kevin's blog

Random Album Review - Noah and the Whale - Peaceful the World Lays Me Down

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 12:20:09 +0000

Noah and the Whale, kinda indie folky sound - very nice. Reminds me in places of Firefly theme music. I've been listening to it for 3 weeks on and off now and it still make me smile.

Go Buy it!

Back from Cyprus

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 11:56:39 +0000

I've been back at work two days and I'm already wishing on I was back on holiday, even though I was glad to come home when I did. Wierd huh?

I worried alot about the travelling, mostly about going on a flight (which I hate) but also taking Meg on a 5 hour flight each way. Shouldn't have worried, she was great, slept a lot, hardly cried at all - even coped with the wonderful (sic) Pafos airport. Both ways was easy and we almost enjoyed the flight. Travelling late at night wasn't the best, we got there at midnight and got home at 5am.

Still, it was a wonderful resort, looked a bit like this (though we stayed on the other nicer side of the resort ;)):

Good fun was had by all, especially Meg. She was dancing every night and really enjoyed the pirate ship, the splash pool and more than anything the free ice cream. The day times were spent sleeping or splashing about in the pool. The afternoons and evenings exploring, eating and being entertained - all nice.

While the resort was great, Pafos isn't up to much as a toursit hot spot. My advice would be not to bother.

Everyone we met was great, including all the staff. Many thanks in particular to the creche staff who did such a good job of making Meg feel at home she really didn't want to leave them behind.

Back to work now tho...

Holiday

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 20:14:01 +0000

Holiday, yes it's finally here. I'm off work for a week and traveling around a bit. Get some sun and some culture. Taking Meg on a plane is a daunting thought though. I'll post photos when I'm back this time honest.

The most important thing is I'm not at work :)

Star Dodger - Flash Game (I R Traitor)

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 00:20:38 +0000

I've been wanting to learn some new skills in game development, kinda feel like I've been stagnating for the last year or so. A few years ago I had a go at flash games development, mostly because it was there. I couldn't get anywhere, the free and open tools were just hard work. For last week I've been experimenting with AS3, FlashDevelop and the Flex SDK. These tools, while not as nice or as powerful as the Java tool set (Eclipse+JDK), are actually adequate and I've found myself able to be pretty productive. It's also nice to not have the distribution head ache running round in the back of your mind while coding.

Anyway, I'm going to be remaking some of old games (mine and others) in an effort to learn a bit more about Flex and AS3, the first of which is what this blog post is about. My first remake of pretty much the simplest game I could remember:

Click Here to Play Star Dodger

This was more an experiment into how to build a simple game in flash, how to integrate the wonderful Mochiads and hopefully how the flash playing communities respond to games - thats where I'll go next I guess, search around and find out where to submit this sort of thing.

Anyway, so far, not so bad. I'll be feeding the cool bits about as3 back into Slick development and probably whining on about the bad bits here :)

Double Edged Sword in Java 3D development

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 07:12:50 +0000

It's a wierd thing when someone announces a new project, especially someone of note. In this case one of the key developers of JME (who recently announced their departure) Josh had announced the creation of a new 3D engine (along with another of the developers of JME, Rikard). They're calling it Ardor3D and it sounds like they're focussing on top end game development.

It's exciting, it's new and I wish them the best of luck. I think everyone has known for a while that what we currently have in Java 3D space is starting to look a little behind the times - though plenty good enough for most of the projects out there. Josh describes in detail each of the reasons for this which make good sense. Can't wait to get my hands on whatever they come up with! :)

However, it's also a sad day, when JME can be called dead or dieing. I don't really think thats the case. I think it's a technology thats powerful and useful but has reached breaking point in terms of code base. The tools are there, we can use them albeit not top end games development - who was really going there anyway?

Me? Well I'll be dropping my 3D project for now, maybe reworking it into JPCT - I've been meaning to have a go at that for ages anyway. As always the software is designed to switch renderers at the drop of a hat so thats all good.

Right now? Other fish to fry :)

EDIT: As a side note, check out the wonderful ads that google selected for Josh's post. Ford should be proud!

Random Game - Super Collider

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 23:36:20 +0000

Inspired by recent news events I've cobbled together a new game over the past two evenings, it's called "Super Collider":

Play Super Collider

The concept was based on the name, an arena shmup where you don't get to shoot - just collide with things. There are instructions in game but essentially you need to run into the opponents using your mouse controlled ship while you have your shield up. However, you have 3 shields and you need to match the colour of the shield against the colour the enemy. When enemies die they leave behind shield recharge tokens which can only be collected if your shield is down.

Hold left button to keep the shield on. Press right button (or space) to toggle shield colours.

Niche Updated

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 20:21:40 +0000

Finally got my last evening on Niche, so, there's some fixes and a couple of new bits of the quest implemented. Unless I get totally inspired I can't see it going much further than this, but heh, never say never right?

Play Niche

A Two Dimensional Distraction - Seven Day Mash Up

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 23:10:13 +0000

I was getting a bit bogged down in Salvage Rights, it's a bit and complicated beast to code. To keep motivated I decided to take a quick detour back to my beloved 2D game development home. However, since I don't want to totally lose track of SR - a seven day mash up was in order.

(for anyone that doesn't know, 7 day mash up = seven days - or evenings in my case, focused on making a single game with little regard to code beauty of expandability. Just make it work god damn it!)

So I'm officially 7 evenings along now (though I didn't work on it one day this week for other reasons). It's not finished, not nearly, but it is playable and does have a some of the game there. Mostly just scripting more story in left to do (which of course I now want to do, but fighting to get back to 3D).

Here's Niche, a silly platformed hacked about in 6 evenings. All graphics were produced by me, you'll be able to tell. The story is also mine, again, I make no apologies.

You can try it via Webstart. I'll probably get some more done next week.

Blood Effects - JME

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 17:41:41 +0000

I'm working on a little side project at the moment, but I've meaning to post some screens up about progress on Salvage Rights. The last thing I worked on as getting aliens in there and allowing the player to rid the world of the alien presence.

Before hand, there's an alien that the player discovered...

And after, the alien isn't there so much:

Particle effects in JME are an easy and powerful way of making things happen in game. This particular effects looks great in motion and took only about an hour to tune up.

Nice work JME.

Bigger Maps - NavMesh Issues

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 10:23:16 +0000

I've started trying out some large maps to test both culling and scaling of the path finding/navmesh generation. The new map is about the size I'd expect a medium level of a multi-level wreck. It looks like this:

The first thing that happened was the speed of the map load and navmesh generation went crazy. The initial run took 66 seconds to load the map. The main problems were the quad tree generation and the merging of the quads into a more optimized map.

First there was no bounds check on collision with entities in the level. Next the quad tree wasn't pruning nodes that weren't on the map, just making them as invalid. This was actually a memory issue but in Java that mostly accounts for performance hits as well. There were a few other tweaks but stuff very specific to the implementation here.

Having tweaked the loading the medium sized level can be loaded and generated in about 3 seconds. Still too long for a real game, so I'll probably generate the nav-mesh offline and store it as a file along side the SVG. For now however, 3 seconds is good enough to continue testing with.

Next think that happened is crashes. The code made some assumptions about the minimum size of the quads and hence the minimum search distance to find neighbors. This sounds like a trivial fix but finding it took me the best part of 5 hours. Pretty depressing once it's done :)

Path finding is still incredibly quick, even from furtherest points on either side of this map going round entities - around 0.2ms. The paths are also still looking pretty good.

So.. progress is happening, albeit more slowly. I'm still planning on doing steering behaviors next but have been for about a week now.

Depth of Field Rendering

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 22:44:18 +0000

I'm still playing about with JME while trying to get my head round some issues I'm having with the NavMesh in Salvage Rights.

The honorable timong of the Java Classic RPG project has been putting together a Depth of Field rendering pass for JME 1.0. Since I'd like to use it at some point I had a go at porting it (and scraping a test together) for JME 2.0.

As you can see the pass has the effect of blurring things together that are in the distance. It's actually slightly smarter than that, it'll only blur things together that have similar distances from the viewer. The final effect, I think, is pretty stunning - kudos to timong!

It's all done with more shader magic - can you believe it, me, liking shaders! :)

Less Coke More Code

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 12:03:36 +0000

Well it's finally happened, I'm getting old. As such I've decided to cut down on my intake of coke a bit. This may seem trivial to some, but given my initial consumption was around 8 cans in the day and the equivilent of 5 cans in the evening it's probably worth doing :) 13 cans of coke a day is apparantly (as percentages of a adult's guideline per day):

Calories: 91%
Sugars: 507%

Cutting down seem like a good plan, no? I've been slowly taking the levels at work down, replacing it with water and squash where possible. Today is my first day on 2 cans at work (one for lunch, one in the afternoon slump). It's been a painful process so far, with my mood and energy levels going all over the place.

One interesting thing I have noticed so far is the affect on my development practices. I'm still staying up all night coding (I think this is habbit) but the time is spent far more effectively. I can focus on a single task for longer periods without getting distracted by some random conversation on IRC. I've also found my code to be tighter and more robust, almost like I'm modelling again - rather than coding.

Health wise I've not seen any improvement, hopefully that'll come with the rest of the diet changes and maybe even some exercise. Wait, no, thats going to far.

Children's Game Websites

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 06:56:26 +0000

I'm lucky, I have an excuse to be playing kids games on free websites. My daughter, who's nearly two, loves playing on the computer - clicking colourful things and getting wierd noises.

I've always been a fan of the CBeebies website, it has a lot of familiar shows that she enjoys on the TV. However, being the hobbiest game developer I am, I can't help but evaluate the games on the site and can see that they both are lacking in design and polish.

Thats why it was such a refreshing change to see the Disney Playhouse site - Meg has a need for Tigger everything just recently. The games are incredibly polished with really high quality audio and visuals. The site itself is well organized and loads quickly even on my terrible connection.

The thing that struck me most was the quality of the game design though. Each game we (I) played was really top notch. In some parts Meg got annoyed with me because I wanted to carry on playing the game. Some of the game design is so good I couldn't help but thing an adult remake of it for the casual market could be a hit (I took notes of course :)).

I am left feeling slightly overwhelmed with how good these "throw away" games are and how far I have still to go to produce anything like as good.

Directional Shadow Mapping in JME

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 07:51:01 +0000

Spent a long evening last night reworking the shadow mapping stuff from Salvage Rights into a reusable pass for JME. Few things needed to happen

- Tidy up the code, a bit of a mess initially
- Switch from perspective mapping to parralel for direction light sources (the only ones I use)
- Make everything configurable
- Integrate the shadow mapping extension access in JME.

Didn't get the last one done. At the moment the pass still has a few lines of direct OpenGL access in the middle of it. I'd rather these were replaced with some JME functionality, right now it's bound to LWJGL rendering. The rest is done but the pass still isn't really finished. It needs:

- Support for multiple light sources in one pass (multitexturing?)
- Automatic determination of view focus via the frustum centroid. Still got no idea what that last sentence means.

I'd also like to add cascading shadow maps at some point to get the resolution up. Anyway, here it is:

I opened a forum post over at JME to try and get the community to help me fix it up to be good enough for everyone. Have to wait and see what happens.

As always, I want to use the code (thats why I wrote it :)). The nice bit was making the pass generic and fixing it up a bit actually gave Salvage Rights a bit of speed boost. More importantly the shadow resolution looks fine with only a 512x512 shadow map now which is really awesome :)

Issue and Bug Tracking Software - a rare find

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 11:48:46 +0000

I like simple tools. Really simple tools. All these stuff I do for home is small scale, it doesn't need to be industry strength and it doesn't need to be highly available. I need tools to jobs that are as simple as possible to set up and maintain. I just don't have time for anything else. For instance, I love SimplePHPBlog. No database, no configuration. Downloading, unzip and use. Great stuff. JBoss AS is the same, wonderful stuff to be working against, download, unzip and use.

Recently I've been in need of some issue tracking software. I'm starting to get too many bits of paper to hold on to and issues are getting lost. At the moment I have a 2 bits of A4 in front of me littered with thoughts and issues with the latest project, Salavge Rights.

I went to look for software. I want something simple and web based (so I can access it from lots of different locations with ease). It needs to track ideas, let me update them and mark them as closed. It may need to support teams eventually but probably not right now.

Everything I could find required dependency X, Y and Z. From libraries, to databases, to masses of configuration. And then I found Code Track!. Seriously, check this little beauty out.

No database required - check it uses flat XML files
Handles all the normal sort of issues things - check, basic but clean
Supports teams of people - check, without any work
Simple to install and configure - they claim less than 5 minutes

Now, I dispute that last point a bit. It only takes 5 minutes if you include the download time. Less than 2 minutes I would have thought was a more accurate description. I'm very impressed.