July 12th, 2009 by Boon
Coming Along...
Things have been moving a bit slowly. I just had 3 weeks off work, in which time I hoped to finish the editor. Unfortunately, I didn’t hit that milestone, but I did make a lot of progress. While the first few months of this project were spent learning XNA and getting myself up to speed not only with C#, but also with the basics of programming design patterns and working up a bit of an understanding of good programmatic flow and structure, moving over to a WinForms application has presented a whole bunch of new challenges. Like trying to decide if this was really a big fat stupid idea :/ Read the rest of this entry »
June 20th, 2009 by Boon
It's a window. And it's way more exciting than you think it is.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted. Been busy with project wrap up at work, but now I have some spare time I intend to hammer away on PixelPoet – the editor for SagaEngine, which we’ll be using to put together our first game. Until recently I’d been building the editor entirely within XNA, but then I came to the problem of trying to design a usable interface without access to any of the Winform controls, and realised I’d have no choice but to go, yet again, back to attempting to build an editor that worked within a windows form. Read the rest of this entry »
April 25th, 2009 by Boon
A small update on sagaEngine (an increasingly appropriate name, mind you). I realised I was handling input wrong for the editor. Each entity which required input (each button, palette swatch, scroll bar, draggable object, etc.) was individually checking for input, and passing around a whole bunch of global variables through a singleton to avoid registering multiple input events – for example, if a button is in a window and that window is over the stage, and I click my mouse, I don’t want the editor to think I clicked the button, the window, AND the stage. Unfortunately, my editor doesn’t understand common english and no amount of screaming abuse at it to “JUST F***ING WORK” seemed to have any effect.
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April 16th, 2009 by Boon
I haven’t updated my ‘daily creativity’ blog for some time now. Not because I haven’t been doing creative stuff in my spare time, but simply because what I’m doing isn’t very fun to look at. Code. URGH. So for the sake of looking productive to the two people who sometimes read this blog, I thought I’d expand a bit on the entity > component based design methodology I’ve been following since my last code refactor. I know – exciting stuff. Hold onto your cushions, people. This is going to be WILD.
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March 31st, 2009 by Boon
I’ve been struggling to figure out a problem with my code. For some reason, my partitioning system wasn’t working. On paper, it was perfect. Unfortunately, my PC can’t read my handwriting and refused to believe me. I had a feeling I knew roughly where the problem was – buried deep within a huge chunk of horrifying arithmetic that I must have written in the midst of a siezure, because everytime I look at it I go completely blank and wake up lying on the couch sobbing into a coffee mug.
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March 30th, 2009 by Boon
I decided to implement some form of culling to my engine, for the sake of performance. I don’t need it yet, so technically this would fall under premature optimisation, but I know I’m going to have to cull collision data at least, so I didn’t think it could hurt.
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March 20th, 2009 by Boon
One of the biggest pitfalls for me recently has been in trying to make my engine one-size-fits-all. A road block that is probably more frustrating than trying to eat steak with a straw.
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March 18th, 2009 by Boon
I spent some time looking at the available tools for building/prototyping games. I wanted something that was relatively easy (or at the least, had a good community and many tutorials available), but also powerful enough to do what I wanted it to do. Being that I had no idea what I wanted it to do, this was a bit tricky.
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March 17th, 2009 by Boon
An image that represents complexity beyond the capability of words to describe.
Over the last couple of months I’ve finally had the time to start playing through a backlog of video games that have been little more than expensive paperweights on my desk since I bought them; Fallout 3, Crysis, Farcry 2, Dead Space, Gears of War 2… and a bunch of non-FPSOMGEXPLOSIONS games that I can’t recall right now (seems I like me some explosions). But inbetween all the enormous, flashy particle effects and exploding body parts, I was struck with an overwhelming urge for pixels. Big, chunky, melt-your-eyes-out-of-your-head pixels, as only the 80’s could deliver.
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