Free MMORPG Forums

Eriond

Yup. So 'cause my own little corner of the forums is kinda dead compared to everywhere else, I thought I might as well post a kind of dev blog here when I feel like it, and people can comment on it, or ask technical questions if they wish, in the interests of sprucing up the forum a little.

Of course, if anyone else wants to do this with their own project, please feel free to go ahead; you can even post links to your website! But only if it's reasonably legitimate, of course.

So, yes. For those who don't know, I'm making a 3D Action/Shooter/RPG space game, written in C++, using OpenGL and SDL (and a bunch of other smaller libraries). Think Escape Velocity, but in 3D and in an asteroid belt.

I'll leave this post up as an index, for future entries.

Entry 1
Entry 2 (Eriond's Game Dev Journal)
Entry 3 (Eriond's Game Dev Journal)
Entry 4 (Eriond's Game Dev Journal)
Entry 5 (Eriond's Game Dev Journal)
Entry 6: Fear the shipbox. (Eriond's Game Dev Journal)
Entry 7: The mighty scripting system. (Eriond's Game Dev Journal)
Entry 8: Demo Release Soon! (Eriond's Game Dev Journal)
Entry 9: New Object System (Eriond's Game Dev Journal)
===================== Entry 1 =====================

So, yeah, today. What did I do today?

Well, I'm mainly tweaking my scene graph. For those of you who don't know what a scene graph is, it's basically something that splits up the space in your game into logical structures in a computer's memory, making it easier to handle. If you don't have a scene graph, your scene data is usually all over the place, meaning like, say, if you wanted to find out all objects 10m around a particular tree (rocks, people, etc..), you'd have to go through every single object in your game, and check to see if it's in range, something that takes up a ton of time.

To fix this problem and make things faster, scene graphs were invented. Basically, they order objects into some kind of hierachy; I'm using what's called an octree, which is basically having a group of boxes within other boxes within other boxes. It lets me find out which objects are in what box, meaning that I only have to go through objects within a few particular boxes, instead of every single object in the game, when I want to find out if they're within 10m of a tree.

So my main problem today is that the asteroids in my game are shy; i.e., they don't like being seen. It's really odd. They keep popping in and out of existence, like some sort of interdimensional beings on crack. My scene graph is blatantly lying to me, by telling me it's never including off-screen boxes in the list of boxes that should be drawn, but then going ahead and doing it anyway (and not including the ones that should be included).

So yes. That's my task for today; I have to fix my scene graph so it'll stop lying to me.

That is all.

__________________

Eriond

===================== Entry 2 =====================

Well. I got a bunch of stuff working today, including that scene graph problem. Plus I made this out of my codebase, using a program called gource. It's a visualization of all the changes made to my code, by me and my team member. The dots are files, and each branch is a different directory. The MSN thingy is me, and the other one that shows up for a bit is my modeler. Spans about 4 months. Enjoy!

YouTube Video

__________________

Mime Taxidermy

You're game is starting to look pretty impressive. Nice to see the progress from a year ago, and see how far in development it is now. Do you plan on releasing the source code after you finish it?

Eriond

Thanks!

As for source code release, hmmm. Maybe. I don't know. It's entirely possible. Of course, I'd be glad to throw any code at anyone who wants a particular part, but as for releasing the whole thing, I dunno. It's debatable.

I think it depends on whether I ever make anything commercial out of the engine, after the first game.

__________________

matey

Question here

I am in love with space games,and i saw that video of Outsider a while now,any news on it?

Eriond

Well, not too much news, just that it's still in development, with not a whole lot of content, but the engine's almost done. I hope to have something playable out by christmas ('course I said that last year)

__________________

Eriond

===================== Entry 3 =====================

So. I'm currently working on a system to integrate my existing resource editor (kinda shitty, not a whole lot of features, but integrates everything into one contiguous file, and is able to patch well), with something a little more modifiable and feature-rich; say something like an excel spreadsheet, so I can copy and paste easily, anyone can edit, that sort of thing.

So essentially what I'm doing right now is writing a method for my game into import an excel spreadsheet of data into the editor and synthesize a new resource file from the excel file.

For example, let's say I have a large list of items I want to be able to tweak easily, so I put them in an excel spreadsheet. Pretty easy to see, everything's nicely organized, sortable; hell, I can even do statistics on it if I want.

Before, the long way to convert this nice and easily readable format into my editor was to input each field for each item in by hand (cost, description, name, etc...), and while it'd work, it'd take a lot of time that I don't have (I imagine things will tweak a lot when we get up to alpha/beta testing). Now it'll do it automagically.

So yeah. Kinda boring what I'm doing right now, but it needs to be done. I'll have the game run a script on startup to check to see if the game's data matches what's in the excel files for now, and then spin out a bunch of new resource files that the game can use if not.

Just a little update.

__________________

Eriond

===================== Entry 4 =====================

Alrighty, so I've finished up the spreadsheet importation stuff. It works pretty well so far. Haven’t really done too much to it, but it lays the groundwork for later.

Also started working on the site a lot more. You can view it here http://outsider.dyndns.org, when my computer's on, and in Linux. It'll have a lot of information generated directly from the game using perl scripts, every day at midnight. Things are a little screwed up at the moment, but you probably get the idea.

For the next week or so I'm probably going to continue working on the final spreadsheet integration thing (it works right now, but all the kinks need to be worked out), as well as a way to import whole folders of images, models, files, fonts, scripts and whatnot.

Hopefully I'll be ready to do some actually in-game work soon.

__________________

Eriond

===================== Entry 5 =====================

Well, currently I'm working on the map system. It's going to be fully interactive and 3D, so that means that a fair bit of work needs to go into it. Which is fine with me.



I've started out by drawing the sky of the belt around the map, and then reducing the map's grid down to 2 dimensions from 3, and made it all rotatable using the mouse.

Next, I need to make it so we can select individual squares in the grid, which represent sectors (levels, but you can transition between them seamlessly). Once that's done, I'll try and make the whole thing look a little more interesting (draw asteroids, draw space stuff like comets and whatnot, etc...), and eventually I'll make it so you can zoom in on a sector and get a good feel for what it looks like. It's gonna be a bit harder, 'cause a sector is a basically a 9x9x9 grid of smaller sub sectors, and it's difficult to select things in 3 dimensions, when you're working with a monitor that can only display two.

Anyway. I'll post an update or something later, when it's more up to date.

__________________

Eriond

Fear my ship-box.

__________________