Well, its been a while since I posted here, although not much has changed. I've gotten settled into my job and have almost ended my probation period. I've helped out a lecturer on a research project and should be doing some more for him soon. And I've entered a competition called 'A Race to Saturn'.
A Race to Saturn is an interesting idea for a long term project/competition. The basic idea is to improve an entrants game development skills by having a weekly progress posting (which will be here for me incidentally, and probably on a Saturday or Sunday) with releases of any small games/tech demos that the entrant has created. The final end goal is to have created a commercial level game and sell 100 copies of it, although this could be some time in the future (I'm guessing a year or two probably :))
My motivation for entering it was mainly to provide myself with motivation for continuing to develop my game development skills. It also gives me a reason to post something here at least once a week (even if its a 'work has been hell, nothing to report' posting which will happen more than once I expect. Just a warning up front ;)). When I do my first competition post I'll provide the entry details I am required to for the competition and will also do a quick roadmap of what I would like to do in this competition and (very) rough projections for how long I think each item will take.
Thats about it till Sunday. Now I'm off to do some work :/
Friday, September 7, 2007
Monday, June 4, 2007
Working man
It finally came.... I've started my job now. I'm now a graduate software engineer developing stuff for mobile phones :) Or at least, I will be once I get a computer at my desk at work :/ They ran into build problems with the machine supposedly for me, and when they got it sorted, it got requisitioned by someone higher up, so I have to wait till tuesday or wednesday for that slightly vital piece of equipment :)
So, my first day was spent reading the notes for the '3 day Symbian OS Essentials course', which is essentially the minimum required knowledge for my job. Hopefully it will make more sense once I have a computer and can do the exercises at various points along the way.
Otherwise, news is pretty much standard. Anita is ill again (or possibly still), so I've been taking care of her as much as I can, and I've finally managed to borrow a copy of Design Patterns and have been reading that for a bit of extra insight :)
So, my first day was spent reading the notes for the '3 day Symbian OS Essentials course', which is essentially the minimum required knowledge for my job. Hopefully it will make more sense once I have a computer and can do the exercises at various points along the way.
Otherwise, news is pretty much standard. Anita is ill again (or possibly still), so I've been taking care of her as much as I can, and I've finally managed to borrow a copy of Design Patterns and have been reading that for a bit of extra insight :)
Thursday, May 24, 2007
End of an Era
4 years of my life have almost reached their conclusion... finally. This time next week, I will have just handed in my last piece of coursework for university, and will be relaxing before I start my new job as a Graduate Software Engineer the following Monday. Before that, I need to get through a presentation tomorrow, and the wedding reception of my Step Brother over the weekend. I'm envious of Anita now, as she is ill and can't get down to it :P Hopefully the bar will be free though :)
The business plan is finally handed in though, and I think it turned out better than most of the group thought it would. Should get a mark back for that sometime in the next few weeks and see for certain.
Other than that, I've been making sure my C++ knowledge is pretty comprehensive by reading the Thinking in C++ books, which are a nice and fairly comprehensive C++ guide.
The business plan is finally handed in though, and I think it turned out better than most of the group thought it would. Should get a mark back for that sometime in the next few weeks and see for certain.
Other than that, I've been making sure my C++ knowledge is pretty comprehensive by reading the Thinking in C++ books, which are a nice and fairly comprehensive C++ guide.
Friday, May 4, 2007
Its been a while - Update time
Not posted for a while, even though (or perhaps because) I've had a lot going on.
Firstly, all my exams are over, and I have only one bit of coursework left for my entire degree. Its a big one though, a full business plan with feasibility studies and everything :/ Not the most interesting stuff in the world to me, but its all thats standing between me and graduation.
Secondly, I have a job that I'm definitely going to be taking, as opposed to my first job offer that I wasn't too sure about. This time, its with a Mobile Phone application developer company based nearby, so I don't even have to move (which is a good thing, both for me and Anita). Its a 'bit' less in salary terms (almost half the salary :/) but the atmosphere seemed friendlier, its a lot less cost in living expenses to stay where we are and overall, it just seemed like the nicer offer. Anita isn't exactly thrilled, as it is a huge drop in pay, but I think she understands.
Finally, I'm finally getting back into playing games more :D I had a bit of a dry spell in terms of computer games (I was only playing mahjong and freecell... they seemed the most interesting for a while), but I'm coming out of it and wanting to play more and more. At this rate, I may even be able to get up to my old level of skill at games like UT, and then I won't be embarrassed to play it online again :D Will just have to wait and see though.
Well, thats my life updated in not very much time. I guess less happened than I thought, either that or my life is boring enough that all that seemed like a lot :) Expect a couple more posts soon as I complain about my coursework though ;)
Firstly, all my exams are over, and I have only one bit of coursework left for my entire degree. Its a big one though, a full business plan with feasibility studies and everything :/ Not the most interesting stuff in the world to me, but its all thats standing between me and graduation.
Secondly, I have a job that I'm definitely going to be taking, as opposed to my first job offer that I wasn't too sure about. This time, its with a Mobile Phone application developer company based nearby, so I don't even have to move (which is a good thing, both for me and Anita). Its a 'bit' less in salary terms (almost half the salary :/) but the atmosphere seemed friendlier, its a lot less cost in living expenses to stay where we are and overall, it just seemed like the nicer offer. Anita isn't exactly thrilled, as it is a huge drop in pay, but I think she understands.
Finally, I'm finally getting back into playing games more :D I had a bit of a dry spell in terms of computer games (I was only playing mahjong and freecell... they seemed the most interesting for a while), but I'm coming out of it and wanting to play more and more. At this rate, I may even be able to get up to my old level of skill at games like UT, and then I won't be embarrassed to play it online again :D Will just have to wait and see though.
Well, thats my life updated in not very much time. I guess less happened than I thought, either that or my life is boring enough that all that seemed like a lot :) Expect a couple more posts soon as I complain about my coursework though ;)
Friday, March 30, 2007
My first taste of Ostrich
Had quite a nice meal this evening. My sister came up for a visit on her way up to newcastle and her, her new boyfriend and my aunt and uncle that live close by took me and anita out for a meal at a nice chinese restaurant. Very nice food all the way through. As we were leaving, my uncle looks at the menu and announces that one of the starters was ostrich meat. Kind of surprising, but the meat was quite tasty :) Slightly like beef according to Anita.
So, my first taste of ostrich.
So, my first taste of ostrich.
SOGL Update 1
Well, after a couple of days of thinking and coding, SOGL has gotten another stage towards being something useful. This latest improvement is to have a decent input system, built to be included into the Event system programmatically using boost function pointers. As such, my input system can exist entirely independently of SDL and pretty much any other part of the system. All that is required to drop it into another application is for that application to have some way of updating the state of the components. I think this is pretty good for an input system :) I will just have to see later on if it can cope with a heavy input load though.
The other nice thing about the input system is that it lets you register actions, assign keys and button presses to them (either 2 keys, 2 mouse buttons or a combination at the moment) and then query the status of the action, which will perform the necessary checks on its assigned keys. This will allow me to write a keymap config file later, arong with a loader for it, and have a configurable key configuration. I have also steered away from making the EventPump class or any of the input classes singletons, which will allow for seperate input configurations at different points in the program simply by changing which event loop or action manager is active.
The next stage is to start wrapping the OpenGL calls into either classes with some state (such as for textures) or simply overloaded function calls. Once this is done, I can start showing off some examples next to the code producing it. Expect screenshots in a week or so ;)
The other nice thing about the input system is that it lets you register actions, assign keys and button presses to them (either 2 keys, 2 mouse buttons or a combination at the moment) and then query the status of the action, which will perform the necessary checks on its assigned keys. This will allow me to write a keymap config file later, arong with a loader for it, and have a configurable key configuration. I have also steered away from making the EventPump class or any of the input classes singletons, which will allow for seperate input configurations at different points in the program simply by changing which event loop or action manager is active.
The next stage is to start wrapping the OpenGL calls into either classes with some state (such as for textures) or simply overloaded function calls. Once this is done, I can start showing off some examples next to the code producing it. Expect screenshots in a week or so ;)
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Current Project - SOGL
Well, I'm finally kicking myself into actually doing some game development work, and I'm starting with a framework that I can use to ease my way into larger projects. I'm building the library around SDL and OpenGL and I am currently calling it SOGL (soggle) :) My current plans (probably slightly ambitious, but we will see) are to have a more polymorphic and easier syntax for OpenGL and SDL, with some callbacks for events to make an initial project setup easier with almost no boilerplate code.
I also intend to make some classes around OpenGL style objects for certain things that are almost always done in the same way, such as textures and shaders. The intention with these is to ease the code required to set them up and run them, and also some small scale optimisations internally so that requests to change textures are only carried out if the texture isn't currently active and so on :)
There is also some vague idea in my head about some nicer maths objects and classes that I can integrate into the various areas, such as vectors and matrices that can be more easily used to shift between the more efficient opengl vector commands and a nice, object oriented approach to these ideas. This may be replaced with another open source package.
Anyway, my current status is that I have a window class that can create a window, and an event pump that can take SDL events and pass them out to various callback functions as long as they are defined. My next stage is to create a nicer interface to check keys and possibly to generate a system to assign named actions to keys and key combinations.
My ultimate aim is to build an extra layer of abstraction on top of SDL and OpenGL that will allow me to not end up worrying about the mechanics of how they are doing things. I'm doing this myself rather than using an existing framework is because I feel like it :) If I get the code into a decent state then I will probably release it to anyone who is interested as well, but currently this is not really an objective. I will be building some examples and little games as and when I can though, and hopefully they will be easy to understand.
I also intend to make some classes around OpenGL style objects for certain things that are almost always done in the same way, such as textures and shaders. The intention with these is to ease the code required to set them up and run them, and also some small scale optimisations internally so that requests to change textures are only carried out if the texture isn't currently active and so on :)
There is also some vague idea in my head about some nicer maths objects and classes that I can integrate into the various areas, such as vectors and matrices that can be more easily used to shift between the more efficient opengl vector commands and a nice, object oriented approach to these ideas. This may be replaced with another open source package.
Anyway, my current status is that I have a window class that can create a window, and an event pump that can take SDL events and pass them out to various callback functions as long as they are defined. My next stage is to create a nicer interface to check keys and possibly to generate a system to assign named actions to keys and key combinations.
My ultimate aim is to build an extra layer of abstraction on top of SDL and OpenGL that will allow me to not end up worrying about the mechanics of how they are doing things. I'm doing this myself rather than using an existing framework is because I feel like it :) If I get the code into a decent state then I will probably release it to anyone who is interested as well, but currently this is not really an objective. I will be building some examples and little games as and when I can though, and hopefully they will be easy to understand.
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