Random Ramblings in Programming, Life & Whatnot..

Blog and website combined: www.mhgames.org

2009-07-21T19:11:00.000+03:00

Hi, to all my readers (yeah all the two of you! ;) ):
I have created a new website, that is a combination of my old game site and this blog. No need to worry, the blogging will continue as usual, just head over to the brand new site at http://www.mhgames.org and browse away!

With this post I'm freezing this blog, no more updates here. I will let it stay online for archival purposes, although all this content IS already imported to my new blog so nothing is lost. :)

Thank you for your interest, hoping to see you at mhgames.org!

-- Mika

Geez, it's been a while...

2009-07-05T11:59:00.000+03:00

Time for an update, I reckon.

Although PolyAnim is generally on hold due to the game project, I made a few optimizations (reducing garbage generation mostly, still quite high though) to it. As for the game, I'm still working on the engine side -- BUT -- I've written down some things on the game plot and other design! I have a vision of the game beginning, but the actual plot still needs to be thought up. Sooo yes, I don't have much at all, but it's a start. :D Luckily I don't have too much pressures on the story side, as even if it ends up sucking donkey balls (excuse my language), it's still infinitely better than the "stories" of my previous games combined! ;)

Meanwhile, in the programming land...

It's been so long since my last update, I've worked on so many things I don't even remember them all. Instead of trying to remember the details, I'll just list the things I do remember:

First of all, I started using revision control for the source code (+ related resources). Instead of using the familiar Subversion, I decided to try something new and thus chose Git. All in all, this helps me keeping track of the things I do and also serves as a backup in case my computer decides to blow up. Git is nice since you can use it locally, on any directory without a server.
VBO (Vertex Buffer Object) support. This means storing geometry to the GPU and rendering it in one batch. Basically it means better performance. Using VBOs I could optimize the text rendering by buffering the rendered glyphs into a batch, up until the buffer fills up (or the texture changes). The buffered glyphs are rendered in one go, and the process starts again.
Particle systems! I started doing a "particle engine" a while back, got it done except for the different emitters. I still need to finish this up: complete the basic point emitter, add more emitters and add the ability to load particle systems from resources (perhaps a YAML or XML file). VBOs are used to render the systems, when supported by the GPU.
Lighting system improvements. Lights can now have different effects on them, like flickering, fading and pulsating. The effects are defined in a YAML file of properties.
Player character designs. I'm not sure if this guy ends up being the final character, but might be. I did a quick idle animation for him (need to adjust that a bit, though), I should add a walk cycle next as it's quite boring to watch now. (The previous animation, test from PolyAnim, did walk!)
And now for something completely different: Water effects. Yes. This is mostly eye candy (as Box2D doesn't support buoyancy yet, I think the water is only going to be used for restricting player movements as in the player can't swim..) so it made no sense to do it at this phase of development. But I did it anyway, I'm childish like that.. :P The water reflects the scenery above (provided the GPU supports Render-to-texture) and I even wrote a fragment shader to make it all wavy and twirling..

I have noticed a problem during the development of this game, which was not apparent on my previous game projects (since they were much shorter): I have this annoying tendency to start working on different (sub)projects even when the previous stuff is still not finished. That means I have heaps of unfinished subsystems in this engine, like the particles, scripting, triggers, etc. And I'm already thinking of doing the sprite system and other things as well! I mean, what the hell, it should be bloody obvious I should concentrate on the unfinished things and finish them.. :P Argh, hopefully I can sort this mess out. Speaking of which, I guess I should start coding the particle system to an usable state.

And of course, to all aspiring game developers: design the game first, damnit! Figure out the plot, setting, characters and whatnot BEFORE getting sucked in the bottomless fathoms of Teh Engine(tm)! Yes, I really should take my own advice some day! :P

More progress: Quad trees

2009-04-27T19:52:00.000+03:00

Today's subject: quad trees. Here is a nice little tutorial on the subject.

Until now I was using a naive method of rendering the level shapes (polygons and circles): I looped through them all, did a bounding box check* to see if they're visible in camera, and rendered if they were. This works fine for small levels (and indeed for the current test level, although I keep adding more and more stuff to it -- nevertheless it's still quite modest in size), but for larger levels it can become a problem, especially on slower machines.

So I decided to add quad trees to speed up the level rendering process. The level shapes are stored in three different quad trees (one for collidables, one for background and one for foreground shapes). The trees are queried for visible objects, which then get rendered. Works nice and smooth, and the performance goes through the roof, right? Well... not quite.

Since the level shapes can have various opacities, it is important to render them exactly in the order that is specified during level creation (in the Inkscape SVG file). In the triangulation & convex decomposition process the original shapes get split up. It was not a problem during the naive approach -- the shape parts were in a list and the original order was preserved. Quad tree on the other hand doesn't necessarily preserve that order, to my great disappointment. It makes sense of course, I just hadn't thought about it until I saw the effect: a few of the level shapes were rendered out of order.

At first I tried to come up with a way to partition the quad tree so that the order would stay correct, but that didn't work too well. In the end I ended up just sorting the queried objects before rendering. That works perfectly, but introduces a new speed hit; the sort. So in all, the supposedly great speed increases of the mighty quad tree turned out to be only a modest gain, since I now need to sort the visible pieces.. Still, I'm confident that the quad trees were worth it, as the levels keep getting bigger and more complex it will surely show more greater effect. :) And at least I found that enormous bug in the bounding box culling! ;)

Check out a few debug screens below, quad trees are the white lines.

*) I actually found one of the most stupid bugs I've ever done in the bounding box check code. It was actually checking bounds from the world origin (0,0) to the object lower right corner, instead of from the object upper left to lower right! That means that the bounding boxes got very big and only the objects to right and down from the camera view were culled properly.. Ouch.

Engine progressing slowly but not-so-steadily..

2009-03-29T16:29:00.003+03:00

Once again, I've been improving the platformer engine. I have done a lot of internal restructuring which isn't directly visible on the screen. Remember, this project started as a quick hack testing JBox2D, so the oldest parts of the code were a total mess. Cleaning it up, I implemented modules, that the engine keeps processing. These modules (e.g. GameModule, MenuModule, OptionsMenuModule) are basically separate states and can be ran separately of each other. They also support transitions, so a title screen could fade into the main menu, which could then roll off the screen presenting the actual game. Currently I have an initial loading screen that fades into the game. Yes, all this doesn't sound very exciting (and in reality it isn't), but it makes the code much more cleaner and modular. Hopefully, one my biggest pet peeves -- which is writing the menus after the game is complete -- will be a more pleasant experience with these module supports in place. :) I still have some old physics related code there which needs some refactoring love, so there's still work to be done..

I also did the different rendering path thing I was talking about earlier. The best rendering path allows for some neat shader effects, I did initial tests with a distortion shader -- it was nice but didn't work with the bloom effect, something I hadn't realised before. I guess I will need to implement somekind of a post processing subsystem, that does the bloom among other effects. Oh well. :)

Another thing I added is an ingame profiler. While extremely simple, it still presents some very useful data so I can see what part of the game takes most time at runtime. So far the slowest thing is the text rendering. Luckily that won't be a problem, since I don't plan having much text on screen in the game (apart from dialogue, but that can be prerendered into a texture). In the current demo I draw the yellow text with a nice shadowy border around it -- that is a very brute force approach which just draws the same string a bunch of times. That's very slow. Also the text rendering could probably be optimized more, should the need arise.

I've been also improving the controller support (yes, the game will support game pads! That's the first time in my [released] games -- better late than never, right! ;) ). The basic support was actually added months ago, I just forgot to mention about it earlier. It's still pretty much unusable, since the buttons cannot be assigned: it just uses the first two buttons on the game pad. And that varies per model, a lot. On mine they're positioned logigally, but on another pad they were almost unusable.. So the game needs a controller configuration screen, where the player can assign the actions to the preferred controller buttons. But that's thinking way too much ahead, I need the game first! :P

One more thing: I made a simple test release of the engine, so that I could collect some data on how it works on different machines. (I mainly test it on two computers, which isn't that much.) Head over to the JavaGaming.org forums and take it for a spin! Hopefully somebody confirms it works on Mac OS X as well.. :) [Update: Yes it does!] By the way, I will probably take the thing down in some time, since it's still in very early stages and doesn't have any gameplay in it anyways..

That is all this time, stay tuned for more! EDIT: I just realised I had used this very same line to end the previous posting.. Am I really this unoriginal!? Apparently, yes. Yes I am.

Platformer progress

2009-02-10T07:48:00.001+02:00

After a long break I've started working on the platformer engine again. I've added a material system, where every level shape (i.e. polygon) has a material assigned to them, which defines the texture and physical properties (friction, restitution and density) for the shape. Later on this could be used to trigger different sounds or other effects based on where the player walks, for example.

I improved the lighting system to support rotating lights and finally enabled them to be placed to the level in Inkscape (the lights were previously completely randomly generated). To test these new features, I abandoned the ugly mess of a test map I had been using from the start, and built my first "real" level. It's not too detailed yet (and yes, ugly in some points too!) but at least it's better than some random polygons. I do plan to expand it to test new features as they get implemented. Check out these screenshots to see the brand new level in action. :) Disclaimer: All the textures etc. and even the whole style are temporary and not representative of the final game (if I manage to complete it some day), purely because I have not decided on the final style yet! I may opt for more stylished visuals, as in not using "realistic" (photograph based) textures, contrary to what you see in these images. But as I said, I'm not sure yet.

Speaking of new features, I added support for "floor shapes" - shapes that act as a floor but not as a ceiling. That means you can stand on them but jump through them only from below. You can also drop down when needed. These things are so common in platformers, so I had to have them in. Unfortunately I had to restrict them to be straight horizontal lines - "floor lines" like I call them in the code - due to technical difficulties with the Box2D physics. At first I tried doing this with Box2D sensors/contact listener but it seemed like a bad hack and would probably have not worked correctly in some cases, so I deemed it too much trouble and went for a simpler approach. My biggest gripe with Box2D is actually the contact listener, it's somewhat hard to use it nicely..

One of the things I'll start coding next is sprites, which will be used in several places: as normal level decoration, level decals, in the background and so forth. Currently everything you see is crafted from polygons, which is wasteful on the resources. In the current test level, at least the mailbox, arrow sign and mushrooms should be sprites.

That is all this time (got to run to the school soon.. :/), stay tuned for more! ;)

On Fallout..

2009-01-26T17:41:00.001+02:00

Last week I finished Fallout 3. I somewhat rushed it through, as the urge to start playing Fallout 2 had grown too strong! :P I probably continue playing FO3 from an earlier save later, since I had heaps of places I didn't get to visit and a good deal of unfinished quests as well.

So what do I think of the game? Well.. It's a great game - much better than Oblivion, for example - looks great and sounds great. I enjoyed my time on the wastes a great deal. But... how could I put this... It's not Fallout! :/ While there are plenty of things done right (the VATS system works quite nicely!), it's still missing much of the good old Fallouty spirit.. The biggest problem is the dialogue: it's just not that good, especially when compared to FO/FO2. NPCs feel like answering or quest machines. Where's the humour? Not much of it left. The ending was not very good either, although not as bad as some people claim it to be.

Nevertheless, as I said, I enjoyed the game a lot, and will be playing it again. :) Perhaps they should've called it Fallout: Something something something, though. I had a few problems with the game: three freezes (two of them while approaching Evergreen Mills) where I must restart PS3, one crash and several little (graphical / physics) bugs. Not too bad, I guess. Lots of PS3 players have complained about worse problems.

And after completing FO3, I've been playing FO2 again, after many years. As I mentioned in my last post, I never actually finished the game and have held FO1 as the better game. Let's see if the order changes after I finish the part two. It's very hard though (at least in the beginning), much harder than I remembered. I think I've hit a bug though (I'm using Killaps unofficial patch 1.02.25 - highly recommended, I've yet to try the Restoration Project), skip the following paragraph to avoid FO2 spoilers.

*SPOILERS* I cannot seem to be able to give Bishops holotape and the Raider account book to Lynette in Vault City. I wiped out Bishops in New Reno, found the holotape in the safe. On my way to Vault City, I cleaned out the Raiders cave. At Vault City, I can tell several people I've neutralized the raider threat, and they say I should tell the First Citizen, but I cannot give the account book to Lynette. Nor the holotape. I tried before doing the Gecko power plant quests and after - doesn't work. Oh well, I guess I cannot complete those quests then. *END SPOILERS*

Now I just need to plug GOG.com, the Good Old Games! The service is excellent, so far I've bought FO1, FO2 and Gothic. The games come prepatched and DRM free, it's great. :) Good stuff, highly recommended.

Holidays and gaming

2009-01-02T11:16:00.005+02:00

First post of 2009, yay. I've been taking a break from, well, almost everything: school, work, programming (yes, even that!) and instead spent time with family, playing games and being lazy in general. Isn't that just what holidays are about? :)

I have played lot of games lately on the PS3, mostly Little Big Planet and in these last few days Fallout 3. Little Big Planet is really fun, especially when played together with others (in my case that means my fiancée Annemari <3). style="font-style: italic;">Little Dead Space level was brilliant.

As for Fallout 3 (got it for Christmas), I'm very enthusiastic about it so far. * Feels a lot like Oblivion in places, but that doesn't bother me since I like Oblivion. My current Oblivion save has almost 60 hours put into it, and the game isn't nearly finished (I'm currently on the Shivering Isles expansion). The main quest is a bit dull, I don't like cleaning the Oblivion gates (hence Shivering Isles).. Fallout 3 on the other hand seems much better and more interesting. Maybe that's because there are hundreds of games in the generic fantasy world but only a handful (I'm only aware of Wasteland and Fallout 1 & 2) in a post-nuclear environment. This time Bethesda even hired more than three voice actors, wow! The game looks and sounds great, obviously. I guess I'll comment it more after I've finished the game.

After I'm done with Fallout 3 (not too soon, I reckon), there's a lot of unfinished stuff to play: GTA IV, Oblivion, Lego Batman.. :) In fact, I might even start Fallout 2 again, as I have never actually finished it(!). The original Fallout I've finished with at least three or four characters. Good times.

*) Yes, I'm aware the PS3 version is the worst of the bunch. However, it has trophies now and I haven't had any problems so far, apart from some minor bugs like a severed molerat head that just couldn't stop rolling around. The lack of anti-aliasing is a bit distracting, but nevertheless I can recommend the PS3 version... unless you got other options. I didn't (my PC is a bit too old).

Random things..

2008-11-18T18:00:00.001+02:00

Before getting carried away with the platformer rambling, again, here's something about PolyAnim. Yesterday I added automatic polygon triangulation for concave polygons into PolyAnims LWJGL-renderer. This is mainly for convenience, since the triangulation is quite expensive - it remains to be seen if this is fast enough for more general use. At least with simpler scenes it might work alright. Convex polygons should still be preferred for speed reasons, but I admit it: they're major pain in the ass when animating. It's cumbersome to build and animate non-convex shapes from several convex pieces.. Hopefully somebody will contribute faster triangulation code at some point! ;)

What else.. I've been working a lot on the platformer engine. JBox2D got an update, so I ditched the old polygonal approach (which had a lot of problems, as Box2D is very picky about the shape of the collision polygons) and implemented the collision geometry using the new feature: edge chains. They work nicely and are just perfect for this kind of usage. I use triangulation with convex decomposition now only for the renderer, which luckily doesn't mind very thin triangles. I've added more eye candy as well, generation of level outlines and support for background/foreground polygons (which are not collidable, of course). I still need to implement other decoration elements, such as a stripe of grass blades running along top edge of things, for example. Parallax scrolling is something I want to have in too, I mean, if you're making a side scroller, why shouldn't there be parallax scrolling!? =)

And finally I did bite the bullet and implemented those damn PBuffers (enjoy the picture there, that's them buffers giving me hard time!). They work okay when FBO is not available, but they're yucky to code. Luckily LWJGL makes it a bit less painful than it truly is. Looking back, in Funguloids things were almost too easy, as I had Ogre at my disposal! Along with PBuffers the thing now supports plain old frame buffer copying as well, though I couldn't be bothered to make bloom work with it (lighting does, though, which is more important anyway).

While fighting with PBuffers, I noticed I could make the bloom much faster and more importantly allow for more shader effects if I used RTT (render-to-texture) same size as the screen dimensions. I could then render the scene only once to the RTT (currently I have to render twice!), have bloom shaders use that and actually do the final additive composition in the fragment shader too. Having a screen sized RTT would allow some neat shader effects like screen distortions and shock waves. There's one problem, many cards don't support rectangular (non power-of-two) RTTs.. The solution: separate rendering paths. I would implement several render paths with varying amount of shader and RTT usage, then determine what the host system supports and have things running nice and solid. Sounds like bit of work to me, but I guess the end results would be worth the trouble. We shall see. :)

Oh, and I've finished my bachelor's thesis, like a month ago. Forgot to mention that earlier. :P Now I'd need to decide if I continue to write master's thesis on the same subject, or choose something completely different. If only I could think of a subject having to do with game programming, that would certainly help with the motivation..

Shader goodness: Bloom!

2008-10-20T18:13:00.000+03:00

In the last post I talked about lighting, this time it's shaders and more specifically bloom. I must say I like the effect when it's used subtly as a mood enhancement and dislike it in it's quite common burn-your-eyes-out -form..

For the platformer game I'm planning to use the effect for a nice and quiet dreamlike feel, although I'm still not sure what kind of game it will be (except that it's a 4-way scrolling platformer!).. And as I often do, I find myself getting carried away doing all sorts of graphical effects (lighting, shaders) when I don't even have the basic game mechanics in place! Can't help it though, I must have some eye candy going on to keep myself motivated in a project. *shrugs*

So I coded a quick & dirty shader support to the engine, and today I've been trying to get the bloom working. And now it does. :) I'm still not done with it, needs some tweaking - and that's somewhat impossible right now since I have no final assets for the game yet! Everything you see in those screens is temporary and/or random. For anyone interested, here's some technical details on the subject.

I based the implementation on the GLSL bloom shaders from Funguloids, which in turn are modified from Ogre sample shaders. I'm still a beginner with the shader programming as I may have mentioned, so having anything to work from was invaluable. I tweaked the shaders to get the subtle look I was aiming for.

I'm using two small render textures (which are FBOs, no support for Pbuffers yet - and I think I'll have to do those at some point, as my laptop doesn't support FBOs), 128x128 in dimension and one bigger 512x512 RT. I render the scene normally to the bigger RT. The blurring is then done in two passes: first the scene RT gets rendered to 128x128 RT #1 using a horizontal blur shader (it also does some luminance stuff to have the bright parts more bright and dim parts more dim). Then RT #1 gets rendered to RT #2, this time with a vertical blur shader. Finally the RT #2 contents are blended additively over a normal 1:1 render of the scene. It needs quite a lot of tweaking, but I think it looks quite nice now.

In another news, my thesis is now almost complete! ^^

Let there be LIGHT!

2008-10-16T15:26:00.000+03:00

Wouldn't you know, after I complained about lack of coding motivation in my last post, I started hacking at my Java platformer engine the very same evening! I finished the Inkscape SVG importer, now I can create the levels in Inkscape using polygons, rectangles and circles.

Last couple of days I've been implementing a lighting system to the engine (and preliminary scripting support before that). The lighting system is based on very simple ideas and was quite easy to implement. No troubles whatsoever, I was actually surprised. First I was contemplating on doing it using pixel shaders, but that would've required much more work (still learning the shader stuff) and I'm not sure if I could have pulled it off anyway. I still need to incorporate some shader support to the engine if I want to have a bloom effect later on.. Pixel shader lighting would have allowed to have normal maps for the textures though, now that would have looked very nice if done properly! Oh well.

Instead I went for texture based approach using a single FBO (Frame-Buffer-Object) where the lights get rendered to (additive blending naturally). Then with help of some stencil buffer magic, the light map is rendered over the scene using multiply blending. Stencil buffer is needed because it makes no sense to render the lights/shadows over the background (i.e. sky in my platformer). That would be very unrealistic (you can't really cast shadows on the sky, now can you?) not to mention ugly. For top-down games no stencil buffer would be needed, unless the area that gets lit must be restricted somehow.

This technique allows completely dynamic lights of any shape (like flashlight cones) using one render-to-texture (FBO in my case). The light map doesn't even need to be large, since (at least with soft lights) it's hard to see the difference between 256x256 or 512x512. I'm using 256x256 currently, but even 128x128 looks fine. The system works nicely and I've yet to optimize anything about it: for starters I'm currently rendering each light, no matter if they're actually visible or not!

Overall it suits my purposes perfectly - carefully arranged lighting can make a tremendous difference in the feeling and apprearance of the game. :)

Here's a few sample screenshots. Please ignore all the graphics etc., as the level is just random polygons and lights are literally randomly generated. And the background is lifted off Jewels. :P

Long Time No See

2008-10-08T13:30:00.000+03:00

So what's going on for me in these days? Well, that depends.

Not much coding, unfortunately (or is it unfortunate, don't know really.. :P). The fact is, while the Qt Jambi patch is now out and indeed fixed the problem I was having, I haven't found out the motivation to work on the editor. That doesn't mean I've abandoned the project, not at all. I have these periods when I just don't feel like doing much hobby coding, if any. But no worries, some day I find myself hacking at it like no tomorrow! ;)

Guess what has been draining my free time recently? PS3. No kidding. PS3, that black monolith, a product of pure genious (not unlike the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey!). That's mostly what's going on here! Oblivion (GOTY edition), GTA IV, Uncharted.. Oh, and the wondrous Blu-ray capabilities!

Speaking of movies (well, technically at least), I finally updated the movie list with latest additions. Unfortunately I had forgotten most of their purchase dates and prices, so I couldn't add those.. Note to self: enter new movies to the "database" in much shorter time span from the purchase than this. I'm also celebrating my first Blu-ray movie, I Am Legend. It was a nice flick and the picture looked awesome even on my 32" HD-ready TV. Looking forward to having more BRs. ^^ (damn they're expensive, though!)

In other news, I'm still working on my Bacherlor's thesis.. Hopefully I'll get it finished in few weeks tops. That is all for now.

A quick update..

2008-08-23T11:07:00.001+03:00

I haven't been coding much, but instead writing my Bachelor's thesis. There's still plenty of work to do before it's finished. Well, serves me right for not starting it earlier in the Summer like I intended to.. ;)

School starts in September again, yawn. The Qt Jambi update I'm waiting for might also happen in Sept.

Oh, I went to see The Dark Knight again - it was even better this time, like I thought it would. 5/5 it is.. :)

Why so serious?

2008-07-25T21:36:00.001+03:00

Saw The Dark Knight today. Awesome movie! I'm still digesting it, but it feels like a solid *****/***** for me. Now, just waiting for the dvd release.. :)

Somewhere Back In Time 2008

2008-07-20T22:55:00.001+03:00

Just a short post, for a change: Went to see Iron Maiden yesterday, it was great! \m/ Above is a photo I took - one of the few that actually turned out alright..

In addition, I managed to wash my cell phone in 40 degrees Celcius two days ago. It doesn't work any more. :(

Oh, and PolyAnim now has some Java Web Start demos up at http://code.google.com/p/polyanim/wiki/WebStartDemos..

Inkscape to the rescue!

2008-07-13T16:15:00.000+03:00

You know what, after starting to write a simple editor to be used before the proper animation editor gets finished (not anytime soon..), I started to think - what am I doing? Why to make a crappy editor, while I could use something else to do the job, and way better (yet I hope and believe that the custom made editor will be the most comfortable way of creating the animations).

Once again, Inkscape proved its worth. SVG was relatively easy to parse (except the damn transformation matrix - I wasted hours searching for clues how to decompose the original scaling and rotation from the matrix, finally got it working though..), and the Inkscape layers turned nicely into animation key frames. It requires quite a lot of patience, and my conversion tool is dodgy to say the least, but it will enable the creation of animations for PolyAnim!

So I wasted more hours, and created the very first proper PolyAnim animation, in Inkscape. After seeing the animated dude moving on the screen, I felt very pleased about how it all turned out. :) Rare moments, those. Hell, I even made a video to celebrate the event! ;) In case anyone would want to try the Inkscape route, I also wrote a tutorial about it.

Check out this screen shot from the demo, and compare it to the earlier shot a post or two back.. The biggest dude is the original, the others are rendered using the various render modifiers.

PolyAnim progress..

2008-07-11T15:44:00.000+03:00

Well, I've made a logo. See? ;)

Okay, there's a bit more. The core library itself is in (somewhat arbitary) versi0n 0.5. Most of the important functionality is in there already. Anchors and different blending modes are still missing. Read more about the current state of features here.

There's still a big mystery in this project, for I have no idea if the code is fast enough for the intended usage (which is game sprites)! The tests I have made are composed only of a few polygons, which is not very demanding.. Therefore I've started the work on the animation editor, using Qt Jambi. But alas, I have bumped into a severe bug, which unfortunately crashes the Java VM. While waiting for that to be solved (the bug fix is scheduled for the next Qt Jambi patch release), I'm wondering what I'm going to do in the mean time.

Should I hack a quick and dirty editor in Swing? Or work on the other (unimportant) parts of the real editor? Implement more features to the library? I don't know, I'd rather not add more stuff to the lib, because in that case the editor's going to have a lot of catching up to do.. :P Perhaps I could throw together a stress test using lots of random shapes.. Hmm..

Or I could succumb to the goodness that is (J)Box2D, like I momentarily did about a week ago. I made some platformer physics tests with it. Good stuff. :) All this is obviously for a grand purpose: finally making a (platformer) game that's perhaps a bit more than just nice and simple 10-30 minutes fun. That's my intention anyway, we'll see what happens.

Introducing PolyAnim!

2008-07-04T22:29:00.000+03:00

I decided to unveil the project I've been working on lately. It's a polygonal (i.e. vector) animation library called PolyAnim, now up at Google Code. First things first: I'm not trying to compete with Flash, this thing is mainly meant as a game sprite replacement. :)

Too bad there's still not anything nice to show yet.. :P The stuff I have so far is a few hard coded animations consisting of couple of triangles and squares, it's not very sexy to look at, mmkay? But all that will change once I get the editor going and can finally make something cool with this thing. So, be patient. ^^

Just to prove I've achieved *something*, here's an ugly screenshot of the test program. I'd say it looks better when it's animating... I mean, really. Hey, it really does.. *sigh*

Getting tired of C++?

2008-06-24T07:48:00.001+03:00

I'm starting to notice, that I've been probably spoiled beyond all redemption by the wonders of Java and Python. And by that, I mean the general relaxed feeling when developing, such as not having to deal with memory management* and so on. As I've been working with Java and Python all this spring (plus we use Java at work), now writing C++ for the sekrit projekt(tm) feels cumbersome.. Dealing with const references, virtual destructors, templates and whatnot just doesn't have the same effect for me it once did.. What's happening to me? Am I really getting tired of C++? :/

But wait! There's more.. *bows head in shame*

I've been further tempted to the Dark Side by my very recent interest in Qt Jambi and LWJGL.. :P I mean, what the hell, is there really anything stopping me of doing the sekrit projekt(tm) in Java, using LWJGL and Qt Jambi for the editor (ooops, slipped that out!)? I think not!

So.. Perhaps we hear more about these shocking developments later on. Perhaps.

*) Incidentally, I'm doing my bachelor's thesis on "Automatic Garbage Collection In Programming Languages".. ;)

Intellisense in Visual C++ Express, and getting it working with Qt 4.4

2008-06-14T00:18:00.006+03:00

Visual Studio Express editions are nice and free, but Visual C++ 2005/2008 Express seem to be lacking in the code completion (or Intellisense as it's officially known) department. If I recall correctly, in MSVC++ 2003 (version 7.1, that is) Intellisense worked perfectly. When writing new code, Intellisense picked it right away, even without saving the source file. I never had any problems with it.

In MSVC++ 2005 and 2008 (Express editions, I haven't tried the full featured versions - although I doubt they'd work any better..), the code completion has definitely taken a step backward. It just doesn't work as nicely as it did in MSVC++ 2003. It seems to parse the source files quite lazily, and sometimes just doesn't work at all. When given a moment, it works again. I've found out that switching between Release and Debug from the toolbar dropdown causes "Updating Intellisense..." to appear in the status bar. That helps, but it's still not very convenient.

As I recently installed and compiled Qt 4.4, I noticed that Qt classes would not be in the code completion list at all. I included Qt's include-directory to the "VC++ Directories" in Options. That wasn't enough. Finally I got it working by including "$(QTDIR)\src" to the "Source files", and listing all the Qt include subdirectories separately in "Include files".

Status update

2008-06-09T16:13:00.000+03:00

Just a quick status update: school is now over (apart from one exam), the application project course that lasted for four months is also finished. I'm glad that it's done. :) I've started going to work as well.

My sekrit projekt(tm) is proceeding, albeit quite slowly. Today I have coded it a lot, though. It's still too early to be shown - not that there is anything interesting to show in any case.. Not yet. But fear not: I'll write about it once it is developed a bit more. ^^

So yes. I'm still alive.

Plans for summer - Revisited

2008-05-26T09:09:00.002+03:00

Change of plans: I don't think I'll do the CSSTint-rewrite this time.. I've got a much more interesting idea. While it's still too early to talk about this, it involves Qt 4.4 (yay!) and OpenGL. I will write more about it when (or if) I have something to show. =)

Right now I'm wondering whether to go with SourceForge like I always have, or to use Google Code. Google Code seems nice and simple, as I'll only need SVN and some pages (or a wiki). And yes, it'll be open source. ;)

"Jewels" version 1.0 is out

2008-05-18T17:02:00.000+03:00

Just wanted to mention that version 1.0 of Jewels is finally released. I'm glad it's out of my hands now, phew! :) Download it from http://www.codeplex.com/jewels.

"Jewels - Now with a Game Settings -menu!"

Qt 4.4 released + plans for summer

2008-05-08T08:11:00.000+03:00

Qt 4.4 framework was recently released. Hopefully PyQT 4.4 soon follows. Qt just rocks. =) Having been working with Java Swing (*cough*h o r r i b l e*cough*) these last four months, Qt 4.4 brings some light to the end of the tunnel..

Now that that's out of the table, I can talk a little about a project I'm perhaps going to do next summer. It's about remaking CSSTint. While I think the current Windows version of CSSTint is quite nice, it's still... well, Windows-only. While I am using wxWidgets, it's still doesn't work in Linux properly - I have tried. I'm doing some nasty, ugly hacks in the code, so no wonder. All this could probably be fixed, but for the sake of learning and for an interesting experience, I've been thinking of rewriting the whole shebang.

I'm sure I will use Qt for the job, but I'm still undecided between C++ and Python. Learning Python has been interesting for me, as I've blogged before. Python version would also work on Windows as is, which won't hurt even if the original is also for Windows. On the other hand I could reuse some of my non-GUI CSSTint code if I went with C++.. Decisions, decisions...

Anyway, that's my current plan - things might still change. :)

Why my stuff is Open Source?

2008-05-04T12:48:00.002+03:00

I have several reasons why most of my games and programs are Open Source. Here are some of them.

Let's consider an example. Why is Formido available for Windows, Linux, MacOS X, BeOS, Xbox, AmigaOS and even OS/2..? The answer is obvious. Should I have kept it closed source, it'd be for Windows only, and maybe Linux.

Here's another example. Recently I was contacted regarding a bug in Funguloids that prevented it from working with Ogre versions 1.4.6 and newer. I had no idea of this bug, as I haven't personally touched the game since its last release, which uses Ogre 1.4.1. Things have been happening on the community front however, as Funguloids has found its way into Ubuntu Hardy (for which I'm very grateful! :)) After exchanging a few e-mails, the person who reported the bug presented me a patch (an one-liner, even) that fixes the problem. I didn't even get started examining the issue myself! Very nice.

Also, as I have learned a lot by reading source code, I feel kind of obliged to do the same.. I'm not worried about people stealing my code - the code's not that good to begin with. ;)

Why I use Linux more than Windows on these days..

2008-04-28T10:21:00.000+03:00

Yesterday I dug up my Jewels-project from under the thick layer of frost it had gathered during the winter days. As it is a XNA-game, I have to boot into Windows to develop it. I installed XNA 2.0 and started porting the game. After a few head scratchers I finally got the game working properly in XNA 2.0. Great!

I'll try to finally finish that game, so I have been making some improvements and fixes. I need to add the timed play mode, and the do the game settings menus.. *sigh* Damn, why games must have settings menus..!?

Anyway, I noticed that I needed a key typing sound for the highscore screen where the player enters their name. You know, the old typewriter sound. So, I browsed my earlier game sounds, found a sound, double clicked it. Winamp starts. At this point it occured to me: oh crap! I have Winamp set to playlist looping, which is what I like when I listen to music. However, double clicking a file replaces the current playlist and plays the single file looped. In case of a short sound clip, the sound repeats quite often. It sounds a bit annoying, but that's not the worst effect here.

You see, on this machine, Winamp somehow cannot handle a short sound clip played on repeat (I only remembered that *after* I had activated the file!) - it crashes. And hard. So Windows presents me a message the Winamp had to close. When I click on Close, the computer reboots cold. Same as when I press the reset switch. And that annoys me. This has happened several times, and it's annoying. A cold reboot doesn't exactly do wonders on your HD.. :(

When Windows finally comes up (that's another thing, it takes ages to start up - although I do have years worth of crap installed, so no wonder..), it presents me a familiar little dialog:

Feels like coming home.

My adventures with Python / PyQT

2008-04-26T15:26:00.002+03:00

First of all, let me just say that Python + PyQt just rocks.

I've been recently learning Python. Just for fun, basically. Additional benefit is that now I have a better understanding on how to cope with Zope/Plone at my work. Anyway, apart from the Zope/Plone stuff the first thing I did in Python was a command-line script that allows creation and handling of .mpk files that I've used in a couple of my games. MPK or MPak is a simple WAD-like format that stores all the game files in a single package file. I had a C++ CLI application that did the job, but it was really a piece of crap..

So I deciced to write a replacement for that app, in Python. The finished script (mpak.py) is much nicer to use and works better. I wrote it in Linux and it worked as is in Windows too - neat.

Then, I wanted to try GUI stuff and went with PyQt. I had a simple DVD collection management software called MyDVDCollection that I had written in .NET using C#. It worked, but was not too good either. So I began hacking away with PyQt and now I have PyDVDCollection (pretty clever names, huh? ;)) that I use for maintaining my collection. It has less code and more features than its .NET counterpart. It works in Linux, naturally, and also beautifully in Vista.

As you can probably tell, I'm very impressed with PyQt and the Python language, and I'll be using them in the future as well. =)

I Have No Delete Key

2008-04-25T13:21:00.003+03:00

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS aka Hardy Heron was released yesterday. I had previously installed 7.10 aka Gutsy Gibbon on my new laptop, and upgraded to Hardy last night. The update process went quite nicely, except for one strange thing: my delete key no longer works! O.o

When I press delete, the laptops WLAN led goes on - nothing else happens. When I press it again, the led goes off. [Homer impression:]"Led goes on, led goes off, led goes on, led goes off...". (sorry about that - just when they're going to release the season 11 on dvd!?)

On this laptop (Acer Extensa 5220) the WLAN led is always inverted in Ubuntu; when the WLAN is in use, the led is off. That doesn't bother me at all. However, I would like to get my delete key to work again. I use that one quite a lot in typing/programming, and well, in deleting things...

I made a thread about this on the Ubuntu forums, but so far the problem remains a mystery. Other than this little annoyance, Hardy seems very nice. And it works quite well in this laptop.

Update: Turned out it was a known bug. It works now. :)

So it's finally come to this..

2008-04-25T12:25:00.002+03:00

Yes, I've started a blog. I'll try to write here at least somewhat regularly, but knowing me, it's probably not going to work.. ;) I'm quite busy in school (a software project course going on right now, it's big!) at the moment, but I should be able to do more this summer. On the other hand, I do have work then and I'm hoping to write my bachelor's thesis too.. So we'll see. I have some other plans too, but I'll talk about them in another post.

And that's that. I guess this shall do as The First Post(tm).