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.

My framework is far away from being usable by non-programmers and there is only a basic function set. But I think it is time to start developing some basic tools to make it easier to use. Right now this tools wont be used to create games, but it always looks good when your engine offers some tools. The more important part is that I can check if the design of my framework allows tools to be easly integrated, which I hope it the case .

Im trying Qt as a Gui library, simply because I have a university project next semester which will focus on Qt and learning one library is easier then two. I dont like the idea behind moc, but I can live with it and Qt seems a like a really good choice for Gui developing. The first tool I plan to develop is a simple package inspector, which shows you the components of a package. Nothing fancy, but useful and it is the foundation for a component editor, enabling the user to build a game without the need to code.

Im not sure which is the right buildtool for me. I know I want a tool which doesnt build the project directly, but generates the needed makefiles or visual studio files. This makes developing for me a lot easier, I use visual studio and I dont want to maintain two build systems, visual studio and my buildtool.

The only buildtools which can do this, as far as I know, are premake and cmake. I like premake, its easy to use, very well documented, but it has some problemes with my project structure. So I tried cmake which works fine with my project and also comes with a nice gui and a lot of features. The downside is that the documentation is crap if you dont buy their book. I needed a lot of experimenting before if worked the way I wanted it, but know it works and I think I will play with cmake a bit longer until I decide which buildtool I will use. But right know cmake has the lead.

In six days the first round of the “Jugend Forscht” research competition is to start and Im busy preparing everything for this, so today just a link.
I totally agree with the statements. There are no rules for programming their is a set of best practices and experiences which one should know and have in mind while developing but they are not mandatory. When you start to do something just because it was always done or because someone says you have to do it this way otherwise it will be wrong, just stop programming and think first.

Every line of code you write is different and therefore different rules apply. Of course there are rules which are almost always true and should be followed. But these rules are subject to change and not god-given. Sometimes a old rule doesnt work anymore and then we just abandon it and search for a better rule. When you stop to question your doing and stop searching for better ways to do something you gave up becoming a better developer. Always thing about what are you doing and why are you doing it.