Bad Sector’s DevBlog

This is a followup to the previous post, isometric stuff. I just added objects in the isotiles program and here is the result of a small map with some objects:

All objects are 32×48 images, however the image height doesn’t matter. When the program is about to draw a map cell (which contains a tile and an object), it draws the tile at whatever position it should be drawn and on top of it it draws the object. The object’s screens-space Y position is the tile’s Y position minus the object image’s height plus 15 (the tile image height). Since the objects are drawn from top to bottom, there is proper overlapping done with no need for sorting or a depth buffer, just like i mentioned in my previous post. It took me only a few minutes to do this – most of the time was spend in making the program to load images from external PNG files, add separate floor/object editing mode and other “management” stuff.

All graphics except the characters are made as “pixel art” using GIMP. The characters are 3D models made in Blender, rendered using an orthographic camera with X/Y/Z rotation set to 65/0/45 degrees with a 32×48 framebuffer and edited in GIMP. I’ve downloaded them from the Official Blender Model Repository.

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Tags: isometric, lazarus, tiles

What? What took you so long? Where’s the todo?

Well. Due to some personal reasons which boil down to me probably moving to UK in a few days (that is less than two weeks), i don’t have much will to work on the engine these days. In fact i haven’t wrote almost any code since my last post here.

However, two days i ago i bought Fallout from GOG (Good Old Games) which was in a special offer that packaged Fallout 1, Fallout 2 and Fallout Tactics. I can’t say its my kind of game, but impulse buy and psychology about sales and perceived values stuff took place, somewhere a cog sparked in my mind and somehow i paid about 11 euros for this. I played the game a bit so far and i can see why so many people like it: although i don’t play such games, somehow i am interested in this one. Its only a little, but enough to make me open it now and then, kill a couple of monsters, save the game and close it.

Because of this games i became interested in isometric tile engines. I’ve tried to write one at the past, but failed because i wasn’t sure how to render the tiles. This time i decided to look around and i’ve found a nice introduction to tile engines in GameDev. Actually there is a whole category in GameDev about isometric engines, but i’ve found this old article to be the most interesting. I must confess that i didn’t read much past the first time it mentions a C structure, because what i was mostly looking for was explained above. I came out myself about the rest. (more…)

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Tags: 2d, demo, isometric, lazarus, source code, tests, tiles

I’m still writing the TODO list – i hoped to have this finished by now, but unfortunately it took me longer than i expected. However i finished the Engine part (which means the libraries that make up the engine) and now i have the Editor and Tools. The tools will be easy – i’ll just do a Blender exporter in Python. Currently i’m not interested for more than that – remember, the goal is to have something running as fast as possible. I’ve already started writing the tasks for the editor, but it needs a lot to be done. Besides for REM1 a big part of the work will be for the editor. However since the list is not done, i cannot post anything about it for today. So i will write a bit about a fundamental aspect of the engine: messages. (more…)

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Tags: ai, engine design, messages, runtime engine, scripting

Today i was writing down the milestone 1 goals for Runtime Engine. I call this version REM1 from “Runtime Engine Milestone 1″. Here is what i wrote in the Wiki: (more…)

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Tags: engine design, project management, runtime editor, runtime engine, tool design

I was looking for a simple TODO list plugin for Eclipse where i could keep my tasks for Runtime Engine. Eclipse can already extract //TODO and /* TODO */ comments from code (a nice feature), but using a separate source code file just for adding entries to the Tasks tab (where the content of these comments is displayed) is an abuse of the feature. Eclipse already has task management using Mylyn (which i think that now is part of the standard Eclipse distribution), but this is too complicated for what i want and besides it doesn’t seem to be for simple tasks such as “fix the texture coordinate calculation code” and “add a NULL check in foo_bar function”. I wanted a feature where i could add tasks as they come to my mind and the process of adding tasks to a repository in Mylyn is too long and tiresome.

Not to mention that the tasks are saved in the workspace, while i want to have them somewhere in the project so i can commit them to the SVN repository. Ideally what i wanted was a dedicated editor for some sort of “.todo” files. I could use a plain .txt file, but i prefer some formatting.

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Tags: development tools, eclipse, eclipsewiki, subclipse

Runtime Engine is the name of the new 3D game engine i’m making. Currently it is at its initial stages, not even able to display anything (well, sort of – the OpenGL context creation code is working fine so you can use OpenGL commands to display stuff, but there isn’t any processing done by the engine).

Before Runtime Engine, i was working on another engine called Undead Engine. Undead, unlike Runtime, was written in C++ – usually. The thing with Undead is that i wrote the engine from scratch many times and in fact some of the code in Runtime Engine is indirectly inherited from Undead. An old version of Undead can be found in this server at http://undead.slashstone.com/.

This was a few rewrites before the current Undead code (which now is gathering dust in my SVN repository).

The problem with Undead is in the design and the language i used to make it. The design of Undead was always grand in scale and although in the above page i mention that i decided to rewrite the engine to make it simpler, in fact currently the design is much more complex than the version one can find in the site. On the other hand, is much more well thought and this is a reason i’m not “killing” the engine – i just put the development on hold until at some point in the future (unlike the released code, the current code is very well documented and i keep a private Trac page with tasks, wiki, etc about the engine).

(more…)

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Tags: c++, engine design, freepascal, lazarus, runtime editor, runtime engine, tool design, undead engine

I’ve made yet another new blog here. In this site (”badsector.slashstone.com”) i’ve had two or three blogs at the past and also there is another blog of mine at http://www.badsectoracula.com/. This other blog uses static HTML which is nice if you want to post something now and then, but for regular posts with images (such as screenshots) and videos, i needed something else. Initially i thought to use some of the dedicated blog sites, such as LiveJournal, Blogger and WordPress. What i wanted was mostly a true WYSIWYG editor for the posts that included image embedding and uploading. I don’t want to manually upload the images every time i want to use one – which is the case with the static pages blog i use over at badsectoracula.com. With this in mind i was looking what these sites offer. After looking here and there, i decided to check WordPress. I used WP at the past for this site, but i remember having to manually upload images (and other files). But that was some years ago and i decided to check it again. Well, i was pleased to see the upload/insert buttons for images, videos and audio in there! . Embedding images isn’t as easy as it could be (i would like to drag-drop an image or an image file or paste it from clipboard for example), but it is manageable. I haven’t yet tried video.

This will be a devblog, that is a blog where i will write about the development of whatever i make. The projects i will mostly -try to- write about is my Runtime Engine, a new 3D game engine i have in initial stages, and about some Flash games i’m making such as Rombo and the RayFaster raycasting engine for Flash.

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Tags: blogging, flash, rayfaster, rombo, runtime engine