Blog for Nate "Nateholio" Watson at GarageGames.com

Engine Progress - Zilch

Nate "Nateholio" Watson — 2007-01-11T23:16:52+00:00

Progress on my engine has once again come to a halt, as it usually does this time of year. I just cant seem to keep interested in it for more than 2 or 3 months at a time. But my other projects (hardware stuff) are coming along great, as usual. Also Ive been looking at acquiring an existing printed circuit board manufacturer, which will allow my company to expand into the PCB business, but more importantly (at least to MY core interest in hardware development) will give me a source of customized PCBs cheaper than I currently can buy them.

More Attempts at Texturing

Nate "Nateholio" Watson — 2007-01-05T03:53:32+00:00

This week I decided to give texturing my buildings a try. I think it worked out better than I had planned but things could still look much better. Anyway, for the screenshots:

ixeelectronics.com/K96/Screens010407.html

I have several more pics but for some reason yahoo keeps messing them up when I upload them.

Anyway, as you can see in the first pic the platform on the top if the storage tank isnt finished. I havent figured out how to best rotate the image for it so that everything lines up properly. MS Paint only lets you rotate by 90 degrees, the GameCreator program I have lets you rotate by any amount but it looks like junk afterwards, and Photoshop must be related to Windows somehow because it insists on doing stuff I didnt ask it to - "softening" the edges when something is rotated even though I dont want it to. I cant have edge softening because I dont waste time with making alpha channels in Photoshop with that crappy plugin that I cant even remember the name of. I just use a background color (usually green=255) then tell the engine to treat that color as transparent. I think that I will have to end up finishing the platform grating by hand which will take an hour Im sure.

Im also finding that my creativity in making maps is really bad. I have several buildings I modelled but I have no idea where to place them, and even worse, where to place all the "prop" buildings later when its time to lay out the city. It might be one of those things where Ill have to go look at some of the sites I frequent to find some city layout algorithms and implement them in my engine.

This all has got me in a disappointed mood because I hoped to have more things done this week, but oh well.

Edit: I started some experimenting because I needed to be able to name arrays on the fly with names generated by the program. So I tried it and to my suprise and relief it works. I had always thought BASIC would kick back and error if you tried to name an array using a string variable as the name, but apparently it doesnt. Im pretty sure this will lead to another engine rewrite but I can deal with that.

Buildings to Populate Demo Map

Nate "Nateholio" Watson — 2006-12-29T02:20:52+00:00

This week Ive been modelling buildings to populate the demo map. I've started with the important ones such as power plants, communications offices, factories, etc. Theres lots still left to "build" for the demo, and I think that having a map with lots of different buildings and objects to blow up (depending on your affiliation of course) will make up for having not-so-hot graphics. That along with a few other things I hope to add should make up for the lack of high poly and amazingly textured models. If anyone is curious why Im not using many textures, or at least professional looking ones, is that my 2D art skills on the computer are really horrid. Im actually a really good artist with real brushes and such, but I havent been able to do very well using computers.

Along with building structures, Ive been coding the system of interdependencies between buildings and other structures. For example, if a power transmission line to a distant town gets blown up, that town will be without power, making it easier to attack. The way this works is that each structure/substructure has information defining what and how much it consumes and produces. Each structure also contains brief into about its function so the engine can handle it properly. With this said, its not necessary for a structure to have a specific supplier of an item it needs because several switches exist that let the engine pick from several sources depending on various rules.

Im sure this as vague, but I don't want to go into a long boring explanation of it here.

Why worry about all these dependencies and stuff you may ask? Well Im not making some FPS - those lose my interest pretty fast - I'm making a multiplayer combat sim. I want every object in the game to allow the players to interact with it somehow and cause other events to trigger depending on the object and interaction made with it.

Not game related, but a good post for the holidays

Nate "Nateholio" Watson — 2006-12-22T00:44:14+00:00

This is a post from a friend on myspace, which I added some comments to at the bottom. Whether or not you celebrate the holidays (I dont celebrate Christmas myself), this post pretty much sums up giving vs. greed (greedy motives), and we would all be better off if we acted this way:

Quote:
From: Oggie

Date: Dec 21, 2006 10:52 AM
Subject Giving from the heart
Body: I was on my way to work this morning when I ran into an ex co-workers husband while stopping for a cup of java. We greeted each other in the Holiday spirit, inquiring if each other were ready for Christmas. My friend was saying this is such a stressful time of year, I replied "yep, we tried to keep it simple this year, not having to run around buying things no one needs just because it is the season to spend but still found our selves caught up in it all by necessity or obligation." He then made the statement "well. I try to give from the heart" and replied "As it should be" We wished each other a merry Christmas and went on our way.

As I was driving up the highway I started thinking about what my friend said, "I give from the heart." I wondered, "Does he really know what it means to give from the heart? Do any of us in this oh so materialistic world know what it means to give from the heart,
especially this time of the year? "

Lets face it, we live in a society that has perverted and dictated the Christmas Season and the idea of giving from the heart. First off, if we give because it's that time of the year and it's the right thing to do, are we giving from the heart? If we give to only friends and relative relatives, are we giving from the heart? If we by presents for those we know or expect are buying something for us, are we giving from the heart?

What does it mean to give from the heart? Well I guess each person has to come to that conclusion himself or herself. I can tell you what it means to me and you take it with a grain of salt or embrace it as your own.

To me " To give from the heart" means...

to give unconditionally with no expectations of gain.

to give freely out of love and or sincere compassion not out of necessity, obligation, ritual or tradition.

to give anonymously and in secret as to not blow your own horn or impress others with false generosity.

to step out of your circle of friends, families and co-workers and to give to a stranger who is in need or even an enemy for no other reason then to show them you care.

Let me give you an example. You know, that greasy old man you always see in front of the Wal-Mart exit holding a cardboard sign, the one we all justify passing by, because after all he is probably a drunk or drug addict. What if you were heading to Wal-Mart and saw him on the way in and you noticed his hands were red from the cold and you thought to yourself " Man that guys hands must be freezing" so you decide you are going to by him some iceotoner gloves a card and maybe a gift certificate for McDonalds or something. As you get ready to seal the card something tells you to drop in a $20 bill, then in your mind you think "well he may spend it on drugs or alcohol" then you realize its not your place to judge him after all you don't know why he is there or what event has brought him to this low place in life. You seal the card, wrap the present, pull up to where the man is sitting with his sign and instead of handing him a hand full of change or a crumpled up dollar bill you give him a Christmas present picked just for him, wish him a Merry Christmas and go on your way, never telling anyone else about what you did.

Now to me, that's giving from the heart, a pure heart. Why? Because the act was done out of complete selflessness. Nothing to gain, no one to impress, only because you felt compassion to someone who was in need, not only in need of a tangible item but more importantly in need of a kind gesture, a compassionate touch or a simple how of unconditional love.

So my friends, if you have that Holiday burn out and you are tired of the whole ritual of giving because "that's what we should do", I encourage you to look around listen to your heart step out and experience "Giving from the heart".

Well, as I said earlier 'I can tell you what it means to me and you take it with a grain of salt or embrace it as your own."

I hope you all have a wonderful and blessed Christmas.

Chris"

Quite a good blog post, I especially like the part about:

Quote:
"to give freely out of love and or sincere compassion not out of necessity, obligation, ritual or tradition.

to give anonymously and in secret as to not blow your own horn or impress others with false generosity."

Thats one reason I dont care for the CFC (a federal charity drive), people either seem to give because everyone else is or to meet some squadron/base-wide dollar goal so the Squadron CO/Wing King can say "My squadron/wing met and exceeded our goal for this year". Also, some ask me why I don't give to the CFC....Well, because the CFC isn't the only place to give to charity, and quite frankly who I give to and how much is none of anyones business. Thinking about this also makes me wonder how many man-hours were wasted by federal employees trying to get "100% contact" for the CFC. Im sure all those hours could have been better used doing federal or volunteer work...but Im getting off the subject.

Another thing you can add to that list is not giving because of beneficial tax writeoffs.

Finally finished with "base" terrain...for now

Nate "Nateholio" Watson — 2006-12-22T00:18:38+00:00

Most of the work I did this week was to make terrain features to populate the demo map. I made 27 different hills, each under 200 feet in height.

Screens

Each type of hill is repeated 10 times over an area of 23km/sq for a total of 270 hills. I still need to code the caching routines for loading only hills and objects within view of the camera to keep the poly count down. Im also not sure of what I should do at the "edges" of the map where the terrain features stop. I could just do nothing and let the players continue going on a flat plain, or I could make large mountain ranges that surround the map. One thing I dont care to do is repeat the map over and over or restrict player movement to only within the play area. Ignore the tank and dead trees in the shot, they were there to test sizing and my attempt at making a dead tree model. The problem Im going to run into with having mountains surround the map is that its a little unrealistic for one, and I'll have to figure out a way to make decent looking large mountains quickly. Currently I just use the terrain generator function in MS3D and tweak the settings to make ok looking hills. Ive tried to make mountains but the terrain generator only supports 64x64 maps with a max height of 200. It works fine, but the mountains look horrible when scaled vertically in order to make them steep enough to not allow traversal by players.

Ive also started coding the world generator program so I can just define variables about a map and have it automatically generated using data contained in files about each terrain/vegetation/scrounge/etc object. In tests just generating tree positions, the map file was about 5.5MB uncompressed and contained the species, type, name, and position of 437,500 trees. Seems rather large to me in order to define trees, but I dont know if thats a normal size for such a thing.

Posting to Keep in the Habit

Nate "Nateholio" Watson — 2006-12-14T22:33:23+00:00

In my attempt to start and keep a habit of posting at least once every seven days (time and work permitting) I'll go ahead and post today, with a screenshot. I think that if I include a screenshot it will give me a little motivation to make good progress so they all dont look the same.

This week's progress was ok, I could have done a lot more, but alert keeps you busy sometimes. Im pretty sure that over the past seven days I spent about 16-20 hours on the jet each day troubleshooting equipment, putting officer's heads back on straight, and doing general management activities for what amounts to a nationwide DOD telecom network, network manager for a 100-ish user network, and a crapload of other electronics stuff. And of course, there is the leadership and mentoring of a bunch of Airmen. All of this done in-flight and between flights. I think it was one of the busiest weeks Ive had since Sep. 11, 2001. Along with all this I've decided that I need to take a different attitude, a positive one, so I dont have a stroke in an internal anger fit over equipment or Airmen. A positive attitude also has the benefit of helping one treat others better, developing leadership, and developing leaders around you (Just another thing my dad told me and I ignored until now, lol). So In my posts I'll be thinking of things in a positive manner, even if not much was positive.

After a jeer of sorts in IRC about not having anything but trees and terrain, I decided to start making other parts of the engine such as the HUD. I had a comment from someone in IRC about not having enemies and such, granted its boring not to have them, but Im not to that point yet. So now I have a digital compass readout top-center and a circular radar display top-left. The compass works perfectly, but the radar sits there as there is nothing for it to track in the level yet, and no code to control tracking even if there were objects. Next things on the HUD to do - elevation bar, targeting recticle(s), weapons status display, targeting window, speed/temperature/time/etc readouts, and a damage display. Some of these will depend on other functions and objects being loaded, but I can at least make the display portions for now. Besides, doing my HUD now will allow for more critique as I post screenshots, so I can change things around to get HUDs more user friendly.

Now for the (note to self: think positive, not witty) screenshot:

So as you can see, nothing has changed overall except for a compass and radar up top. Some of you may recognize these as being very very similar to other games of olde, but I like them because they are simple and informative. The compass still needs the digital number readout below the bar readout, but the compass itself works fine.

The compass works by taking the heading of the player and converting it to a measurement of how many pixels it is equal to in reference to a set standard, i.e. the above image. It then chooses the proper row to grab the angle image from, and grabs a 256 pixel wide area which centers on the desired angle. Originally I was going to just have the angle readout, no black background or frame, but it proved hard to read under certain conditions.

My plans are to make an altimeter in the middle-left similar to the compass readout, weapons display/status in the upper-right, turret/torso "angle-from-center" indicator above the compass and a similar one for aim/target elevation next to the altimeter, a damage displayin the lower-right, a targeting display lower-left, and systems status lower-middle.

I have also started logs for each week, a progress log detailing what I have done/fixed, a screenshot page, and a code page. The code page won't have too much in it, considering I dont want to release too much of my code.

The log pages can be found at:

K96 Logs

Treeses ;) and Terrain

Nate "Nateholio" Watson — 2006-12-08T17:06:46+00:00

Just another screenshot of terrain with trees this time.

I spent about a week reorganizing the code into functional blocks, so progress has been a little slow.

As you can see, LOD hasn't been implemented yet so the engine stops drawing trees not too far in the distance, about 750ft.

The next important things I'll be working on are LOD and terrain/plant/scrounge placement so things don't end up on top of each other sometimes.

The following link is just to show how things are loaded into the engine, and how easy it can be to manage objects using names rather than object numbers.

ixeelectronics.com/K96/Code120706.html

When a request to load a resource such as a texture or mesh(object) is received by the various managers, they check to see if that particular file has already been loaded. If it has its just assigned a new number and cloned (in the case of objects). Otherwise its loaded from disk. After that its assigned the name specified by the "load" command. No two resources can have the same name, as this is the way resources are normally referenced by other processes. Resources also are grouped into classes for tasks such as collision checking, placement checking, etc. For example, "Foliage" would be a class, "Tree" a subclass, and "Scrub Pine C" the name of a particular object.

The reason for classes and subclasses is to allow easy parameter checking. The second block of code illustrates this. The line "Name$ = NearestMeshClass("Terrain", X#, Y#, Z#, "", "", "")" returns the name of the nearest mesh to the given x, y, z coordinates. A class can also be specified, which is "Terrain" in this case, so it will return the name of the nearest terrain feature. Also notice the three empty strings at the end of the line. They are used to exclude up to three different named objects from the check for other functions such as object placement calculations.

Slow Progress on K96

Nate "Nateholio" Watson — 2006-12-02T03:30:16+00:00

Progress has been slow on getting the Terrain, Mesh, and Texture Managers to work as planned, let alone talk to each other. Most of the problems have been small nitnoid things that I overlook when copying and modifying blocks of code from one function to another. Quite frankly its getting discouraging, I don't know if I'm getting worse at coding or whats going on. So basically I have a bunch of nicely organized code, then nothing but a black screen at runtime; where before I had spaghetti code and a nice, yet primitive, terrain/skysphere system. I mean currently TextureManager can't even figure out if a file exists or not. Ive tried all kinds of things to fix it but it still thinks files dont exist.

K96 Terrain Testing Going Well

Nate "Nateholio" Watson — 2006-11-24T23:44:31+00:00

So I started this morning messing around with something that had nothing to do with terrain or sky rendering/management. Anyway I ended up coding my terrain/sky manager for K96. Its still simple, no shading, textures, etc but it does have a nice skysphere, some terrain objects, crappy clouds, and a decent system for managing stars and other celestial bodies (for the client side viewer of course, not the actual orbital management). Here are 4 screenshots for your viewing pleasure, or displeasure......

ixeelectronics.com/K96/Screens.html

Game Schools and Reorganizing

Nate "Nateholio" Watson — 2006-01-21T23:18:23+00:00

Again, I am reorganizing how my game engine handles things. Its been an interesting learning experience so far. My biggest mistake was not following the organization plans I had drawn up several years ago and just jumping right into engine coding out of excitement. So now I am stuck tearing what little I have completed in my engine apart and putting my original plans into code. Lots of wated time, but a good learning experience. ALWAYS FOLLOW YOUR PLANS WHEN BEGINNING A PROJECT, then tweak/add/delete as needed LATER.

Now for the school subject - asked to those of you who have real-world experience in making games. I am looking to attend a school whose main focus is game design. I WILL be living in Ventura County CA, no ifs, ands, or buts. Are there any such schools that you would recommend within a reasonable (50-75 maybe even 100) mile radius of Ventura County? It seems that most gaming-specific schools are in WA, FL, or AZ. For those of you who aren't familiar with the location of Ventura County, its between LA and Santa Barbara. LA is about an hour drive south and Santa Barbara is about an hour north. Maybe some local colleges/universities have programs that you would recommend? This isn't me asking IF there are programs around the area, its me asking if there anre any that are worth my time in the view of those that have REAL development experience.

Anyway, thanks for the read and recommendations! :)