Over the years I have had some comments in languages other than English. Unfortunately I have had to delete them since, a) I could not understand them. b) I don’t have language packs for languages other than English installed on my machine. So anything posted in other languages appears as garbage.
Sorry if your comment was deleted. Try and post it in English, and I will be more than happy to reply.
Thanks.
I was a bit hush hush about my current activities, but I guess it’s OK to talk about it now that the project has been put on track. I am not revealing too many details as yet, but I can tell you what it is going to be. Well it’s actually a smaller project considering the my previous one (Doofus Longears – The game), lot easier in complexity and pretty small in size. Yes, it is related to games and gaming and involves a game, but it’s not a 3D project — it is 2D. Well it is 3D under the hood since it is based on Direct3D but it rarely uses the third dimension so it’s not 3D per say. The entire project involves creation of a game, which I must say is pretty trivial, but more than that it involves the creation of a generic game builder software, the work for which is already under way. The name of the entire thing is still under wraps, but you should see it come out in later entries.
The engine is an already written, accomplished 2D engine — no I am not writing the engine this time. The major job is to create an elaborate game builder (GUI), a designer, a scripting engine (Lua in this case) on top of the engine and integration of the engine and the scripting system into the game builder and designer. The game will be built on top of the scripting engine and should be pretty simple to make once the game builder and the scripting systems are in place and properly integrated. The game builder is designed to be generic enough to make any kind of 2D game (arcade, adventure, platformer, puzzle,…)
So — Yes, I am taking a holiday from our engine for a while, I hope only for a little while. I have been up to some interesting R&D which I hope I can integrated into the O2 Engine soon. It’s been a long time since I worked on a 2D game, almost 7 years now since I wrote a 2D pacman clone. The game had 3 levels and crappy graphics, makes me laugh looking at it now. But hey — that’s how you learn.
As it stands today, a fair amount of progress has been made on the GUI side of things. A lot still remains to be done with integration, but 2D games are lot simpler than 3D ones so I hope and can tide over this project pretty soon. More details about the project and the game builder will be out in due course. I will post some screens of game builder when the game engine is integrated and there is at least a semblance of a game running inside it.
My initial years in software development were spent writing software for trading, stock markets, cash markets, futures, derivatives trading — mostly for trading houses, brokers and in general for the finance industry. You could say that I have at least some knowledge of how financial markets work. In the same breath I can assure you I am no expert in the workings of the finance industry, but I am not totally clueless as to what’s going on either. However, many of my colleagues and friends from software development backgrounds are clueless of the exact nature of the current credit crisis that has, what some have equated to being a “financial tsunami” to have hit the world.
If you are one of those who doesn’t have a clue of what’s going on and why people are hysterical, or wonder why a housing crisis in the US is going to make you living 10,000 miles away homeless, this is probably the best explanation I have yet to come across.
I would sincerely suggest you take a look at it.
I have been away from blogging for a while now (I know, I’m sorry) and I really feel that I have neglected the blog for the past couple of months, but on the whole it’s been a slow January and a rather boring February. I have also been taking breaks from my daily routine, not too many, but on the whole I have been rather sluggish for the pas t 2 months. I guess it’s an unfortunate consequence of being stuck to a chair for 6 odd months and being generally devoid of and other life 😀 ! I had decided to go somewhere and relax for sometime, but I haven’t yet found any time to do that. Thus far it’s been only small weekends of relaxation. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to take the “big vacation” I had been planning for (yet), but I guess I will get around to it one of these days.
Besides all that there have been some projects I had been holding out till I had released the game and I finally got around to having a go at them. However the major chunk of my time is currently being spent on R&D, and that’s probably something I love doing. Trying out crazy stuff, hacking around code in the most insane ways possible, trying out crazy stuff with shaders, pulling and pushing DirectX, NVIDIA, ATI samples. Yeah! All that kind of stuff one likes to do 😀 . It’s really fun to see how far your card will go (in my case the HD 4850) and I can tell you the 4850 has a lot of punch if you know how to tweak it.
Well, this entry is a no brainier, but then again I haven’t been doing a lot of brain activity recently 😀 , so this entry probably reflects that 😉 . Don’t worry I will be back to myself in no time…
I am a sucker for IDEs and I have been meaning to take Netbeans out for a test ride for sometime now. I have been hearing a lot of good things about Netbeans every since version 6.0 came out and more so ever since the version 6.5 arrived. OK before I proceed further, let me point out the fact that I have been using Netbeans for C++ development and have never used the IDE for anything other than C++. So my comments may be somewhat inaccurate for other languages.
For one the IDE seems to be solidly built and you can find your way around the place easily. Everything is where it should be and there is no second guessing as to what functionality a particular window, menu item or an option provides. Clean and sweet. Netbeans has probably the cleanest interface among IDEs. This is probably the strongest points about the IDE and given the fact that it is available on multiple platforms, means it could be used by people who do cross platform development.
I ran the IDE on Windows using the MinGW and MSYS systems, and it wasn’t very difficult to setup given that I already had MinGW and MSYS setup. The build system for the IDE is via your native Makefiles (*shiver*). I severely dislike the taste of Makefiles; especially maintaining them for large, cross-platform projects that have multiple dependencies. But the IDE manages Makefile issues nicely and I can live with that.
For those who don’t already know, Netbeans is actually a framework and a platform to build applications. The IDE is an application built on top of this platform. The strength of the Netbeans platform is it’s ability to have modules. Platform modules are basically Java classes that interface with Netbeans open API. The IDE also, can be extended via modules to add and enhance functionality. An open API like that also means Netbeans can be turned into almost any type of IDE by simply programming in functionality for a language.
The IDE has an excellent code completion feature, and I have to say it is surprisingly fast. The intellisense of the IDE is top notch, probably better than most free IDEs out there, including my current hot favorite, Code::Blocks. I would even go as far as saying that in some situations it is better than even Visual Studio Express. The Navigator and the class display windows are pretty snappy. Any addition or change made to the code is updated very very quickly. On the intellisense front, it deserves a 7 on 10. The real-time syntax checker also deserves a praise. Oh how I miss these things in VS Express 🙁 !! Small things go a long way in enhancing productivity and Netbeans is by far the best among the free IDEs in that regard.
Netbeans has a lot of modules using which you can extend the functionality of the IDE and the community support is equally good. I would seriously recommend this IDE to all those who want a free IDE for C++. Netbeans by default supports only the GNU toolset, meaning you won’t be able to use compilers from Microsoft, Intel, Borland and others. The debugger used is gdb but the display and setup of the debugging GUI under the IDE can probably rival any other IDE for completeness.
So what’s to complain? Nothing really; but, just to nitpick, the fonts look a bit messy. There is no hinting on the fonts and it does look a bit drab. No hinting also means I have to use a higher font size than I normally do under VS and Code::Blocks. Talking about Code::Blocks, for me C::B still edges out in front of Netbeans just because it has a build-in GUI designer for wxWidgets, and well Netbeans dosen’t but that is probably just for me. I hope someone writes one soon 😀 . Netbeans is too good an IDE to ignore. However, I must say, I am impressed with Netbeans. It sure seems OSS IDEs are rapidly closing the gap between commercial ones.
Shooting a movie for the Doofus game turned out to be more than a headache; a bad case of migraine I must say. Well it all began soon after releasing the game. The logical next step was to shoot a movie/video to put on Youtube. What was supposed to be a 2 hour job turned out to be a lot harder than I had anticipated. Most screencap utilities do a pretty good job at capturing screen movies, however, what I failed to realize is the fact that most of them are hopeless when capturing any Direct3D or OpenGL rendered visuals withing a game. I am extremely disappointed with capture software that is available for recording an in-game movie. I tried several applications that are available, both free and commercial ones, but all of them turned out to be poor — either extremely slow or extremely buggy.
In the end I had to manually write an AVI capture facility into the engine code; ie. physically get the Back-buffer, StretctRect it into a texture, download it off the GPU and store it’s contents into an AVI file via a bitmap, frame by frame. Similarly with the music and game sounds, for which I had to code in wave capture in OpenAL. Whew done! Unfortunately not all went as planned. I soon realized that the video and audio streams in the recorded AVI file went completely out of sync. That’s because the game’s frame-rate varies considerably while playing, whereas the sound is always played at the same rate. The problem unfortunately is — unlike the game the AVI file’s frame-rate is always fixed. So after a 1 min shoot, I could clearly notice a mismatch in video and sound. I tried unsuccessfully to correct the problem, but the problem still persists. That said, at least the results of video capture were better than any 3rd party application I had tried before. So it wasn’t a total waste of time.
So yeah, I could shoot video clips, albeit not as good as I would have liked. I wanted a 1024×768 res video and all I could manage was a 640×480 one at pretty moderate quality given that all the streaming was done into a MPG4 compressed stream and there was a noticeable loss in quality. Then came the next challenge; editing the video into a full streaming movie. Movie maker was a the only free option available and the app is not too difficult to use. However, the app encodes videos only in WMA format and I couldn’t locate a MPG , AVI or an FLV option. That meant I needed to convert the movie to a flash movie (FLV) so it could be streamed off the Internet using a SWF flash plugin. Bah! WTF! Well it turns out ffmpeg can re-encode movie files to most formats; including FLV and it’s free. Thank you ffmpeg.
Then it was Youtube. Well it seems when you upload a video to Youtube the server converts and re-encodes the uploaded video file using a really poor quality compression. I am not sure which format the FLV encoder on Youtube uses, but the results turned out to be a blocky pixelated mess. I guess, after some many conversion and switching formats, the video quality on Youtube turned out to be pretty poor. You can compare the quality with the ones on the Doofus website (the larger one here) and you will understand what I mean.
Bah! The next time I am directly streaming content into a external HD video recorder via the TV-out option of the video card to avoid such craziness!
That’s really great news! Qt the open-source and cross-platform tool-kit/framework from Nokia (formerly from Trolltech) is going to be released under a more liberal LGPL license. What it means is, you could now use Qt in any of your projects provided you agree with LGPL. Well, does it also mean that you could finally see all those wonderful KDE apps ported across platforms? I sure hope so. KDE was built on top of Qt and thus shares a lot from Qt, and thus it’s fair to assume that KD too could benefit from this move.
Nokia states that having Qt under LGPL will allow “wider adoption”, and it may very well turn out that way. The earlier GPL license was, according to me, hindering the adoption of the toolkit and this is a welcome development indeed. Qt is a very polished GUI toolkit there is no denying that, however the license may not be the only reason why developers choose other tool-kits/frameworks over Qt.
I have used Qt quite a lot in the past, both for commercial and open-source development. However, it’s been some time since I have dabbled with the toolkit/framework and over the years I have slowly moved on to other tool-kits like wxWidgets. I haven’t been too fond of Qt’s moc-compiler thing which can be a pain to work when the project size gets large. Having said that one can’t dismiss the fact that Qt is probably the leading cross-platform toolkit out there. It provides a huge number of widgets and a myriad of functionality that would have to be rewritten or re-invented if one were to use any other toolkit. Ot offers a strong development environment and an equally strong GUI designer; often missing in most other tool-kits. It has a proven legacy and is used by companies big and small for almost all types of GUI.
Would I switch to Qt if it were LGPL? No, probably not. I am perfectly happy with Code::Blocks and wxWidgets combo and I don’t see any reason to move to Qt. Most of my projects use pretty complex but consistent UI and wxWidgets serves me pretty well in that regard. The game builder I am currently working on goes pretty nicely with the existing wxWidgets framework and the toolkit offers me more than what I need. So I personally see no reason to switch.
A very Happy New Year to all. A bit belated I know, but I was kinda busy doing nothing. Well, not really. Yeah, I have been taking time off, but I was also busy with other activities, most importantly, marketing of the game.
So what’s 2008 been like? Well for me it was pretty uninteresting. Not, that I didn’t enjoy it, it’s just there was precious little in the way of what I like to do best; research. Most of 2008 was spent on fixing bugs, play testing, hardware testing, level creation and solving some insanely complicated issues, issues that shouldn’t have been there in the first place and some unavoidable circumstantial problems, that shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Most of the coding that was done was also equally uninteresting. Majority of the time was spent on getting thing working right with gameplay and design. Not the most pleasurable of things I must say, at least not for me. That said, a lot of ground work has been done w.r.t the engine, most of which will not have to be repeated for sometime to come. So that’s a big positive, something I can take away from 2008 as being extremely productive.
Having said that, the biggest hit of the year for me is of-course the release of the game; which took far more time than I had initially anticipated. True, it turned out OK (great 😉 ) given the budget, time and resource constraints, but I would have liked to do more. Maybe all that was missed in this one can quickly be added to the next one. A Causal Analysis is due, however I would like to hold on to that a bit longer. At least till we finish up with the final marketing parts which I am currently focusing on. A part of last year was also spent in starting 3D Logic Software and there are a lot of things that had to be done before we went online. Unfortunately they accounted in a pretty big delay for the launch of the game.
On the tech front, 2008 has been equally low. Very little interesting developments. Most of things that happened were evolutionary rather than revolutionary. On the OS front XP still rules and will probably do so in 2009 as well. However, the year belonged to the underdog Apple. Both their OS and their products have gained significant market share and will probably continue to do so in 2009. Linux has always been interesting and 2009 will be no different. Linux grows from strength to strength in some areas and remains the same in others. If anything I am looking forward to Linux in 2009, some interesting developments on the horizon.
In 2008 we saw a resurgence of the GPU battles with ATI throwing in some impressive technology, and that’s good thing. For the first time I am an owner of an ATI card (HD 4850) and though NVIDA held on to the top spot (barely), ATI was close behind and even edging out in front at times during the year. Then again we can’t forget general purpose computing on the GPU. The year has been interesting for GPU and GPGPU. Powerful cards with supercomputing capability were unveiled and this year will see more power being packed into cards as the GPU titans clash with better with more powerful weapons at their disposal. Oh, let’s not to forget Intel here. Intel finally unveiled Larrabee, so you very well could have another titan arising in those battles.
Personal wish list for 2009.
That all for now, 😀
Once again a Happy New Year.
Ah, finally some free time on my hands these days, and you bet I am putting it to no use! 😀 For the past couple of days it’s no coding, no reading, no working on the game, I must say it’s something really strange for me and I feel almost guilty being away from the computer and doing nothing. However, it’s something I am forcing myself to do. Yeah, forcing myself to do nothing 😀 ! Also I am making it a point to sleep on time, early to bed and early to rise, late to rise will perhaps make me into a total slob soon, but I am kinda enjoying it for the moment.
It’s strange that I am currently not playing any games either. I know, Fallout and Fable II are out, not to mention Left 4 Dead; and I have a new HD 4850 on my PC, but I haven’t gathered up the interest to go out and play anything. Very strange, I must be coming down with something. The only thing I am currently enjoying is listening to music. Knowing myself, this probably wont continue much further. I am sitting on a pile of games that are just shouting out to be played and I will probably start with something very soon.
Hmm.. which one should I pick? Maybe an FPS, haven’t played that in quite a while. Maybe shoot some brains out of some poor alien bas***ds. Would be kinda nice end to the year!
A lot has happened on the game front as well. First let me start off by letting people know…. I have launched 3D Logic Software. That will be our business name under which the Doofus game/s will be released.
As far as the game release goes, the countdown has begun! I have not had too much time to update the blog since we were all working hard at the final push towards the finish line. Yes, the Doofus Game is to be released very soon. Keeping my fingers crossed.