Where I've been since April?

Well It's been a while since my last blog post in April. Some of my steam was stolen away for a few months playing Guild Wars Factions and playing Saga of Ryzom. That is one good positive thing about being a hobbyist. I don't have any game deadlines for my projects. However, it is really easy to loose focus. If I spent the time instead of playing, learning, I would have something to show.

This last month I have put aside TGE/TGB to refocus on learning OOP design. I was getting caught up with art pipelines, lack of any artistic skill on my part, and general engine tinkering, that I was going nowhere and getting frustrated. I wasn't creating games, I was just modding an engine to make it snow!

I am from the old school methodology of procedural programing. Pascal,C, and mostly Perl. They serve me well for my day job when I need to write scripts for Linux administrative tasks or use C knowledge to patch / compile some open source software. The source of my frustration seems I needed more experience with OOP and design. PennMush's soft code programming language could be considered OOP, but.. It's a mud scripting language that isn't something 'main-stream'.

I needed to get back to basics!

The following book was a good starting place for me to get into C++

Beginning C++ Game Programming by by Michael Dawson

This book was an excellent bridge for me from C to C++, and a theme I can enjoy! I was able to tinker around to get the Lua scripting language embedded into a simple C++ program with the knowledge I learned from this book. It was simple program I wrote to populate a "inventory" vector in C++ from Lua script.

A very good tutorial on Lua and embedding it into C++ can be found here for those interested:

gamedevgeek.com/tutorials

LUA sparked my interest to revisit Python again.. I have used python once before to see if converting a Perl database application I wrote would be easier done in Python with SQLAlchemy (with sqlsoup). I disliked Python. It's whitespace sensitiveness drove me up a wall. Where are the fancy {} to block code? Python is known to be used in the game industry as well as Lua for scripting and tool creation.

A common theme kept popping up on the various game development boards I visit. Python is easy to to prototype a game. Using pygame (SDL) and if your daring, using Twisted for networking. I thought learning Python would aid me in OOP design in any language at a pace I would enjoy without having to deal with C++ specifics.

The past two weeks I have grown from loath to LOVE python. I should have never passed it up in the first place. It's cross platform ability (Linux/Win) is great and I found a decent Editor (Wing) for windows to really keep me interested

Here are some excellent books to get up to speed with python I suggest anyone interested would find them useful:

Beginning Python (Wrox Press)

Game Programming with Python by Sean Riley


The Game programing book by Sean Riley is _excellent_. Not only applicable information with python but game theory and design. I highly recommend this book. It's opened my mind on some of the terminology used by TGE. (SimObjects, Simulations, etc)

Now armed with all this information what I am going to do with it? I started to work on a remake of the Classic Ultima 5 in python using pygame (SDL) and my trusty Ultima Collectors edition CD.

I was very much inspired by others who have done conversions/remakes in the past: EUO (www.swut.net/euo) and Ultima IV multiplayer (www.shatteredmoon.com)

In doing a remake, it has given me the ability to take 'baby' steps in the process of developing a game. The art, content, and general game template has been done already. It also gave me the ability to do this in bite sized chunks, so I can work on it after coming home from work. My goal is having a multiplayer classic remake of Ultima 5.

This should give me enough to keep me busy, and in using python, getting fast results.

In about a week and a half I was able to write python classes that enables me to load any Ultima game map from Ultima 3 to Ultima 5 and display them both in ascii (for testing) and using the original tile sets and binary data files with pygame. I have been writing it using Design Patterns "Model View Controller" (MVC) framework which I found a good tutorial at:

sjbrown.ezide.com/games/writing-games.html


Doing all this has giving me a better appreciation of the TGE and TGB game engines. All the tool sets like GUI editor and Torque script are pretty much taken for granted until you realize what it's like writing something from scratch. I've learned a lot by choosing to focus on python right now, and anyone else in the same position as I am, check out those books I suggested. Terms like 'object serialization' make a lot more sense to me now, as well as different simulation models.


Hope you find this useful,
Dennis