Smallish Update

Hello there! 

    Today has been fairly productive, I've managed to implement the necessary Fmod classes into our game (for those of you who don't know, this is what we use for sound). Surprisingly it didn't take very long. After reorganizing our ENTIRE game in order to make it more efficient and flow nicely through functions (rather than be a stupid mess in just the main) I've gained some nice experience and I find organizing code to be MUCH easier now - exponentially easier, really.

    After the last couple of Intermediate CG classes ambient, diffuse, emmissive and specular lighting terms are burned into my mind - which is not a bad thing, actually. I've been understanding these concepts much better lately, and I'm finally grasping things I didn't before.

    One thing I don't get however, is how to create a VBO.....properly. I have a couple of difficulties with the setting up of the VBO itself. I've got all of the information set and ready to go and loaded in properly, it's just a minor detail at this point that I have to figure out. 

     Once that is working again....Stephen has been working on wandering algorithms, which are ready, and the path finding that I finished recently - then we combine them and BOOM! Gameplay. Success. Etc. Ha!

Brayden. OUUTTTT.

Relax, Program, Study, Program....and then Program some more.

     The title says it all for me this past week. I've either been sitting in my room looking for ways to improve code and for things to add or I've been studying up and how to do things that would benefit my code. I've relaxed now and then, but have gone right back into coding and it can be quite stressful really.

     I had a great thing going when I was assigned new group members for GDW this year. I was removed from the Producer position (awesome - because now I didn't have to program, model, AND make sure everyone else was doing their programming and modelling and other stuff WHILE making sure it was all up to par and in on time). I'm now our group's 3D modeller and it feels wonderful. I'm still doing half of the programming work, which I have no problem with, and I spent the last week upgrading our game's ship model because....well take a look for yourself:

It's a big improvement from the last, believe me (and if you don't, go check out my first blog for a picture of the old one).

     Only problem so far is that my UVs aren't mapping the texture properly. For some reason, the bottom half of my ship looks perfect, but the top looks almost as if the texture slipped off to one side. Either way, it's not working properly and I plan on changing the whole system soon because I'm turning it into a VAO/VBO in the near future.

"A Vertex Buffer Object (VBO) is an OpenGL feature that provides methods for uploading vertex data (position, normal vector, color, etc.) to the video device for non-immediate-mode rendering. VBOs offer substantial performance gains over immediate mode rendering primarily because the data resides in the video device memory rather than the system memory and so it can be rendered directly by the video device."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertex_Buffer_Object

In short terms: It's placing the texture data on the GPU's storage to be rendered on the GPU rather than the CPU. Simple, right?

     One cool thing that I learned this week, which I was actually not surprised about, but I was more shocked that I didn't think of it that way before is that mirrors in games are all rendered by placing a camera at the mirrors position and taking the image that would be rendered to the buffer, storing it as data, flipping it, and binding that image to the surface where the "mirror" would appear.
   
     Cool stuff, huh?

Anyways, once all that texture stuff is sorted out I will be ready to make our AI's load and function with GREAT SUCCESS!

With that said....thanks for reading!

Brayden out! :)

Progress - A nice feeling.

     I'm going to make this one brief. Progress has been made, and progress feels great. Pathfinding for AI's now exists in our game, the only problem we have is that it's not being USED for anything (because we don't have any AI's to move.....

     Stephen is working on that part, and hopefully within the next week or two we will have enemies that are even just boxes that follow your ship around the map and get closer and close (assuming we do it correctly).

     Goals. Important stuff people, set some, aim for them and PASSION. Learn it, love it. :D

That's all for me, just an update on our progress for today.

Brayden out!

A Horrible End. A New Beginning.

So here's the thing. Life can really suck sometimes, and people can't always be trusted. It's a life lesson everyone will eventually learn in their own ways. And now that we are on the same page, let's get started with a story!

     Not to long ago, in a semester recently past, Mr. Bubbles/Stephen/gamedever.blogspot.ca and I had a LOVELY group who let us do all the work because they were so kind. In turn, on one of our projects, they decided not to do an important part of every document known as a "citation page" by most non-GameDev people (because we use other lingo, duh). This page fell into an abyss, never to be seen by the likes of teachers and Game Gurus alike.

     After consulting these "Gurus" and professors/teachers, our only options were take an arrow to the knee (get an F in the course) or be torn apart limb from limb....(going to a meeting with the academic board - mostly likely kicked out of the program).

     Needless to say we took an arrow to the knee today....YAY!

     Story over....OR IS IT?!

No, it's definitely over...

     TIME FOR NEW BEGINNINGS!!!! WOO! (This is the good part)

    SO this means good stuff....right? That's what it says above so I guess I should say good/happy things....
     .
     .
     .
     .
     .
     Rainbows?

On a more serious note, we have new group members who (so far) don't seem to have the intention of screwing us over completely! HURRAY!

     We merged the two groups (all three were working together last semester) and have now gone from ShadowInk (our old name) + CounterMarch (theirs...obviously) to: ShadowMarch.

     It seemed fitting to combine the two group names...so we did.

Anyways, here's to a new semester, new classes, new group members, new profs (some) and a new attitude ....Plus nobody TRYING to screw us over! (yet...)

Best of luck to the rest of you in school!

Brayden. OUT!

The Fun Begins...

Well hello there...

     It has been an interesting start to the new year in the magic land of GameDev so far. First things first, classes are looking awesome. I'm excited for less math and more programming techniques when it comes to graphics. I'm happy that our Finance class is going to be hands on (AND we might get a chance to sit in on an investment meeting! YES!)  and that this professor is an investor himself. Field experience from a professor is the best teacher you can have in my opinion. I've only had two classes thus far, but it's only the second day of the week...not a big deal there is plenty more GameDev stuff to come. 

     My name is Brayden. I am a GameDev/GameDevelopment student @UOIT and I'm a gamer and creater at heart. This blog is created for myself, to express what I enjoy, what I dislike, and whatever the heck I feel like talking about. It's for you, the reader to hopefully find some insight into the GameDev world and processes, and it's for my professor(s) who read these because they're to be "marked" or used as an idea of where myself and my classmates are at in our progression in this program.

     Enough boring intro there, time for talky stuff:

     The interesting part about the start to GameDev this year is that we (My Project Group/GDW from here on out) have had a big hit to our team. Last year/semester we were 5.....we are now 2...Stephen (gamedever.blogspot.ca) and I.

     I know, this is going to be a hectic amount of work to accomplish - seeing as how the majority of the groups still have 3+ people (at least - most still have their start 4 or 5) and the expectations will most likely NOT be lowered for us. However, I think we will be able to pull of a game that is still enjoyable. I think that between the two of us, and considering that what we passed last semester with was just our code, we will have enough manpower to finish this sucker.

     I mean...it already LOOKS pretty good (if you discount the temporary HUD and ship model)

*Picture from last semesters' submitted prototype 

     We've got moving waves...that's a thing, right? 

     I'd love to say that GameDev is ALL going smoothly so far, but I've been having some troubles with creating Pathfinding for our AI. I seem to be able to set up a grid system, I drew the centers of each tile I had created and they scaled to 4x the spacing they should have....which was fine because that can be changed, but the tiles themselves....they didn't draw over the centers like they should have. In fact, they were doing quite the opposite and drawing 1/4 of what they should have been....a tad confusing. 

     Since that stuff last week, I've changed my implementation quite drastically...I have yet to fully implement these changes but I'm almost certain I can get it to work. It just requires a few more tweaks.

An example of the Algorithm I'm trying to implement 

(for those interested - it's called the A* Algorithm (or A-Star)):

     Image:

          http://www.policyalmanac.org/games/aStarT7.jpg

     Explanation:

          http://theory.stanford.edu/~amitp/GameProgramming/AStarComparison.html

     Other than this issue I think second year GameDev is going to go swell. I would highly recommend GameDev programs to people who are capable in the areas of programming and intermediate level math because it can be loads of fun, and it's a challenge, that's for sure. 

     I would like to abolish the idea that GameDev is a "fun time" or a "simple/cop-out" choice for anyone who likes playing games to go into because "Oh, I play games, why not make them!".

     NO. Bad idea, reevaluate WHY you want to do this. Go up to anyone in my program and tell them that, second year or up and they will laugh at you and walk away because they know they won't see you after your first year. It's something you have to realize needs to be taken quite seriously. First year alone can be difficult to grasp. The concepts are easy, but the application is what will get you. You are constantly pushed into MAKING and CREATING rather than just IMAGINING and thinking you can create the world....when the reality is you might be able to make a box...if you're lucky. And even a simple box confuses people...just ask Stephen! HA! (I make all his boxes still)

     I'll stop with the attempt to scare people off though because GameDev is a wonderful thing, but the simple truth is that you have to be passionate about it, and you have to put in a strong effort. Otherwise you doom yourself to fail.

Thank you for checking out my first blog, there will be more to come - at least one per week as I am required to do for a class - but I think I could get used to this...perhaps I will do more and simply link my professor one per week (the "good" ones of course).

Brayden out!