Game Development

9:00 PM

@MickLH Lol when I said i was going to disappear, I meant I was going to start learning C without any distractions :P

user4704

@TheMuffinCoder I mean you'll need to start with some basic concepts, yes.

@TheMuffinCoder If you want, I have an assignment that has really "shined" with the people who have asked me to tutor them.

user4704

But it's better to, for example, attempt to write a guess-the-number game than to "learn about rand()"

MickLH

I have them write a program that can input 2 arbitrary length numbers and add them together.

user4704

If you do the latter it's easy to fall into the trap of reading a few pages on what rand() does and think that means you "know" it, but you've never actually used it or had any experience with it, so you don't really and you're like to easily forget it

MickLH

9:02 PM

They grind their brain on loops and pointers for a while and eventually something clicks, I let them enjoy that for a while and then I say: "Now do it with multiplication."

Then I move them on to C++ forever after

user4704

Concrete tasks like writing a program to do a particular thing help give you applied practice, help you focus around a clear goal and success conditions, and can feel more rewarding and engaging than writing a dumb program that calls all the various push_back or insert methods on a vector to "learn" it.

MickLH

and btw, Josh and I are still saying the same thing in different ways :P

Almo

if you don't know a particular thing because of a gap in your task-oriented learning, this is what happens:

"Hey, lead programmer, how do I store these things?" "Use a vector." "3 floats?" "No a vector." "What's that?" "Here's some sample code." "Oh, cool, thanks."

^ is a true story.

don't worry about knowing everything. worry about building software that works.

TheMuffinCoder

Lol I was going to initially write this game with JavaScript

Almo

Arrays had always suited my purposes, so I never had any reason to learn vectors.

TheMuffinCoder

9:06 PM

But i want to make it really shine and add a lot of particles :D

MickLH

final note from me until more questions come in... That assignment I described above is actually tested and fine tuned over time with a good number of students.

It probably sounds silly, but it has hidden challenges and I would highly recommend it as a benchmark for when you "know enough C" and should be focused on C++

TheMuffinCoder

; - ; I can't start yet since I'm waiting for codeblocks to install

MickLH

36 mins ago, by Ali.S

@Almo who needs tools? when you have cmd?

I'm partly joking, an IDE is wonderful.

But I just didn't like Code::Blocks and rather use a command prompt if those are my options :P

TheMuffinCoder

I just want to follow the tutorial first, once I have a grasp on how things work I'll move to VS :P

MickLH

I actually love clang++ for its error messages.

If you can use that, I'd recommend it. It actually DESCRIBES the error (holy shit) and shows you the line with a nice little ASCII art showing the exact character it choked on

Slereah

9:19 PM

My wolf sprite spontaneously turned into 2 sheep and 3 chickens

I suspect something might be off with the sprite management

MickLH

Or maybe you pissed off a wizard

... (in game, that you forgot you coded)

Slereah

It's weird because it didn't happen with the previous sprite

Oh well

Plenty to debug now I suppose

MickLH

yeah those damn wizards

Slereah

Maybe I should just rewrite that class

MickLH

eh, just send them to hogwarts

homeschooling doesn't give a young wizard a chance to grow social skills

Slereah

9:21 PM

Really I could understand turning into another sprite

But 5 sprites?

I am impressed

I guess something fucked up with the width of the selection

MickLH

Off by one error overwriting a buffer?

Jon

have you ever heard the tale of the duck?

This started as a piece of Interplay corporate lore. It was well known that producers (a game industry position, roughly equivalent to PMs) had to make a change to everything that was done. The assumption was that subconsciously they felt that if they didn’t, they weren’t adding value.

The artist working on the queen animations for Battle Chess was aware of this tendency, and came up with an innovative solution. He did the animations for the queen the way that he felt would be best, with one addition: he gave the queen a pet duck. He animated this duck through all of the queen’s animations…

Eventually, it came time for the producer to review the animation set for the queen. The producer sat down and watched all of the animations. When they were done, he turned to the artist and said, “That looks great. Just one thing—get rid of the duck.”

MickLH

Is this a real example? Or a re-skin of the proverb with the guy with the chisel?

Almo

yup, I heard that. My understanding is that it is in fact true.

MickLH

Lol, that guy took the proverb with the chisel to heart, and to good effect

Damn I can't remember where it comes from at all, but it's a story about a guy who does the sculpture self portrait for the rich man. He purposely leaves the nose messed up, so that when the rich man complains about it, he gets to finish his true work of art.

Instead of finishing it, and then the rich man defecates on some part of the perfection.

Jon

9:28 PM

it is a real story

but its on the internet so who the hell knows

Almo

Battle Chess is the very definition of style over substance.

it's just chess, and not with a very good AI. But they sold tons of copies because of the graphics.

Jon

The idea that some team leader probably felt the need to have some form of control, and that a mastermind designer planned it all out, is a pretty fun story

any programmer would eat up that story

MickLH

It's real good advice...

Pip

Programming time!

MickLH

I learned it the hard way, even after hearing that proverb

My first coding job, I did everything perfect. Flawless fully tested and exactly to spec.

Jon

9:30 PM

LOL, didn't we all

TheMuffinCoder

ideone.com/sqjfru :D

Jon

although, I revised some of the code I produced at my first gig (I brought it home)

And it is really bad

Pip

So.... MonoDevelop with all of the stuff I love about Linux or VS with all of the stuff that I hate about Windows?

Jon

LIke, back then, I thoguht I knew what I was doing

Pip

(Working on a thing that I'll be blogging about)

Jon

9:31 PM

LOL, @Pip

MickLH

@Pip I vote MonoDevelop because I don't have to open up VirtualBox for it

Jon

well, you can technically NOT use direct X

Pip

lol

Jon

The point of monogame was to make XNA more portable

And I think they succeeded at doing that

Pip

uh huh

Jon

9:32 PM

Even though their mobile support is grasped by the balls

MickLH

Oh yeah ditch MonoGame just use SDL

oops

@Jon That was my mistake... now I still do it exactly to my vision, but then I go back and misinterpret some detail and deliver the "broken" version instead

Pip

But I like MonoGame and the reason I'm doing this is to demo a library that I've been contributing to :P

Jon

I love monogame

Just wish Xamarin would be more cool

Xamarin is the anchor

Pip

Agreed. Then again, I'm a student so I have a free Business class license :P

Jon

Monogame needs to release open source mobile libs

Pip

9:33 PM

They can't really

Jon

weighing them down man.

Pip

everything is built on top of Xamarin

Jon

Unity, UE

Pip

But I agree, it is

MickLH

If MonoGame didn't feel like an esoteric language, I'd not hate it so much

It's actually exactly the level of "engine" I want.

Jon

9:35 PM

Same here

fuck its so nice to work with

Pip

@MickLH check out Monogame.Extended!

github.com/craftworkgames/Monogame.Extended

MickLH

I'm sorry @Pip, I can't deal with their rendering philosophy

Pip

we're working on making extensions for MG to mkae it.... better :P

Howso? What's wrong with it?

MickLH

It takes more than 5 minutes to learn how to write a deferred shading renderer

Pip

I have no idea how to do that in any language

MickLH

9:37 PM

Pseudocode is the only language that should take longer than 5 minutes, the first time lol

Then once you see how simple the concept is, you'll hate EVERY half assed piece of shit everyone tried to put together and call a "graphics library"

Including OpenGL and DirectX, but those will rise to the top for their simplicity and performance

(neither of them are simple, or really even all that performant given the raw power they use)

@Pip I remember now, it's the content pipeline

Nothing else was a huge problem IIRC

Pip

Content pipeline has been.... sorted!

pretty much

Ali.S

@MickLH can you help me with piece of C++ code?

for (unsigned k = 0; k < coded.size(); k++)
{
	unsigned x = coded[k];
	lockedLevel.put(x % 256); x /= 256;
	lockedLevel.put(x % 256); x /= 256;
	lockedLevel.put(x % 256); x /= 256;
	lockedLevel.put(x % 256); x /= 256;
	int length = lockedLevel.tellp();
	assert(length % 4 == 0 && "Somethings wrong");
}

why am I getting an assert?

any one?

TheMuffinCoder

9:53 PM

LOL I loved this video

Coding Sucks: Why a Job in Programming Is Absolute Hell

►

user4704

@Ali.S tellp() tells you the position of the put pointer.

user4704

Are you sure it was on an appropriate boundary to start with?

Ali.S

@JoshPetrie so why is it not always divisible by 4?

user4704

1 + 4 is not divisble by 4

user4704

What's the thing's actual value?

Ali.S

9:56 PM

@JoshPetrie this line happens just before that loop:

ofstream lockedLevel(text);

at the end of each iteration it should be tellp should return something divisible by 4 right?

user4704

What's the type of text?

user4704

I see why you think that but just because put takes a char doesn't mean you write a char to the stream

Ali.S

yeah that could be it

user4704

put() does formatted output

Ali.S

thanks

user4704

9:58 PM

ofstream's two constructors for char * and std::string do slightly different things (the std::string one does more than the char * one)

Ali.S

yup that was the problem

thanks

user4704

Oh, actually, I guess I'm wrong, there are no material differences between the two ctors. I was thinking of the difference between default and non-default.

Ali.S

this one did the trick: ofstream lockedLevel(text, std::ios::binary);

I just expected that put doesn't format the string...

user4704

That suggests that you really should not be using put()

user4704

One of your characters probably ends up being something subject to transformation, maybe a newline.

Ali.S

10:01 PM

@JoshPetrie that's the whole writing function...

@JoshPetrie is there any other character that could be transformed?

user4704

Yes.

Ali.S

that's something new I'm hearing... like what?

user4704

Depends on your locale and various other crazy things.

user4704

Although apparently put is considered unformatted output.

user4704

So perhaps what is happening is that hte underlying buffer is doing formatted/unformatted output based on std::ios::binary.

user4704

10:05 PM

(that is, the result of rdbuf())

user4704

yeeees that must be it

user4704

that ctor calls rdbuf()->open() and passes the ios flags

user4704

iostreams are dumb

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