Blog for AcidFaucet at GarageGames.com

The Considerations of Development

AcidFaucet — 2007-09-16T16:06:00+00:00

Tend to come across a lot of "This is my design" or "Here's my magic system, check it out, it's cool" .plans and posts but few posts actually touching on serious issues of independent development. Designs are cheap, we've all got 10 thousand in our heads.

Since designs are so cheap, it only makes since that the solutions someone comes up with to solve their problems in content are of considerable value. Afterall, content is the bitch for lone wolves and small teams.

Of course I'm only detailing audio as art and code were non-issues other than pipeline considerations.

[u]Audio[/u]

Where will the sound effects come from?
1: Most effects will be foley sounds produced courtesy of the many unusual items in my basement as well as the short lived classics (cans full of soup, lettuce, etc).
2: Audio will be recorded with a mixture of equipment both of my own (I built several condenser and dynamic mics during an electrical engineering course, they're top notch) and higher end (and therefore less expendable) equipment on loan from a friend.
3: I'll handle the sound effect post-processing (good old goldwave)

Where will the music come from?
1: I will have to compose most of the music, with a few tracks being composed by the same friend I'm borrowing recording equipment from. Luckily I took both music theory and composition ages ago and have been slowly getting back into the mode working through Russo's old school book.
Consideration because of this: I'm obviously not going to be writing blockbuster quality epics, so to compensate most tracks top out at 30 seconds while ingame music will change frequently with the circumstances. Each track will be divided into layers (e.g. percussion only / all others) to help a bit more with being varied.
2: Though I'll be composing in MIDI, my audio hookup will sit down and use his setup to (philharmonik I think) to get a more realistic sound than nasty midi. This is also why I have to do most of the composition (as he'll still be spending a good chunk of time tweaking).

Where will the vocals come from?
1: This is why you do things like list issues and their solutions, so you find issues like this one, that make you think. As this is an up-in-arms issue.

It would be interesting to see what considerations others make and the resources they use to solve their issues. As I mentioned above, designs are cheap, solutions valuable.

Handy tricks you should already know

AcidFaucet — 2007-08-21T21:06:17+00:00

It seems theres an awful lot of posts that ask questions that could be easily solved by using the compiler (VC2003 in this case) as a work horse.

Advice Item #1: Use doxygen, not compiler related but it makes research easier. Don't forget that you can open it up with an HTML editor like dreamweaver and add your own personal notes (assuming you used HTML output).

Advice Item #2: In VC when you right click on a term you get this handy dandy option "Go To Definition." There's also "Go To Declaration" but it's not as useful. Go to definition will take you to the root of the term (typically a class).

If there's more than one definition than it will display a dialog allowing you to chose which definition you'd like to check, and of course, it tells you the names of the files where the definition appears. With some logic there's no trouble.

Advice Item #3: Use "Find in Files" (it's the button that's highlighted and showing off a tooltip). Any compiler worth anything will have such a feature, so find it and use it. By the way the shortcut is CTRL+SHIFT+F.

If you highlight a term and then use Find in Files, the dialog box will already be loaded with the term.

And when you do search, you get a nice list in a persistent little search results window. Everywhere your term shows up you'll get the filename and the line number of each occurence.

Something to consider is that if you're looking at maybe making some considerable code changes do a couple of these searches and see just how many times a term comes up. It could be a useful consideration as to whether it is really worth making the change.

Advice Item #4: If you look in the above image where I've focused on "Go To Definition" you'll see that in the right click dialog box that there's an "Outlining" option. Collapsing all outlining is a handy way to view things. It'll let you skim the junk and get to the functions that you're after. Use it, it's great for general browsing.

Advice item #5: Search for header names. There's no easier way to tell if code from a header is used in a file than to look at the headers. Using the name of a header as a search term can be a big help in understanding what's going on in the engine just by file relationships.

Free Plant Textures

AcidFaucet — 2006-08-19T20:38:24+00:00

I've been focusing on textures, and while I haven't spent much time working on the website, I figured it was about time to get some free stuff up there for people to download and use if they want to.

WARNING: The images are all put together on a single 2048x1024 PNG. You'll have to cut them out and arrange them how you want. Makes things alot more flexible as opposed to several less editable files.

Credit is the only requirement, and I'll be kicking out at least 1 zip file each week (I hope). There's more information in the readme file in regards to what I'm working on a perspective dates of announcement/release.

website link

http://www.malignantdrive.com