Busy days

Published on May 25, 2010 in Uncategorized. 4 Comments

It’s been ages, but then again I’ve been really busy lately and I’m afraid that will continue for a while. I almost daily have tests at school, I have an admin mod for Garry’s Mod to finish while dealing with competition and I have a life to live. Anyways, let’s start with some screenshots of demos I made for my engine.

Passion - Game of Life

Passion - Julia

Passion - Blur

From top to bottom, it’s demos showing off basic primitives and texturing, shaders and 
post-processing effects using render targets. I know it’s not all that impressive yet, but the functionality these demos show off are basic features a render library needs to have. Currently the only things left are:

  • Model loading
  • Text rendering
  • Clipping planes

After that I will start working on the physics and scripting libraries. I’ve also switched from SVN to Git for source control. What I really like about Git so far are the branching and merging features. You should try it!

Evolve

About a week ago I finally posted the beta thread of Evolve in the Lua section on Facepunch. The responses have been largely positive so far and currently about 70 (!) servers are running the mod. This is really satisfactory and motivates me to continue working on it and adding the features to do a proper release. I’ve also bumped into competition, which I didn’t expect at all. The competition is an admin mod called Exsto by a guy called Prefantastica. He’s an awesome dude, so I hope this doesn’t kill our friendship. Here’s some screenshots, which almost everyone has probably already seen:

menu menu2

Birthday

Last but not least, I celebrated my birthday this Saturday. I bought a PlayStation 3 for myself and my parents got me the games Little Big Planet and Red Dead Redemption :D . Little Big Planet has a lot of features including physics cutting! Of course, the past few days I’ve mostly played Red Dead Redemption and I’m at about 44% of the storyline right now. I’m not going to explain how amazing it is, because there’s enough people who have already done that.

In the next few months I hope to show more and more pictures of my engine getting more features and my first actual game made with it.

Oh, I almost forgot posting this video of the first demo. Enjoy.

Pässion

Published on March 16, 2010 in Programming. 2 Comments

This time I’m not going to talk about any Garry’s Mod related projects. Actually Garry’s Mod does not even show up in my recently played games list at the moment, which is quite unique for me.

LÖVE

Those of you who know Lua have probably already heard of or even used LÖVE. It’s a 2D game engine which allows you to write games using Lua only. It’s feature rich as it includes libraries to create particle effects, simulate physics and do the fancy drawing you need for a 2D game. Distribution is also extremely efficient. All you need to do is zip the folder of your game (which includes your .lua files, textures, music, etc.), change its extension to .love and you’re ready to distribute it to all your friends. I believe you can even turn your game into an .exe file, so the players of your game don’t need to have LÖVE installed, but I’m not sure about that.

Pässion

As I said, LÖVE is an excellent 2D game engine. However, even though 2D games can still be a lot of fun (Tetris, platformers like Mario, physics sandboxes) three dimensions are quite appealing to both developers and gamers.

Now, that’s where Pässion comes in, as you would’ve probably already guessed. Pässion aims to be a 3D game engine which is as easy to use as LÖVE. Its main goal is to make 3D game development as easy and as accessible as it should be. Although I’m by no means a professional developer and I will not be developing an engine as powerful as Unreal, it will support all the features a modern 3D game needs, ranging from pixel shaders to volumetric shadows using a stencil buffer. Don’t let those words scare you, most of the content you’ll need for your first game will be shipped with the engine and pre-coded.

I’ve been working on the renderer of the engine for about two weeks now and it’s starting to turn out quite nicely. The screenshots below range from the first steps to where I am right now:

Passion - Benchmark

Benchmarking the 2D renderer.

Engine - First 3D shot

First test of the 3D renderer.

Models

First test of loading model files instead of boring triangles and quads.

Engine - Texture coordinates

First test with texture coordinates. It’s not noticeable, but they’re wrong in this shot.

Engine - Real models

Got the texture coordinates working. The raped face is not an issue with my code, but the SMD importer.

Engine - Lighting

Testing directional lights and spot lights. The cone represents the spotlight.

As you can see the development is going lightning fast and I hope to keep up with that. Let me know what kind of features you would like to see (level format, features like the stencil buffer) and what you think of the results so far. emoticon_waii Also, should I do more of these posts?

Layers update

Published on February 18, 2010 in Projects. 0 Comments

Yep, nearly two months without an update. I’m sorry, but I didn’t really have something blogworthy until now. Anyway, I’ve rewritten a large deal of the Layers code and added a neat little menu to it:

Instead of choosing a layer from 1 to 20, now every player has the ability to create their own layer. Additionally, there’s three icons which display the players, the amount of entities and the owner of each layer. I’ve added an icon for the owner because the title of layers will probably be changeable. I’m currently looking into minor issues and measuring how much lag it causes. I’m not going to show a video of it yet, because it’s not perfect yet, but you can expect a video very soon.

Evolve

Currently I’m not paying a lot of attention to Evolve, but it is not dead and I’m constantly adding small new features and fixing reported bugs. The chat command and console command code is pretty much done, so soon you’ll be seeing progress on the new menu:

The idea of the layout is a mix between a big menu like ULX and the compactness of ASSMod. Tell me what you think of it!

Sandbox server

I’ve bought a new sandbox server (yet again) which you can find here. This time I really want to spend some time to make it special. Perhaps you also have some suggestions regarding that? Currently I’m thinking of the following features:

  • Lobby at the spawn with minigames for when you have nothing to do
  • Fancy background music
  • Designated build areas (You have your own space which other people can’t build in)
  • A hat store (Cliche, but nonetheless pretty cool :3)

What’s next?

I’m going to France for a few days, so I’ll probably make a post about that some day next week. Anyway, next week I’ll likely post a video of the new Layers in action and perhaps the first steps of the new Evolve menu (which will include entity/weapon restriction and rank modification!).

Evolve and rising water

Published on December 22, 2009 in Projects. 10 Comments

To start off, I’ve been working on my Fretta gamemode. To be more specific, on the developing map which just acts as a map to test gamemode mechanics. I’ve been having trouble with actually moving water, so I decided to move the level down instead. Here’s a video of it:

Someone did state that clientside prediction might not do so well with moving level architecture, so I might use moving water after all. What do you guys think? Good prediction or fancy water?

The work I’ve finished for Evolve is equally awesome (I guess). Let me start off with the spelling suggestion feature. Has it ever annoyed you when you typed

!ramk mingebag superadmin

and it responds with Unknown command ramk and you’re all like

Fuck, now I need to retype that shit, just because I hit the M key instead of the N :(

Now that isn’t a problem anymore with the built in spelling suggestion feature. Instead of giving back Unknown command, it will know that you meant !rank instead and correct you. So from now on you can reload the map with !reloasd!

Anyway, here’s the progress on the Lua version of the photoshopped concept I had posted earlier in the What are you working on? thread on Facepunch:

It’s far from done, but I think the result so far is pretty cool. Remember that the admin menu is going to be integrated in it. However, I’m not targeting sandbox servers only with this admin mod, other gamemodes will use their default scoreboards and the admin menu will be shown another way. Let me know your suggestions and other comments.

I also decided to enter Evolve as tag in the server browser, just to see the result and found out 20 servers are already running the mod. That’s pretty cool and rewarding for me. More so because I’ve not in any way advertised it and it’s only available by SVN.

Finally, I’d like to congratulate my server host, since it’s been doing pretty well despite the activity in my build server. I’m pretty sure they’re one of the cheapest hosts after UKGame.com, but then again UKGame.com fails big time.

Happy holidays.. and I’m preparing a surprise for you guys!

WebOS, blogging and GMod

Published on December 15, 2009 in Personal, Programming, Projects and Videos. 2 Comments

Luaduck let me know about the WebOS SDK on Steam friends today. For those who don’t know what WebOS is, here’s a small summary:

WebOS_Launcher[1]Palm webOS is a mobile operating system running on the Linux kernel with proprietary components developed by Palm.

webOS’s graphical user interface is designed for use on devices with touchscreens. It includes a suite of applications for personal information management and makes use of a number of web technologies such as HTML 5, JavaScript, and CSS.[4][5]Palm claims that the design around these existing technologies was intended to spare developers from learning a new programming language.

So, basically, you write applications in HTML or Java. Setting up the development environment took some time, but writing the Hello World application was worth it. You can just drag images, stylesheets and other files to your project, press the play button and your application runs in the Palm Emulator.

2uz2p15[1]

Neat.

New avatar

237537ed1e5ce13b50268c5a292a2872a5e3e835_full[1]That brings me to my next subject. I made a new avatar, again with our beloved male_07. This time he wears a rebel suit and has a cheesy smile. Took about 20 minutes to get the smile and pose right and about 10 minutes to find the tutorial for the rising sun background.

Windows Live Writer

Actually, you might be surprised now that I’ve posted a new blog post within a week of posting the last one. That’s because I’ve discovered a shiny new tool to make updating my blog a lot easier: Windows Live Writer. I’m not going to discuss all of it, as Garry already covered it, but it’s like writing a blog post with Word. You can position items wherever you want, insert images from any source automatically and all you have to do to configure it is inserting your blog url and username and password. Really cool.

Fretta gamemode contest

23hk84x[1]I’m pretty sure most of you have already heard of it, but Facepunch Studios is hosting a gamemode contest with prices ranging from $1000 to $5000, read more about it here. Anyway, I’ve started working on my own entry: Flood Control. It’s pretty much a remake of Puzzle, only it’s third-person, there’s two teams and there’s rising water. Here’s a full description.

Evolve menu and scoreboard

I can’t tell a lot about this yet, but the menu of Evolve will be integrated into a custom scoreboard. This has several advantages:

  • You don’t have to bind a key to some obscure command.
  • It integrates better into GMod which is one of the goals of my admin mod.
  • I can make the menu look more interesting.

More information about this soon enough.

I’d like to end this time with a video of RayWilliamJohnson, featuring a cat which actually says OM NOM NOM while eating. Worth checking out!