Hello chat!

Hello.

greetings

I'm trying to fit my recently written code into a proper structure. It resists.

It was wrong to handle entity-system interaction in a class that holds systems. It had to be aware of the existence of different entity types that should be registered in different systems. Instead of this, the object should do it because it knows better what systems does it use.

Has anyone managed to compile freeglut project to android ? Is there an easy way to do that?

@trollingchar hmm, typically, entities don't have "types", no?

@TomTsagk I haven't tried that, sorry.

I don't understand why everything NDK related on android is so complicated :/

I'm not an android dev, but from a distance, it seems like android's OS / API has more churn per update than other OSs

Assuming that's even somewhat true, having a moving target doesn't make it as easy for other SDKs need to synch up.

@Pikalek I used to do android development, from what I understand they already do have C api available for use, it's just initially it wasn't open for all users, and slowly they opened it.

Still, sux when stuff won't build.

NDK is deprecated

Some years ago I spent way too much time trying to build an NDK app, and I was lost in some Google's official documentation basically telling you "copy-paste this text here and that text there" without telling you why

@AlexandreVaillancourt "Type" here is just what determines which components does an entity have.

last time I touched it, upon starting it up it said "deprecated. new tools to be released" or something

Ah. Isn't android limited to some subset of openGL? Like ES or something like that?

@Almo Is there any alternative for building native apps ?

android is limited period.

man what a pain.

sorry I'll stop bitching. :)

@Pikalek Yes android is using OpenGLES

@TomTsagk I don't know if there is an alternative.

I just avoid android unless some engine (like unity) deals with the problems for me.

@Almo I agree with you to some degree, but you can't deny having a game also available for android is a massive plus (if you want to reach more users)

Cognizer Android was fairly painless, except for the idiot back button stuff.

I don't care if android is more users if it makes me hate my life

this is talking as a hobby dev

I don't do hobby dev that makes me hate myself. :)

That's true, that's why I either want an easy way, or just not support android

@trollingchar Oh ok, makes more sense.

at work, yeah we definitely have to deal with it. :)

Also dealing inhomogeneous hardware sucks

when you're supporting back a few years, you have to worry about what capabilities the ancient cheap-ass devices have.

Also, android users' tendency not to get OS updates hurts

not really their fault

since vendors are responsible for updates, you get a real hodge-podge.

iOS updates have huge uptake within weeks.

I do remember when doing native android development, these issues were pretty much either handled by android studio, or not really affecting the app, but any other project that needs an android version is painful :/

android studio itself is painful

who the hell uses Gradle anyway

I don't feel I should have to dig around in text script files to get my game to compile.

Is freeglut still being maintained?

at the time of Love and Hip Hop, just publication console was horrid

ha! Gradle confuses me a lot, I wish they went for something simpler

you hit publish on your beta "WARNING: once you publish your app, you can't make <X> changes!"

@Pikalek I think its abandoned, but they do have instructions of how to compile for android

are they warning me about publishing the beta? Am I going to fuck this up?

no, they were just warning about the main published app even if you were publishing a beta or alpha

scared the shit out of people over and over. I had to keep going over and helping other teams with their publish because of it.

@Almo You sound like you've had a lot bottled up :P

I hate android in so many ways, and I have a long memory for such things.

:D

Honestly I wish they gave more control to the users

less

That's how stuff came in the days of love & hip hop - in bottles.

apple-style.

I'm personally avoiding the apple ecosystem, because of their "walled-garden" approach, and the fact that you need to spend a lot of money to compile for iOS

I don't see any of my projects there anytime soon

@TomTsagk What do you need out of freeglut?

$100 a year is not "a lot of money"

if you can't afford that, you can't afford a computer to develop on

@Almo Also all the apple devices that you need ?

one mac mini.

I own a ~£100 computer, and can develop for free, forever

@Almo it depends on what are you going to buy

there's a simulator; not the best, but you can get one used apple phone and you're good to go

some things aren't worth $100

ok so develop and publish good android game from that 100 pound computer

I think you are missing the people that develop open-source apps and don't expect any money back

I don't expect money back from Cognizer

I released it free

still the dough is not much compared to the market access I get

But I get that a lot of people don't care about ease of use. If they did, DOS would never have been so widespread.

So why exactly are you chasing a bigger market if you are not earning anything back from it?

Accessibility.

I tell some random person on the street "you can play my game" and they can get it

as unity made android easy, pretty much any phone can run it

as win/osx/linux was easy on steam, I support all three there too

still free.

This has gone a little off-topic :P

Not everyone is using Unity, so not everyone is having the same experience

correct.

many are having a worse experience

and don't seem to care.

I can't imagine building an android app without the support of something like unity

it even auto updates SDK stuff for you, which is great unless you have some third-party plugins that are finicky about such versioning issues.

we had that problem on LHH

analytics wanted like build tools 24, but unity wanted 26. was lots of "fun".

My question was more about a compiler I'm making, so it can't really work with Unity

C :)

@Almo Keep in mind that we get a lot of questions on the site which starts with "So I'm currently writing my own engine and [...]"

:D

haha yeah alex

I wrote a script compiler once, but it was pretty rudimentary

I genuinely wish you luck with the C compiler. such projects are hard, but rewarding when they work. :)

Oh I think you misunderstood me, it's a compiler for a custom language, but is written in C, it's a hobby project, but I'm slowly approaching the stage where I can support extra platforms, and was thinking if android would be an option

Will you get to a point where you'll be able to write your compiler in your custom language?

:P

It's syntax is influenced by Lisp, so it's not too fancy

@TomTsagk oh right, that's even cooler. :)

errrr... looks like I have an infinite loop in the parsing of our scene files...

You know when you don't feel like tackling an issue...

How big are the files ?

Not that big.

In fact, I have two scene files, one small and one big. It "works" with the big one, and has the infinite loop in the small one.

I hate infinite loops, but if its a small file, I guess its more bearable

Yeah; the issue lies within the code, I think.

I did not add a feature that would prevent infinite loops in the parsing, though.

May I ask what engine/tools you are using ?

For that, it's a "custom format", we use XML for our scene files. The parser uses TinyXML.

Interesting, shouldn't XML be a "top-down" format? Curious as to how it triggered an infinite loop

Yeah; the parsing of it is annoying.

We have that "progress bar" that we need to update as we parse the XML, load the models and create the scene. This adds a layer of complexity.

Tons of lambdas added to lambdas added to lambdas...

If you are willing to share, how do you create these scene files? Is it from a normal 3D software, that exports to a custom format?

Now it makes more sense :/

No, it's all handmade.

Oh wow, I'm extremely interested on how that's done

I don't know how much I can ask though :P

We have entities and components; we build them by hand, place them around by hand.

Like a GUI? Drag-n-Drop?

We type the XML ;)

Enter the xyz positions by hand; create "rot" and "tr" nodes ourselves and enter the values, etc.

I'm used to making everything through code and not really using any GUI, but I always wondered how easy it is to make a complicated scene, and if a GUI would be needed

It's ok-but-tends-to-be-annoying to create decent scenes for our needs.

I guess, at some point, we'll want to use drag-and-drop and wysiwyg tools to create richer scenes, but that's not exactly where we make our money.

Fair enough! Still sounds quite awesome

Ok, I commented out something, and now my scene loads.

something in the code.

Mmm is it insidea loop ?

Ok, found the bug.

What was it ?

Not exactly. I had a command to process items, but the amount of items was zero; some code handled the case where there was 0 items to process, but not enough, it should have returned at some point but did not and so it "skipped" to another list of items to process.

Ah, makes sense

sounds like a fun project, what language is it in?

c++

oooh luck you, I missed languages like C++ :/

I understand. Using c++ makes me happy and brings joy to my life. I consider myself lucky to work with that :D

Haha, as someone that has been working way too long on javascript, I agree :P

ha, yeah. JavaScript. I'll agree that it's super useful, though. I think what I don't like about it is the lack of tools and intellisense. But maybe that exists now.

I don't like languages like JS. You can declare a parameter and not know what will actually come.

Yeah, I guess that kind of flexibility has a price.

I've heard they made tools to make developing on it easier, but its still quite difficult

There is a balance between safety and flexibility, and you can't pick both.

I just find it sad that there is no options that to go through javascript

I went to an interview many years ago. They said my profile looked interesting. And I said I wanted to do back-end and not web front end or GUI front-end. I did not want to write HTML, nor JavaScript.

They did not call me back.

Oh wow

I'm on my first programming job, so when I had the interview I didn't have that much confidence

Yeah, I guess you don't know much about the field either.

I had some experience as a web dev, and, really, having to deal with all the browsers and implementations was too much annoyance for what I had patience for.

Can't blame you, it's so much information, and changes so quickly, and all the browsers are doing their own thing

Yep

The great thing, though, is that some devs love that stuff, and hate c++! More stuff for them, and more stuff for me! Win-win situation!

I've met people like that, it's so handy to have them around :P

;)

Hello

olleH

Are you my cousin from the mirror dimension?

@Almo

Not sure :)

Maybe so ;) what are you up to?

@Almo

just goin over my JIRA tasks, looking for things I can close or reassign

What is a JIRA?

oh sorry

JIRA is task management software

it's pretty common, so I mistakenly assumed you knew what it was