I was going to write a Weekend SVN Logblog, but it's useless to pretend those are actually weekly at this point, and I've made too many small, incremental changes over the past week to easily summarize with a couple of select entries. I will, however, post this because it was a huge milestone for me:
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r1024 | Administrator | 2009-01-26 20:55:22 -0800 (Mon, 26 Jan 2009) | 1 line
Fixed bug trying to spawn ammo classes while serializing in a world. Protecting against similar cases in the future with a spawning "semaphore".
1024th checkin. I sort of wish it had been a more momentous change than a simple bug fix.
Last weekend saw a huge system finally get added to the game: weapons! It actually took me by surprise the first time I ran the game with a proxy weapon mesh on-screen just how important the first-person view of a weapon (or any instrument in the player character's virtual hand) is for immersing the player in the game. Even before the weapon did anything, before there were animations or ammo classes or any of the myriad of details I've added in the last week, I was running around in this world with a simple, untextured revolver on-screen, feeling at last like I was a part of the game world.
I'm sure there's something meaningful to be said regarding the destructive nature of games that a weapon is critical to grounding a player in the world, but analyzing games in that fashion isn't my style.
Most of the rest of my week was spent either improving the game in small but significant ways (the camera topples over when the player dies, there's a Return to Title button on the pause menu, you can't save your game after being killed, etc.) or starting the arduous process of optimizing this whole thing. I made a couple of simple optimizations (not emptying and reallocating some large arrays every frame) that actually helped bring me back up to 60 Hz in my best case scenes. There's still a long way to go if I want this to perform well on older computers, but then again, I'm developing on a laptop that's over three years old, so my own machine keeps slipping further toward the low end of the spectrum. I guess that's not a terrible place to be--it keeps me honest in my expectations of the engine.
Finally, I added a race timer. It was a very simple class that took me maybe ten minutes to fully implement and test, but it was significant because it is one of a few gameplay systems to be designed specifically for my next game (as opposed to the engine in general) and brings me much closer to having a working prototype. In fact, as soon as I can hash out some more details on the broader AI architecture--sensors, behavior design, AI weapons--I'll be ready to put the code aside momentarily and build out my first real level for this game. I'm excited about this again.
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r1024 | Administrator | 2009-01-26 20:55:22 -0800 (Mon, 26 Jan 2009) | 1 line
Fixed bug trying to spawn ammo classes while serializing in a world. Protecting against similar cases in the future with a spawning "semaphore".
1024th checkin. I sort of wish it had been a more momentous change than a simple bug fix.
Last weekend saw a huge system finally get added to the game: weapons! It actually took me by surprise the first time I ran the game with a proxy weapon mesh on-screen just how important the first-person view of a weapon (or any instrument in the player character's virtual hand) is for immersing the player in the game. Even before the weapon did anything, before there were animations or ammo classes or any of the myriad of details I've added in the last week, I was running around in this world with a simple, untextured revolver on-screen, feeling at last like I was a part of the game world.
I'm sure there's something meaningful to be said regarding the destructive nature of games that a weapon is critical to grounding a player in the world, but analyzing games in that fashion isn't my style.
Most of the rest of my week was spent either improving the game in small but significant ways (the camera topples over when the player dies, there's a Return to Title button on the pause menu, you can't save your game after being killed, etc.) or starting the arduous process of optimizing this whole thing. I made a couple of simple optimizations (not emptying and reallocating some large arrays every frame) that actually helped bring me back up to 60 Hz in my best case scenes. There's still a long way to go if I want this to perform well on older computers, but then again, I'm developing on a laptop that's over three years old, so my own machine keeps slipping further toward the low end of the spectrum. I guess that's not a terrible place to be--it keeps me honest in my expectations of the engine.
Finally, I added a race timer. It was a very simple class that took me maybe ten minutes to fully implement and test, but it was significant because it is one of a few gameplay systems to be designed specifically for my next game (as opposed to the engine in general) and brings me much closer to having a working prototype. In fact, as soon as I can hash out some more details on the broader AI architecture--sensors, behavior design, AI weapons--I'll be ready to put the code aside momentarily and build out my first real level for this game. I'm excited about this again.
posted by David at
12:01 AM
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