Game Development
As a matter of interesting, I moved over to a new site, which now includes my development log and games and portfolio and everything.
Check out the site at http://underscorediscovery.com
I have changed the feedburner URL, so it should have switched automatically.
This was posted on my new blog here
My friend Jon and I have been busy working at the base rendering engine of Laboratory2D for a while. Today, we are glad to announce the 0.3 release of Phoenix. It was more than a year ago since 0.2, but 0.3 marks a lot of significant changes in the engine overall.
If you want a simple to use, high level c++ rendering engine that supports many platforms, manages windows and input, handles shaders and more – It might be worth checking out.
For more information, go see the Google Code project page.
This was posted on my new blog here
This post covers two things. Debugging Laboratory2D games from Eclipse and Using Chrome to debug Laboratory2D games.
So, Eclipse.
I was busy working in Flash Builder (which is built on eclipse) earlier today,
And one thing i realised is that I never got around to figuring out why I could not get Eclipse to Run the executable, and then connect to it to debug in one keypress.
Later on in the evening I tried my hand at installing some other platform features, like C++, to see if that had any handy tools for doing it, and it turns out it did.
It was called a Launch Group, Where I could even specify a delay on each of the stages. Seeing as I have only 2, it was simple.
What does this give me now?
The same features as before, but all on a single button or shortcut. Now when I press F5 I can tell Eclipse to run the game, connect, and show me the scripts running inside the virtual machine. The file with the little chromium icon is in fact the version ‘downloaded’ from the Laboratory2D executable, as is in the execution state. If you change this file, you can push the changes immediately back into the virtual machine without restarting anything. Check this out (it will be made better when I have time).
Debugging from Chrome
Since node.js was released, a huge interest in everything Javascript and V8 have been powering development on all fronts. One of these, is called Node-Inspector , which allows you to debug Node.js applications from chrome using the native chrome debugging tools that you normally see in web pages. The cool thing is, I use v8, just like node.js does so it allows me to use the same tools.
You can check out the video of how it works here, which also includes live editing the values running inside the windows application running Laboratory2D.
Hopefully soon when I am finishing up the rest of the video tutorials these will also get nice voice overs, captions and more.
This was posted on my new blog here
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Help us make things better,
The survey will be live until next Sunday ( 5 June ), so please tell your friends and spread the word.
Thanks!
This was posted on my new blog here
I guess at some point I would need some kind of face to release stuff as, especially If i am teaming up with people. They won’t want to go under my nickname and nor would I want that.
Instead I have made some kind of logo thingy that will represent anything I do and release.
So, Why i like it
I like logo’s that can be used to represent things in different ways. I wanted the right hand symbol of the D to become the main usage, and stylise it based on what I am doing at the time. For example, Here is some kind of camera, a rad looking older guy, a jet pack guy and a messed up pig.
So far, I am happy with the icon’s nature and will be using it for my latest project which is running over on this one month challenge blog at the moment while i develop it. I have mentioned the game before, and will post more soon when I have a little more time to spare on writing up details and videos/screenshots etc. For now, you can see some on my youtube page, and the link to the challenge blog.
This was posted on my new blog here
Hey ,
So I built the latest Mac version of Lab2D today and it has all the new bells and whistles like the shaders and FBO RTT stuff.
Don’t worry if you don’t know what these mean : If you have an Intel based Mac I’d appreciate some data.
Step 1) Get the build
Download the zip file ( 2.8 mb )
Step 2) Run the .app file
Make sure it’s unzipped, obviously.
Step 3) Tell me what happens
You can comment, email laboratory2d at gmail.com, ping me @FuzzYspo0N on twitter etc.
If there are any errors in the console ( push ` / ~ key to open the console ), errors with the shader, or maybe a crash or anything,
let me know! If everything ran smoothly i’d like to know as well, especially if you can tell me what graphics card you have and what frames per second you get (top left top number).
Should look like this, if things went well (except the red colored text)
This was posted on my new blog here
This is basically a dump of things I have recently painted or made.
Encide battlebay 2010
Another ‘late’ entry for me this year, i only had a couple hours to squeeze something in, so i did and ended up with this.
I used this, http://al.chemy.org/ , to generate this :
And painted over it and rotated it, cut it up and colored it in with detail i could see in the form. Really cool way to get inspiration!
One of my original concepts was based on the same sketch, something less interesting to me, so i scrapped it earlier on.
Head over to http://encide.net/battlebay for all the entries to this amazing collaboration of interface designs.
Some other random stuff
This was posted on my new blog here
Laboratory2D uses the simple to use, but extremely powerful bitmap font generator from AngelCode. You can download the generator and see what I mean, the packing options and per channel settings are really handy.
http://www.angelcode.com/products/bmfont/
Let’s make a font
I have a font from Font Squirrel called Capture It , and I have opened up BMFont and I have selected only the characters I want to use in this example.
Then, I set the options like this below,
Then I went ahead and made sure it suited my memory needs (no more than 512×512 in this case), using the handy Visualise option in BMFont, don’t worry about that black background, its the alpha mask and won’t show up in the font itself.
Then I opened up an image editing program and I made some detailed changes to the font. Added a bevel and some shadowing, some thing like this :
And finally, i opened up Notepad++ (my favorite editor at the moment) and I added some code to test my new font in Laboratory2D.
And then I pressed Run ( Ctrl – Numpad 0 for me ) and I can see the following.
Another interesting note
Because text comes back as a geometry object, you can actually assign the geometry to a sprite, and use the benefits sprites have (like moveto, pulse, fade, etc). Take a look at this video for an example.
That’s all for today.
Though there are more feature posts coming this week – keep an eye out. Still have 2/3 posts on features in depth and more like this.
This was posted on my new blog here
In case you haven’t read these two posts from the south african game development magazine – do so now.
Read More >>
Hello again! This is where I spam about all the cool things I have been doing. To reward your visit, here is one of the earlier designs I had worked through when coming up with the logo for the engine.
The huge refactor
It has been a long and crazy time with the most recent additions to Laboratory2D. I started tearing out the insides of the code to try and decouple the scripting from the core C++ engine so that I could start binding spider monkey. It took a really long time, somehow over the last 8 months i had managed to litter v8 into the core components of the engine. Not in a terrible way, i managed to remove 99% of it over some simple copy pasting – but the event system and the whole sub script system were heavily bound to v8. This had to be fixed.
The escalation
Well as always, while shifting around some code I found some other ugly code. I refactored it. I found some interesting bugs, fixed and refactored. I changed all the layouts of code to be uniform again, I cleaned out all the random code that had yet to be finished or tested and stuck it in another branch. I finally got around to cleaning up the interfaces and systems and I am proud to be at the end of this stretch with a much cleaner code base on the c++ side, a lot less hackish code that i did about a year ago when learning the systems involved – and most of all – a clear and driving direction for the core itself.
The new features
Again a crazy list I won’t post here. I finalised the font support for full bitmap font support, with normal scaling, rotation and coloring. Camera systems got large improvements like being draggable and zoomable with a single flag, sprites got a whole new set of handy features, a few more examples were polished and a couple other useful modules have been included in the core (like a handy edit box, with selection, a history and custom properties). I also finalised the networking support for scripting so that a handful of lines of code later, you can have a chat going over the internet.
What about this Beta 2
Well, beta 2 will be the first mostly public release of the engine. Hopefully it will be soon but work and life and other things tend to get in between – so i won’t say a time. Just soon. As of now, Beta 2 is almost 100% complete according to my original goals it is merely a matter of getting the documentation and the examples in line with the monolithic changes I have made over the last month or two. That gives me the next short while to finalise the android, iPhone and browser embedding features that I have been working on in the mean time. As with the post mentioning the way I am doing releases – Beta 2 phase will be fixing all the issues reported by the beta users as well as making even better examples and demos. Sometimes, i can’t help myself so I jump ahead and get started on the demos to keep me motivated. Expect to see a lot of interesting things as beta 2 rolls out!
The original reason for Laboratory2D is still alive
As a matter of interest, the project that started Lab2D is actually in progress again. Now that the core is stable and the scripting is mature it is a totally different world to work with – we are moving forward at a rapid pace again which is exciting. The scripting opens up opportunities for team members to help even more than before and to really get involved where the C++ before had just isolated me from having the game i wanted. As I roll out releases for this game, keep an eye out on other forums and indie gaming channels for trailers and gameplay teasers and most likely a playable release. For those who are not aware of it, it is an uplink style game (inspired by) and it is something i have wanted to make for many years.
How to obtain the beta now
Its free, It’s javascript driven, its fun (and portable).
email fuzzy at owned.co.za
tweet @FuzzYspo0N
Comment below
This was posted on my new blog here
