Game Development

I think most libraries have a way to handle the chunk loading pretty easily...

2:57 AM

@MindWorX yeah, I have moving windows and focus stuff as well

The only thing that's weird about UI is that you draw in the inverse order you handle input.

So things on top, which would be first for input are drawn last.

i'm kind of proud of my in game console code. it's all self contained in a header and code file, and would be really easy to drop into any other SFML project

Nice

That's the way to do it, :)

Silly Ohio, saying stuff to sound clever.

and I can do stuff like Console.log("some text"); to display that text right on the console

2:59 AM

pats Ohio on the head

it's not hugely fancy, but it works well, and even handles the backspace key!

:)

since we're whippin them out, I also handle delete (and hence, the arrows and inserting)

I don't even handle auto repeating. :(

heh, I do, and I even looked up the repeat rate

:(

i could probably handle more stuff, but i don't really have a need (yet) for a true text input box

3:01 AM

Hehe

yeah... I don't need this crap either, it's a frikkin' game!

A GAME DAMMIT!

A BLOODY GAME!

(especially if you're making an FPS)

fyi, for the keyboard repeat speed: msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/…

On an unrelated note, I made those FEZ things of mine control two motors wirelessly using input from an XBox360 controller.

Fun times.

3:03 AM

Stupid: (The actual repeat rates are hardware-dependent and may vary from a linear scale by as much as 20%.)

Hehe

Old features rock. :P

... yeah

If you guys end up using the scroll wheel in any of your projects, for the love of god, please look up the OS scroll speed!

Hmm, what to code...? Maybe I should add that UDP socket to the networking part of my game right away, since that's what I've been working on last.

I kinda finished the TCP part of it.

Well that's good

gulp. I use the scroll wheel in my project.

3:09 AM

I'd still love a way without Array.Copy, but it seems I can't avoid it when I also want it to be async.

hah, I'm watching you

though it's not required, just one of the ways to change the camera

yeah... tbh, it's probably not important to look up that speed for a game, but for a UI control, Do IT!

If it's for camera zoom, don't worry about the OS scroll speed, have a built in speed in units per step.

Oh no! Tetrad is here! Quick, hide your stars!

lol

3:11 AM

yeah... I shouldn't poke (un-starred)

A: Efficient C# byte queue for parsing stream of bytes for binary message packets

Hmm

1

Queue<byte> is backed by a byte[], but you would see better performance if copying to/from the underlying buffer using Array.Copy rather than looping through Enqueue/Dequeue methods. So personally, if Queue<byte> doesn't give you the performance you want, then you might implement you...

Maybe I should simply stick with what I have made, and just move it out to be a bit more generic.

No

Don't preoptimize

This stuff works perfectly.

@MindWorX yeah, that's probably a good rule to be following, actually, that's exactly what I'd do

I highly advocate avoiding pre-optimizing

Yeah, it's generally a waste of time, unless you know the optimization is a serious one.

yup

Let there be MUSIC!

:D

That was easy, now what?

3:33 AM

see? easy!

in-game console?

hey, there's a thought

and :( my keyboard is on the fritz

the 'n' and 'u' keys aren't treating me very well, :(

Must have stressed the keyboard during the move

;(

Are there any requirements for the user when using an UDP based protocol? Do they need to open a port or something to receive?

tbh, I'm not sure I completely understand how uPNP does what it does, but that's what I would look up

... I hate google.

With their instant search, you only need to type "do" add a space, and it does the barrel roll.

lol, that's awesome

That's a funny bug

4:01 AM

You know, this UDP stuff can wait, I think it's time for something shiny instead. I've been wanting to re-add my rendering code for a while now.

Prior to this, @MindWorX's game was rendering a black screen

Actually, it was CornflowerBlue

With two text input boxes that would disappear making it all clear CornflowerBlue. :P

haha

Oh, btw, I got some new textures for my tiles. :D Higher resolution stuff and all.

cool

4:05 AM

oooh, nifty

they don't look too great in-game :(

Nah, not yet, with the lighting in place and a proper background they'll look better.

They all have the brightness of full exposure at the moment.

right, that's what's missing

ehhh, i dunno. I guess I'll have to see them with proper lighting and such before I know if they're good or not

4:19 AM

Well, this is definitely one of the lesser healthy things I've cooked. I just made a batch of Mac'n'Butter, as I am apparently out of cheese.

Which I forgot to check before starting.

haha. Mac'n'Butter. sounds like you'd fit in with us Americans. Or the Norway butter dieters.

Hehe

Poor Norway.

They're in a butter crisis.

Too Little Butter: satwcomic.com/too-little-butter

nice, I should really eat something other than these double stuff Oreos

runs to the kitchen to grab some cereal

mmmm double stuffed Oreo cereal.

:/ yeah... I really have no food in this place yet, and it's too cold to walk around the corner for a poutine

4:27 AM

I'm facing a rather different issue. It's 5:30 AM here.

So no getting cheese for me

good ol' first few days after moving time

heh, yeah, I've been eating with plastic cutlery all week because I can't find my metal stuff

hey guys. So what do you think of the text above the range-rings when you are constructing stuff?

hmmm, not bad.

I'd like it more with some butter.

ok

4:39 AM

But yeah, text is alright, unless you find a different more graphical approach.

Ah, like you're thinking an electricity symbol or something?

Indeed.

Make the text optional, since I know red means mining range and white means power range.

Ok

yeah... I was thinking that myself

Alright, got a basic query tool window up, though it's not at all pretty, and there's no way to get rid of it

Alright, I'm happy with this evening's progress, I'm going to get out of here, ttyl!

@thedaian That sounds good. That lets you see the details of the unit then, who's in there, how much $$$ they are giving you, etc.

4:51 AM

yep, though not quite so much detail (yet). but soon!

and yay for progress

sleeps

Awesome

What did I do today? I guess I added those words around the range circles, added music to the game, and did some refactoring of the back-end really

Oh, and allowed Entities to be solid, or not

So that's something

alright, now I'm really out of here

1:52 PM

hi there

hello

does somebody know anything about java?

perhaps. go ahead and ask your question

I want to create a game and I was wondering if the program Bluej (for writing java code) is good to work with. Untill now I alwys worked with it and I made small games like rushhour in it , but I want to write something bigger that would be able to play on the net.

Hmmm, looks like it's designed for smaller projects. It might be able to handle a large game, but my guess is that a regular IDE would be a better option

2:09 PM

okay and wich one does java game designers prefer to work with?

2:37 PM

@Ruben Eclipse is fairly popular for developing in Java, but the IDE doesn't really matter that much

user4704

5:37 PM

@Noctrine you made my flag list impossible to clear by merging that question! ~rage~

5:50 PM

RAGE

user4704

Apparently we are supposed to get 10.5 inches of snow here. This is quite unheard of for Seattle (and also spells certain doom, as 1.5 inches shuts down the entire city).

user4704

I don't like this question: gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/22495/… :\

(10.5 inches = 26.67 centimeters for us metric users)

That's quite a lot of snow

yay. wall of text question :(

You getting part of this cold front too then? It's getting absolutely cold here, :(

5:57 PM

10.5 inches? yeesh. that's going to doom the city

user4704

@thedaian I was going to edit it, but it's so... rambly.

user4704

I feel a little bad because I was pretty harsh on his other question too, and he's only got three.

yeah. it's really hard to even figure out what he's talking about

i kind of feel bad because he stopped in chat to talk about "pure opengl" stuff, but no one was really here

user4704

Oh. Bummer.

user4704

gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/22476/… :|

6:12 PM

bad/terrible question... fairly decent answer though

user4704

6:26 PM

As soon as I hit 20k I'm going to go on a tag wiki edit spree.

8:11 PM

@JoshPetrie I merged nothing!

user4704

Bah it's gone now.

Come March, if we have another election you'll be a mod anyway :p

user4704

I'm not sure I'd want to be. :P

I wonder what counts as consensus on meta. As only like 1% of the sites users actually visit it.

>_>

user4704

8:24 PM

@Noctrine Why do you ask?

the 1% controls meta. occupy meta!

Just curious, because it seems that we are starting to slowly move against Best of

by votes now :p

8:56 PM

@JohnMcDonald We had almost six feet/two meters of snow some places last winter. :P

Same the winter before. Weather has been acting crazy in Denmark the past few years.

No snow this winter yet, and now it's almost over.

I like snow though, makes it more profitable for us taxi drivers. :P

6ft at a time? or are you talking about over the year?

Oh, I'm talking cumulative through December.

ah, ok. That sounds like where my parent's live: Revelstoke

They get so much snow that the plows don't plow snow to the outside of the road, they plow to the middle of the road and then come with a dump truck in the middle of the night and truck the snow out of town

And people plow their lawns early in the year so that there will be room for the snow later in the year

Hehe, that's crazy. :P

We have lots of open water around here, and they used to just load up the snow and dump it in the harbor.

Jimmy

Here in Chicago, we've only had a light dusting of snow so far this year, and a heavy dusting of salt on the roads.

probably more salt than snow so far

9:01 PM

@Jimmy Same here. :P

But I see now that they predict lots of snow the coming week. That's going to be interesting.

image of the truck loading: farm6.staticflickr.com/5043/5355946552_5e96bfb226_b.jpg

Hah, cool. :P

climate change is great when you're not in an area getting hit by 10 feet of snow, or tornados, or floods, or swarms of locusts.

Jonathan Connell

Good evening

Hello

9:06 PM

@thedaian Indeed. We're used to the most boring whether ever in Denmark. I love it when we get the odd windy season or snowy season. :P

@MindWorX Well, you're crazy. Boring weather is a lot nicer. :P

Hehe, I'm a bit of a survivalist. Odd for a geek I know, but I love nature and being in the open. :P

I love nature. I just don't like freezing to death :(

I'm quite active, and used to think that was odd for a geek, but now I think it's more normal than I used to think it was

skiing, biking, hiking, camping etc.

I'm actually a pretty inactive geek, but I do think a lot more geeks are doing the whole "active lifestyle" thing. Or more active people are becoming geeks, one of the two

9:15 PM

Well... my Dad was one of those uber geeks back in the day, the kind you'd never really expect to have kids (sorry Dad!), but he did, and he's actually quite active too. Lots of skiing, hiking and biking too.

ah, inherited geekness

heh, yeah

I got my few social genes from my mom

Jimmy

I enjoy the outdoors but I'm too lazy for aerobic exercise

so I stick with bouldering and snowboarding because I don't need the lungs of a marathon runner to do either.

yeah... I used to hate sweating, period. But then I went to Abu Dhabi for a few months and I had no choice but to sweat, so now I guess I can tolerate it a little better than I used to.

and that... is why the cold is awesome (down to a point)

user4704

9:34 PM

You can always put more clothes on. There is a point at which you cannot take more clothes off. Therefore it is better to be in a cold environment.

That's always my argument

9:45 PM

I need some suggestions.

That's the image from yesterday.

I'm thinking of ways to dynamically have a nice transition between different types.

I don't want my artist to have to create so many transitions manually, and I don't want to halfass it like Terraria does.

Well... either transition, or at least don't have the nice line between the types

you mean you want to remove brown lines

No, I mean, like between dirt and stone, I don't want the visible tiling difference.

I was thinking of simply fading between the two types. Would that look ugly?

:/ I donno if it would look ugly, I'd need to see it I think

I guess.

9:49 PM

You don't need to implement the whole feature, just do a sample in paint or something

Yeah. I just need to decide where to place the transition then. Like, in between the two tiles or does one tile overlap the other? It seems easier to have different types overlap a bit.

does the part I've marked look ok?

it's what a simple transition will look like (if I got where do you want to modify)

Well, it certainly looks better than it did

Still seems too unnatural.

it's just a blur filter applied to that part

he can do it much mroe better, with drawing that area two times with both layer colors

and each of them fades(using alpha value) as it gets closer to other area

10:04 PM

this one seems much more better

Fade like that? :)

it just feels like grey area didn't fade at all, but it's only light brown area covering it

@John, @thedaian, What do you think?

other than that I think it has no problem

10:07 PM

I'm still trying to make up my mind, but I think it looks alright.

Yeah, it's good

@mindworx sidenote: to do your graphics you can use paint.net

It's really easy to use

and it seems to be designed/optimized for game developers without artists!

I actually use Paint Shop Pro. Most people recommend Photoshop. But I should give paint.net a go.

@Gajet Why do you say that?

first of all every thing is right where you need it,

user4704

Yeah I don't see anything about it that's designed or optimized at all for game developers in any way.

10:11 PM

it's just what I feel

@Gajet This is because what I did was extend the dirt to overlap the stone a bit. I think mixing in the middle would only complicate it more than is necessary.

i'll be back in around 45 min

user4704

@MindWorX I like the first one, not the second blur one

Hmm. The first one just seems like the black border has been removed and a bit of filler has been put between.

user4704

I like the sharp edge though -- I feel like doing the blur will make your game look very fuzzy. I still think a transition is what you'd want, but I think a transition that wasn't a blur would look better overall.

10:16 PM

I agree.

eh, i've used paint.net, it's good for basic editing, but it really sucks for more advanced stuff like blur and whatnot

user4704

It's a fine tool, it's just in no way optimized for game developers or for people without artists. It's just optimized to be a general purpose, simple painting tool.

that said, @MindWorX, I actually do like the first one that @Gajet did. I think it's a bit more "cleaner", or something.

and... frankly, i'm still not a huge fan of the new tiles.

Hehe, we'll see how they look with proper lighting. :P

obvious tiling effect is obvious.

10:19 PM

Was even more obvious before. :P

can't remember what it looked like before

Anyways, I'll put the tile transition issue aside for now, it's not really that important.

ok, yeah, that's not much better :(

the new.... "dirt?" tile is actually good, the sand one is also pretty good

the problem is really the rock tiles

Yeah, I agree on that one, but it seems making a tilesheet with both tile variation that still tiles properly in all combinations is hard. :P

ehhh, are you doing the art, or is someone else?

10:25 PM

Someone else. :P

ok, get them to redo the rock tiles then :P

@MindWorX "with both tile variation", you mean there are only 2 tiles to pick from?

This is just something I was given permission to use. :P

That "both" came out of nowhere. Must be a "Made in Canada" chat we've got us here.

A standard tileset has 4 variations.

ok

oh, so they're not custom made for you, you just borrowed them from someone. alright then, i shall stop complaining about the rock tile graphics until you get closer to an official release.

10:28 PM

Sample tilesheet.

that's pretty tight

i'm having my own art problems right now...

@thedaian what kind of art problems?

it goes like this... the artist i originally got my art from has disappeared for about a year, and i haven't really done a great job of keeping in touch myself...

I like the art guys approach with the dirt tilesheet. First make a single set that tiles without pebbles, then add pebbles randomly afterwards for each variation.

I can see how the stone one can be a bit harder.

10:35 PM

so, i've been poking around trying to find alternate art i could use/buy/whatever, and then someone who worked a bit on a similar "remake sim tower" game (guy pretty much did art mockups) contacted me earlier this month, saying "hey you want to use my art?"

Oh, what a problem! Free arts!

i initially said "ok, cool! here's the format and layout i need"

the problem mostly comes from the fact that he drew all his previous art with a different tile size (not a huge problem) and a different isometric ratio (huge problem)

(and let me guess, all of your friends also tell you "Just use 3D, it's way easier")

and he's often sent me art that i just can't use because the format/positioning of the sprites are completely different from what my engine is set up to handle

:(

10:39 PM

i sent him a copy of the game with all the art and such, and then sent him a copy of the game that could handle the slightly different tile size (though it was more buggy)

ic, yeah, hmm, maybe there's a lesson to be learned in this? I'm thinking to myself that maybe there should be a way to allow artists to load content straight into the game themselves... somehow?

It's almost like asking a programmer to work with a black-box where he can't test how his code interacts with the black box

i think one of the problems is that he didn't seem to have looked at how the current art works in the current version of the game

Hmm, ok.

user4704

One should write tools to support this kind of iteration.

initially, when i was like "oh hey, cool, free art!" he just sent me a huge zip file of all his art assets, and was like "well, enjoy! let me know if there's a problem"

user4704

10:42 PM

It will save one many headaches.

it actually is possible to configure what files to load, in terms of art

I just found someone over the weekend that is interested in providing me with some music, and he also presented some interest with creating art

though i don't have anything really useful like a "reload art" button or command

user4704

One should also have more in-depth conversations about what 'using somebody's art' (or other work) would actually entail. :P I learned this lesson the hard way with the SharpDX guy.

at this point i'm really really tempted to just attempt my own art

10:44 PM

yeah... I've never tried to work with an artist before, so I'm sure there will be some new challenges

@thedaian Dude, that is really time consuming

the recent new artist is good, but the art is fairly simple stylewise

the previous artist i had was making high res textures and fully 3d rooms in 3d max and being all awesome and crazy

nice

Yeah... for this isometric stuff, I'd imagine it's easier to make a 3D room, then snap a 2D of it eh?

In my case, it's obviously easier, because my stuff can actually rotate

yeah, especially if you're making really high quality stuff

i'm probably going to attempt "art" this weekend or something

if i'm partly successful, i'm going to probably drop the other artists

Speaking of custom art. I'm thinking of allowing people to replace art in my game. Are there any gotchas in regards to cheating with custom textures? I know in 3d, opacity can be an issue, but that's not a problem in mine.

And they can't change how tiles act physically as that's handled by the server.

nope. just makes it client-side only

10:54 PM

Well, I wish you luck, and I hope you can do better than I did: media.moddb.com/cache/images/mods/1/2/1398/thumb_620x2000/…

so that people can't be like "oh, tricky, i am scamming people into thinking i am giving them gold when it's really dirt"

Yeah, localized stuff like that is only cheating themselves. :P