Development Blog

Been busy working on my new game and everything is going good :D. Just finished working on the camera to get the proper perspective/movement I wanted. Took a bit because for whatever reason I was forgetting to transform the Look vector by the rotation matrix which was messing up the perspective I was going for, but its all good now.

Tonight I believe I will begin work on generating the geometry for the level from file. The world is going to be built really simply by quads, cubes, and ramps. Each byte in the file is going to indicate what terrain level we are at, and whether or not there is a ramp at this height. I am looking to create a system similar to that in Starcraft II, where there are separate levels of terrain and movement to them is done through ramps.

Also I figured out the AI I believe I am going to use for the enemies on this project. I have been reading some of the publications from VALVE and for the path finding I believe I am going to use something similar to that they discussed in L4D2 where they performed an A* search, and had their agents move towards the next waypoint and about half way to that location switch to the next waypoint in the sequence to simulate a more realistic path. Along with this its going to be a lot of swarming, and I will probably work on creating somewhat of an AI director to control certain events that play out during the game. This is the part of the game I am most interested into getting into and working on, because AI is probably my favorite thing to work on when it comes to game programming :).

Man whenever I code in C# I find something new about the language that I just absolutely love. I mean I love coding C++ because of how much nicer it is to work with memory, and just how powerful the language is but coding in C# just feels so smooth and clean. For example, I just find the way C# deals with Delegates to be so much cleaner then the standard C++ way of function pointers; so much easier to read and deal with. As well today I just discovered you can set constraints on Generic types using the “where” keyword. This just made setting up abstract classes for the new game I am working on a breeze, and making sure everything is type safe and non-nullable. There is so much more I like about the language I can rant on for awhile but all I can say is: I <3 C# 😀

So recently PopCap finally re-released one of my favorite games I played during High School: Candy Train. They released it free for the iOS platform, and man does it bring back so many memories! My only problem is with the touch screen and the size of my fingers its hard to do accurate actions at a fast pace when playing on expert mode compared to the original PC version, but thats ok still lots of fun :D.

Also I don’t get why so many people are already saying negative things about Duke Nukem: Forever before the game has been released. I know its the internet but come on whats with all the predictions of negative reviews? One thing I miss in this era of games, are games like Duke Nukem, or Serious Sam which aren’t extremely scripted, and don’t have a really deep story line but are just fun shooting lots of stuff, finding secret areas and easter eggs, and filled with humor. I cannot wait for the game to be released because I believe its going to be not only incredibly funny/controversial but honestly filled with fun classic gameplay from shooters of days past. Games don’t need the best graphics in the world, or incredibly deep characters to be good; they can be just fun.

After going through folders on my computer and looking at projects in the past, a gameplay design and concept popped up that I am thinking of working on in my spare time. Originally I was writing the game as a 2D side-scroller and well, it didn’t work out properly and I ended up dropping the project. The gameplay concept is still fun though, taking on massive waves of enemies and taking the fight to them, slowly and strategically. I am thinking of reviving the project but switching to a 3D engine because I think this will work out more for what I have planned for the game. My only problem is graphics/animations are going to be harder, but just to get the proof of concept out there I can do simple things in the meantime. I have also figured out an easy way to represent the world, and shade it after using the Starcraft II editor for a bit so, I am pretty excited to begin coding. I am going to code it in C# using XNA to save time and focus on gameplay.

So I’ve been playing with the terrain a bit more. I discovered as of a result of not researching the full properties of the original Perlin Noise function which I had been using that when given negative inputs things become less random and there are visible lines in the noise pattern, which isn’t good. So I started playing around with noise functions, and I currently have implemented Perlin’s updated version “Simplex Noise” which is basically an updated version of Perlin Noise that uses a simplex grid instead of the lattice for determining the values.

After playing around with that before I work towards getting the voxel renderer going I wanna work on something else for a bit. I am probably going to be working on this AI project with the university but I also want to do something else that I am not entirely sure what. I thought of working on an Engine to wrap a lot of the DirectX initialization up, and create a memory manager and profiler as well, however I am almost thinking about finishing the Tile Map editor that I started last summer but did not finish. I am thinking now that my coding skills are much much more, and with some of the compression tricks I learned from school in the past year I will be able to make a much more efficient implementation of the editor. I will have to change a lot of things I think as I am finding the way the data structures are laid out currently, while they work, aren’t the best way of doing things. I also want to create my own serializer instead of relying on the ones in the .NET framework however I still might just use those. Anyway, thats whats up, I also need to write something in the about me section!

Finally got to doing a bit of programming tonight. Updated the Procedural Terrain engine a little bit like I was mentioning in the previous post. Although seams are visible, the terrain is A LOT more natural now, and the application performs much much better as well with improvements to the algorithm I am using as well as improvements to the Data structure. It now much more easily supports infinite map generation because of the new hashed data structure I implemented to store the elevation data.

The next step in this project I think I want to do is add in a water particle system to simulate springs, and then eventually modify the generation algorithm to add the possibility of generating rivers. After I am done experimenting with that I am going to try to again change the data structure to a Voxel based system and then maybe mess around with being able to deform the meshes! Should be fun.