December 01, 2011
I actually did some coding yesterday and today. GitHub says it's been about six weeks since I've committed any changes. I blame Batman: Arkham City, Dark Souls, Assassin's Creed: Revelations and Star Wars: Tho Old Republic beta weekends, and various holiday preparations. I imagine I won't get any m…
October 13, 2011
I've thought all day about how to compile all the maze meshes into one static vertex buffer. Right now, each corner and straight section is its own mesh, which gets transformed every frame. That's 1632 needless transformations. The issue is how and where to create an ID3D11Buffer* initialized with …
October 12, 2011
It took longer than I'd expected to return to this point, but here I am:
And to be honest, I don't care that it's taken me a while. I'm having fun, I'm happy and satisfied with the improved quality of (most of) my code, and I have mo deadline to meet. Sure, I'd love to see this project reach a compl…
And to be honest, I don't care that it's taken me a while. I'm having fun, I'm happy and satisfied with the improved quality of (most of) my code, and I have mo deadline to meet. Sure, I'd love to see this project reach a compl…
October 07, 2011
I've taken a lot of time and care over the rendering code the last several days. I'm also using DirectXMath SIMD optimized datatypes and functions. Memory alignment is something I'd never really dealt with before, and it took a bit of time to get used to, but things are going swimmingly now.
The bel…
The bel…
October 01, 2011
I've spent my coding time the last couple of days refactoring my Renderer class. Up until this point, all the D3D code was in Renderer. It worked, but it was difficult to easily pick out what was going on when looking at the code. So I decided to create wrapper classes for the various D3D11 interfa…
September 21, 2011
I've realized a design flaw in my entity/component system: I don't have a good way to actually initialize component data! Looky here:
[source lang="cpp"]
Entity e = entity_system.CreateNewEntity();
entity_system.AttachComponent( e, COMPONENT_XFORM );
/* e can now have position, scale and rotation, but …
[source lang="cpp"]
Entity e = entity_system.CreateNewEntity();
entity_system.AttachComponent( e, COMPONENT_XFORM );
/* e can now have position, scale and rotation, but …
September 12, 2011
I had coded myself into a corner a while back, not being able to effectively manage the ghosts. Also, I didn't like how some sections of my code were working out. It became evident that it would be easier to start over than to try to shoehorn fixes into the existing code. Well, I actually can use m…
September 08, 2011
I code in a vacuum. I learned C++ from books and the 'Net, never took a class, and all my friends are humanities types. So I can't get any kind of RW peer review. That's where you come in.
I've taken a first pass at an entity/component system. I've neither written nor used such a system before, and …
I've taken a first pass at an entity/component system. I've neither written nor used such a system before, and …
August 28, 2011
I haven't worked on anything in a while because a co-worker of one of my housemates lent me Demon's Souls. That's an addictive game.
I tore myself away from the PS3 this weekend just long enough to finish this latest little mini-project: using Lua as a data file format. Here's my minimal test file:
I tore myself away from the PS3 this weekend just long enough to finish this latest little mini-project: using Lua as a data file format. Here's my minimal test file:
D…August 19, 2011
I'm having to rethink my approach a bit--if I expose a struct, say a Vertex, to Lua that has something like an XMFLOAT* or D3DXVECTOR* member, I get an access violation when I try to instantiate one from Lua. Took me a bit to realize that was the issue. I'm not sure I can make it work without going…
August 07, 2011
I haven't been doing much coding on the game lately. I've been trying to shorten my to-read stack, and just haven't felt like getting on the computer too much. Also, the house took a vacation to my parents' home last week, so I was without a dev machine. When I have been at the pc, I've been learni…
July 07, 2011
I've been exploring the use of SWIG as a Lua binding for the last day or so, and I've found I kinda like it, which surprised me. It took me a while to figure out how to use it--it appeared at first that the bindings had to be compiled into DLL modules before being used, which is cool as a feature, …
July 06, 2011
I was gone longer than I'd expected to be. I spent less than a week at my parents', working the honey. Fun times. But when I returned home, I had no desire to do anything with my computer. Just powering it on felt like a chore, and the thought of actually sitting down at the keyboard was detestable…
May 26, 2011
It's beginning to feel like a real game! Now I just need to make it update...
I need to tweak my font to look better at small sizes and through the bloom in the menu. Also, I don't like the '3' or the '4', but I don't know if I can come up with anything better. Bloom is still ramped up pretty high i…
I need to tweak my font to look better at small sizes and through the bloom in the menu. Also, I don't like the '3' or the '4', but I don't know if I can come up with anything better. Bloom is still ramped up pretty high i…
May 19, 2011
When I first started this project, each game object had a two-dimensional position and an index to indicate what side of the cube it was on. When necessary, I would transform the object's x,y position and local rotation by it's side's xform matrix. I naively thought it would be easier that way. I c…
May 04, 2011
Yesterday I realized I'd fallen into the trap of perpetually improving existing code instead of adding new stuff. Today, I move on.
April 28, 2011
The text strings in Pac-Hedron are simple chains of squares, with each square's texture coordinates adjusted to display the appropriate bit of the font texture. The entire string is a single mesh, which is saved in a std::map along with all the other meshes so it can be reused. This is bad design.
I…
I…
April 25, 2011
I've been trying to improve the rendering code lately. I've reworked it so all the meshes are now [font="Lucida Console"]ID3D10Mesh[/font]es. This lets me approach everything more uniformly and lets me streamline the drawing code. I haven't been able to figure out how to use [font="Lucida Console"]…
April 07, 2011
A few weeks ago, my computer froze while I was playing Rift. Upon rebooting, I got an error stating "hard disk read failure" or something similar. It was disheartening, but I had a spare drive, so I switched drives, installed everything, and was good to go.
A couple days ago, my computer started pau…
A couple days ago, my computer started pau…
April 06, 2011
It seems I never work on next what I say I will. I decided that I wanted to look at something a little nicer when playtesting Pac-Hedron, so I spent the last couple of days implementing a bloom shader. This took more doing than I expected. All the hlsl resourced I was able to find were aimed at old…
April 01, 2011
I've tweaked the music--instead of the drum track stopping when the player isn't eating pellets, it drops to one-third volume. It's an improvement, but it still seems a bit jarring. I think I'm going to ramp the volume up or down over a beat, or maybe half a beat. Quick, but more gradual than an im…
March 30, 2011
The game feels a lot tighter to me now that sound is in:
[media][/media]
All sounds are from FreeSound.org.
In the beginning, you can see menu actions are synced to the beat of the music. Once in game, the drum track only plays while the player is actually eating pellets. This is how I envisioned it, …
[media][/media]
All sounds are from FreeSound.org.
In the beginning, you can see menu actions are synced to the beat of the music. Once in game, the drum track only plays while the player is actually eating pellets. This is how I envisioned it, …
March 30, 2011
Thanks to FreeSound.org I have a techno-ish track composed of separate melody and drum tracks. I also have a single kick-drum hit that I trigger when moving through and selecting menu items. The request to play the kick is queued, and it's played on the beat or half-beat. It almost works.
There are …
There are …
March 28, 2011
I fixed the camera shift this morning, which created an odd tilt when moving sideways, but that's preferable to the previous behavior. I intend to try to tweak it some more, but I'd be comfortable releasing the game with this camera behavior, so I'm moving on for now. It has caused me to believe th…
March 28, 2011
I spent a few hours tonight cleaning up the camera movement code. There were badly named variables; old code, from other revisions, that no longer did anything; magic numbers; code to figure things for which D3DX already provides functions; and undocumented formulae. Fun times.
I started looking at…
I started looking at…
March 22, 2011
I've been thinking for some time how I should handle the model animation in Pac-Hedron. Currently, each model is saved in a simple text file, which lists vertices and triangles. To add animation data of any sort would require a heavy rewrite or expansion of the file format, as well as the necessary…
March 20, 2011
I nearly have my code back to where I remember it being when my hard drive crashed. One or two more things to (re)implement and I can begin working on new bits. I began this project (oh, so long ago) as a learning exercise, and it seems to serve its purpose well. I'm surprised at how much better I …
March 12, 2011
My hard drive crashed yesterday. I've lost about three weeks of work. I was fortunate enough to have an extra drive, so I didn't have to spend any money; but this, on top of upcoming eye surgery (vitrectomy, don't click if you're squeamish) in a couple weeks, has taken much wind out of my sails.
March 01, 2011
I haven't updated in a while. That's largely because what work I've been able to get done has been in tightening up the code, so it isn't really sexy or showcase-able. Also, I had decided it was past time to get Pac-Hedron coming through the speakers as well as the monitor. I tried to use XACT, and…
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