system for my framework. I know there are thousand open source solutions ready to use. But I tried several and nothing felt really good and had all the features I wanted. Also a logging systems isnt that difficult to write and the possible errors one can make are limited.

Righting it my self has the good side that I can add network support and functiontracing into the core of the systen, two feature I find really important. Dont know if it is really a good idea but I will see. The most important thing right now it to have any logging system that works fast enough for games.

Right now when my game crashes I dont know why. My framework dont have exceptions and no error reporting, so I use my experience with it to find the error. Which wont work once another programmer starts using it. So better to it now then after the second programmer started using the framework.

Hinge3D, my game framework, isnt used by many people around the world. Right now there is one, me. And even I only use it to program testgames to improve the framework itself. This will change in April. Then there will be twice as much people using Hinge3D. A friend of mine and me :). Next Semester we participate in a hands on lecture at our university, which focuses at game development. So for the next six month 2 programmers and 3 artist are going to use the framework and created the next big MMORPG.

Or rather a nice small casual game with innovative game mechanics and a unused setting. More details will be made public when a first prototype is running. Which should be at the end of May. To develop the game Hinge3D have to be improved and extended. Im excited how the game will be and what effect this project will have on Hinge3D.

Right now I cant start programming right away, because my university thinks it is a good idea to have exams at the end of the semester. After the 7. April I can start the project. Until then I have to learn .

Today I tried the XML feature of Qt and once again Im astounded. After only 2 hours, my editor is now able to save and load xml. I can save my created games and load them anytime I want. Its much better then doing everytime the same thing to test a small bit of the editor. No only drag and drop and context menu is missing until the first version of the editor is usable and presentable. Im think I can implement these features using some time on monday and thursday before the next round of Jugend Forscht begins, where I will present my editor to the public.

I had some spare time the last days, so I was able to play a bit more with Qt. After getting moc to run like I wanted,moc is a Qt tool needed to created new gui widgets, I started developing the first prototype of a ComponentEditor. It took me 4-5 hours until the first functional version was done. At this state I can load packages, create new ComponentOwner and create new instances at the start of the game. This is enough to create a small demo game. Of course the editor isnt usable, one wrong click and the whole editor crashed, but if you know what to do it works, its not comfortable to use, but it can be used.

The next step is the make it more error proof and add a save/load dialog so the user dont have to start all over again when something goes wrong.
Later I will post a first preview of the editor.
Edit: Here the youtube link