Code Avarice

Christmas Cheer

by Mike

Over the Christmas weekend, I have gotten a lot of work done for our next game. I implemented a physics engine (though, without collision detection, it’s largely useless), I worked on optimization, and really cleaned up the code. 

However, there came a time when I had to spend time with my family, which meant I could not do any serious programming. I did, however, use this as an opportunity to play with a programming toy I have been meaning to use for a long time. 

That toy is  Processing, it is a tool that allows programmers to quickly prototype things in java. I had originally heard about it while watching a Natural Selection 2 video, where they used it to prototype a cool new game mechanic. I had never used it before, but the syntax was near identical to C++, so I quickly began to feel at home. 

I decided to ask my family for ideas for a simple game that I could work on passively while we chatted and watched classic Christmas movies on ABC Family. They were super helpful and suggested “a Christmas game”, so I just recycled an old game concept that I had though of a few years back, but never really worked on. The concept was just that you would jump around in 2D space, and dodge projectiles coming in from the sides randomly. Seeing as it was supposed to be Christmas themed, I went with Santa as the main character, and had Christmas trees flying in from the sides.

It took me about 3 hours total, from not knowing what on earth I was doing, to final product…which is a testament to how quickly you can prototype things in Processing!

When my mother played it, she complained it was too hard, and she sarcastically said the goal should be to hit the trees, rather than avoid them. I implemented that quickly, making a timer count down, granting you extra time when you got trees. This was much more fun than dodging, and my mother was exited that she got to influence game.

You can download the game and source code here. (WASD controls)

Trailer

by Mike

I’ve been working on the trailer for a good while now. Every time I made it either the sound came out bad, or it looked really amateur-ish. I kept reusing the same shell of a project, and just moving text around and replacing the gameplay. This never really made a good trailer, in my opinion. All I was doing was improving a fatally flawed design.

So I redid the whole thing. New music, no text, slightly shorter, but with more gameplay shown. I think it came out pretty well. Hopefully steam/desura will approve the game soon so the release trailer will actually coincide with the release! 

COMPLETING THE CURVE

by Travis

As Mike has mentioned, we have begun moving towards the new project one day after the completion of DimensionZ. We are so hardcore! I spent the first day looking for my reference and working with the music software. I still write music in my spare time. DAS can be sooo annoying to get working correctly. Either way, the music situation for the new project is online.

I will be starting character creation today up until the first Dev meeting and continue for the rest of the evening.. back to my curve.. time to learn some new stuff, thankfully. Very excited to make some art I relate too. Scary, horrific visions of an amassing collection of verts and splines to destroy and plain simply, scare the crap out of you. First attempt… bake a multi million poly model onto a 300 low poly model. Still wondering if a couple mill, is enough to satisfy my level of unruly detail… I want to be able to see the saliva dripping from its maw… \m/\m/

Well, That Was Fun!

by Mike

Today marked the first day of development for our super exciting new game, which I’ve been looking forward to. I have been planning a major overhaul of the engine (we call her Lexi). My goal was to clean up all my old rendering protocols, and implement some sweet multithreading for performance reasons. I had seriously underestimated the complexity of this.

I was hoping I could just say

"CPU1, render stuff. Big 2, hop on that physics engine!"

However, there are issues with reading/writing the same data from different threads at the same time, which means it’s more like

"CPU1, wait for everyone to be done so you can have a turn reading the model location data. Big 2, don’t you dare touch that physics engine while Mr.3 is calculating lighting or I swear I’ll crash this whole program!” 

Also, SDL will not let you check for user input in anything but the main thread it was initialized in, and OpenGL won’t let you render in any thread other than the main thread it was created in. Not only did this cause some confusion that lead to a life saving Google search, but it also forced me to put user input in my rendering thread. That’s no fun! :(

It took a few hours of planning, and a sexy diagram on my whiteboard, but I’ve got all my threads running in perfect harmony, and an astonishing performance boost with such a simple implementation thus far. By astonishing, I mean before these optomizations, rendering one 20K poly terrain would run at 60FPS, now I can render 4 of them with over 60FPS. 

This is really my favorite part of making games. I love to learn new tricks and see how they improve my games, and how I can apply them in cool and interesting ways.

edited by T

BETA TESTERS needed!

by Travis

Hey everyone, we are looking for some trustworthy BETA testers to play through DimensionZ and report bugs to us. We worked feverishly to finish the game in the last two days and we have a deadline to meet. We are gonna choose a few lucky people to help us get it ready for submission and could use any help that people could give. If you are interested, send us a message and we will direct you to the download link. You will be briefed on whats expected and where to find the link. Thanks to any and all who would like to help us on this.

Edit by Mike

Contact: admin@codeavarice.com

A long day, and a GUI Update!

by Mike

Today, I set out to write all the infrastructure that allows for multiple levels, which involved tons of new code, and modifying old code.

I did it, here is how it came out:

I have never been one to enjoy GUI programming, it is rather boring and not very challenging, and silly issues tend to arise, but this was really fun and satisfying to implement. I would say it’s still a bit WIP, but it’s neat…I like it.

This makes testing the game easier, since I can write specific levels to test different parts of the gameplay, and check for glitches.

Tomorrow, I work on the final boss…

Artistic Scripting

by Travis

So, today I will be learning some level scripting…

My only question is..

"cant I just draw it, Mike?"

How Did We Forget This?

By Mike

Somehow, we managed to practically finish the game, without implementing rotating enemies. They just kinda moved around…thanks to a kind forum poster for the suggestion. It’s in now, and the enemies look like they are actually flying around the stage, which is grade-A cool.

This is also the first video that includes asteroid dodging action! Enjoy.

Life After Beta

By Mike

It was hugely satisfying to get a demo out for public playing, after so much work going in, we’re finally getting some feedback. Reception is great thus far, and people seem to be really enjoying it. The only complaints have been nit picks, which is great both because it means there is nothing major that needs changing, and the nit picky complaints help us polish. 

It has been a little bit tough to find inspiration to work when there are so few tasks to work on left. Most things are either trivial, or things I’m deliberately avoiding.

I did manage to implement Travis’ new nebula backgrounds for asteroid mode!

Beta Gameplay

Some gameplay from the free beta of DimensionZ Available here.