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<p>It's been a very long time since I wrote about anything in particular, and believe me when I say I think about it <em>every minute of every day</em>, roughly. Maybe slightly less than that.</p> <p>Since the last post, I've done all sorts; gone through crunch and release of Kinect Sports, cruised around California a bit, had my eyes lasered, and started a <em>top secret new project</em>.</p> <p>I've also been making progress on Cities in the Sky, believe it or not! The unfortunate thing is that everything I change I think is too unimportant to write about, so I don't. And the more time passes since the last update, the more interesting the change has to be for me to consider it website-worthy. So I end up never writing about anything :(</p> <p>From now on, I think I'll just write about what I've done recently, regardless of if it's interesting or not. Well, I'll have some kind of standard - you probably won't care about my latest whitespacing strategy.</p> <p>To get the ball rolling, here's a quick run-down of everything I've done since the last time I wrote about CITS:</p> <h3>Gameplay</h3> <ul> <li>Lots of fiddling with camera to make it feel nicer - it smoothly follows the build position, and moves with the tilt of the island. This was harder than it sounds and still needs some more work, as the steep slope of the central bump of the island makes it hard to see the other side of it without rotating round, which feels disorienting.</li> <li>Better control of current piece, now it feels pretty much as you'd expect a tetrisy game to feel.</li> <li>Added audio to the game using <a href="http://www.ambiera.com/irrklang/">irrKlang</a>. Currently I only have placeholder sound effects made by me making noises into my awful webcam microphone, and no music, but it's sound nonetheless!</li> <li>Replaced the physics middleware I'm using: OPAL has been dropped in favour of <a href="http://bulletphysics.org">Bullet</a>. OPAL is not being actively developed, and being based on ODE, it suffers from a lot of stability problems that Bullet doesn't. The feel of the game is so strongly dictated by the feel of the physics, so I wanted to go with something more robust, and something with a larger community that can help me get it right.</li> </ul> <h3>Engine</h3> <ul> <li>Split engine code out of the game (and tastefully named it 'bengine'), for use in the <em>top secret new project</em>.</li> <li>Numerous improvements to game object system.</li> <li>Removed Hikari UI library, as it turned out to be a bit of a pain. I'll find another way to do UI later.</li> </ul> <h3>Unnecessary indulgent programmery stuff</h3> <ul> <li>Updated to use VC10 and some C++0x features (replacing most of my use of boost), which I like very very much :)</li> <li>Replaced Ant build system with the excellent <a href="http://jamplus.org/">JamPlus</a>. JamPlus is also now used to generate workspaces (e.g. vcproj files), which removes the old problem of having to keep a build script and project file in sync. This warrants a post of its own really, it's quite a big deal to me!</li> <li>Included all dependencies in game repository using <a href="https://github.com/apenwarr/git-subtree">git-subtree</a>. Now you can clone the game's repository and just build it, no messing about. And of course dependencies are versioned, making repeatable builds much more reliable, which pleases me no end. Again, this warrants a post of its own.</li> <li>Experimented with <a href="http://astyle.sourceforge.net/">astyle</a>, as a way to make sweeping style changes easier. I realise that my coding style has been changing during my time at Rare, and that old bits of code are much harder to read and maintain than newer bits.</li> </ul>
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cities-in-the-sky
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