Dozza'z Dev Blog

Detris? Done!

2011-06-30T18:13:00.001-07:00

WOW! Been a while since I posted something here. I’ve been up to my neck in school work but I know it will all pay off. Now my summer holiday is back and what’s the first thing i did? Progra... no I PARTAYED!! The second thing i did was programming, more specifically the Detris game I decided to make a long time ago. I think it was to start off with a little project which I would stick too, however that little project was also put on the shelf because of time constraints.

However, here’s the final thing. There are a couple of bugs inside (which I’ll let you figure out and use to your advantage for a high score) but all in all it is all done. There was one weird thing I came across during development which was how to make the Blocks rotate. I could’ve just made many many different versions of the blocks in their different rotated positions but that would’ve been quite tedious. Instead I just wrote an algorithm to rotate them. The ‘I’ block was deciding to misbehave during rotation since it was very long, and a rotation about one of the cells near the middle would still mean that one of the blocks would go off screen. To overcome this I made one special, manual rotation for the ‘I’ block.

The music is from youtube, you might recognise the tune in which case you might want to search the tune followed by 8-bit to find the song. There is also a clicking noise which I sampled from someone tapping a guitar, from The FreeSound Project (www.freesound.org).

If your interested, you can edit the blocks and the background image to add your own designs. Just make sure you don’t change the size of the images and you save them as a 24 bit bmp file, under the same name. The tetromino.tet file can also be opened in notepad to reveal the ascii-art/mappings of the different blocks. These can also be changed provided you don’t add any new blocks, only change the ones that are there, and they must also be 4 by 4 cells.
I’m quite happy with it! I’ll edit this post with any changes I make to the file like bug fixes or whatever.

Detris

2010-03-13T06:03:00.000-08:00

I haven’t posted anything in quite a while so I finally decided to post something. School’s been taking over my life, but not necessarily in a bad way. I do enjoy school a lot and I’ve been learning loads of useful maths that could benefit towards programming and computing in general. I’m taking further maths at the moment and literally everything to do with that is based on computing. We do trace table’s, linear programming, sorting algorithms based on what a computer can and cannot do. For instance, whether we can use memory to sort or not.

On the programming side of my life I haven’t done anything. I’ve been learning Visual Basic for my computing course which is relatively easy. There’s some things that just annoy me about the notation. One off the top of my head is the fact that instead of putting != for not equal to, you put <>. This can make sense but i generally get many debugging errors from using the former. Furthermore semi-colon’s on the end of statements aren’t needed and it’s difficult remembering this as its been embedded into my mind as reflex.

I’ve also decided to leave behind that project on Panzer as I think that large project’s like this will really dig into my school work, which is the most important thing. As I remember, I said that this project would help me to stay committed to a task, which has obviously proved me wrong. I’ve decided to take a smaller (far smaller) task to work on, as I think I’m trying to run without learning to walk – so to speak. The new project is Tetris aptly named Detris with my unique and cunning naming scheme… Thinking about how I will develop this, it occurs to me that this project will require a good understanding of computer code and algorithms rather than Panzer which used understanding of Physics and Mechanics. I’ll update on my first approach of the project soon.

Problems and Progress

2009-07-06T10:50:00.001-07:00

Since my last post I had been planning for the game, putting all my ideas into the Groove Workspace and so forth. I had also decided to incorporate some planning methods learned from school which I know will be annoying to manage but will keep me much more organised. The planning is relatively complete, I have written a document detailing some things I would like the game to include, why I would want them in the game, what kind of audience I will try to target etc, which can be found here.

Recently I had come across a serious problem concerning rotation. Initially I had decided that I would need to create 360 or 180 images of the tank and its gun to allow a good degree of rotation, however when it came to just drawing a square 180 times to represent a tank for the test, it proved to be extremely long and tedious. Thinking ahead, I know that the changing tank style would represent what upgrades it had and how powerful it was therefore I would need to create lots of drawings, each with 180 different orientations! That is forgetting about animations! I decided to take a leaf from the 3D game programming book about texture mapping and implement one into my 2D engine which would allow rotation, skewing, scaling, etc. It took me around a week of learning before I felt confident to implement it and now after 3 days of bug fixing, even though there are still bugs, I have finally come up with my texture mapper! I have created a demo of the texture mapper here for you to try. You can use W,S,A,D T,F,G,H I,J,K,L and UP,DOWN,LEFT,RIGHT to control the movements of each corner point of the bitmap. Left Shift and Left Control also rotate the bitmap round. It is still rather buggy as I haven’t completely finished the error checking such as straight lines in the polygon but it is rather good. The texture mapper uses point sampling with no filter methods or anti-aliasing but I may try to get some put in to make it look a little nicer, further since it is an affine texture mapper, scaling and skewering can produce slightly odd looking results similar to the image on Wikipedia.

Now that I have completed that first hurdle, I can continue to make the game which I have now decided to call: Panzer! If I see the game developing into a fast and fun game I will keep the exclamation mark on the end of the title to make it seem more fun, however if it develops into more of a serious game, which i doubt, i will remove the exclamation mark to make it seem serious :).

Whilst making the texture mapper I also discovered Verlet Integration! Verlet Integration is a surprisingly simple and easy way to produce physics models on the computer. When I first found out about it I thought it was so simple that it was stupid! I have created a small rope demo which shows the capabilities of around 4 lines of mathematical code to produce such an amazing outcome.

Links:

Panzer Game Detailed Document
Texture Mapper Demo
Verlet Physics Chain

Planning

2009-06-15T09:53:00.001-07:00

I’ve been planning the tank game so far for a week now, before I even created this blog. It was the game that made me decide to create this blog. Ideas aren’t an issue but incorporating them will be. I put these ideas into the Groove workspace under a tool conveniently called ‘Ideas’. Below are screenshots showing the ideas that have been posted into Groove. Before I actually start developing this test I will need to try out the different methods I have talked about in the plan before I put them into a game. Therefore I will be making lots of little flash demo’s of these different methods and posting them here. I will make them interactive so that you can have a play with them.

So far It’s all going well, that is taking into account I haven’t done any developing for it yet but I the ideas seem reasonable, doable and fun. I haven’t asked for any help on ideas yet but I will soon, this is so I don’t need to heavily modify my code for the game in case a super idea is found: I can just build it in as I go. A little off topic: the weather is weird down in SW London. I was just outside and it was lovely and sunny then it all of a sudden started raining! Like something out of a movie…

Below are some screenshots of the workspace inside Groove. They are of the 'Ideas’ tool showing what I have come up with so far. I am going to be stuck in my bedroom for a while during the up coming summer holidays if I want to get this done…

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WA'HEYY!!!

2009-06-12T11:46:00.000-07:00

Hello World!

This blog is just to document my developments about game programming. Previously I was against blogging and Facebook and MySpace and what not because I believed they were a waste of time. I learned that Facebook is good for contacting people and blogging is good for recording things. I also haven't renewed my website therefore this is also a substitute, whether I will continue this if i renew my website is unknown. For now though I will try to update it often. I still won't use Bebo or MySpace though...

Since I have just created this, there is nothing really interesting to blog about therefore I'm just writing this intro blog. I created a little team called Vereia which was a group of people keen on gaming and possibly game development. The team became smaller and smaller until I realised I couldn't rely on anyone as no one is truly committed to this. I still hold the name Vereia for the productions, if any, that I create. Normally I don't create games but rather update my game engine and code. Now though I am taking time from developing the engine to developing games. I say engine, which is what it is, however you probably think its super high tech and 3D. It's completely software based, as in i wrote it all with the help of books, but it's not very advanced. One of the reasons that I want to create games instead of working on the game engine is to see if I can use it to create a full game. Previously I have created demo's of such things as mathematical problems in game development, collision detection demo's, physics demo's but nothing of a complete game. I will start working on a new game soon and when I have something to blog about I'll come back here and do so.

Now I have gotten that information out of the way it is best that I introduce myself:
My name is Dorian, I am 16 years old, just moving onto 6th form. Currently taking my GCSE's.
I aspire to be a games developer, preferably on the engine side of games development. I would love to work at Epic Studio's to work on Unreal Tournament, one of my favourite game series ever. I started programming when I was around 12, I was learning HTML in school. I quickly moved on to CSS and JavaScript when I was finally introduced to C++ by my dad. Since then I have been learning C++ to work my way up to reading Tricks of the Windows by Andre Lamothe which was purchased from a charity shop long before I could understand any of the code written in it. Since then I have just been reading and learning and developing games. I love programming, hate art, adore music and some literature.

That's all the blogging I will do for now, come back soon for when I do start blogging about game development.