Reply With QuoteProbably not, I only teach in one class and it is masters. Do you spend much time in the undergrad labs?Originally Posted by Bakerman
I'm not quite sure I understand what you're going for... any chance you could describe your game a bit more? Spelunky Got me into this sort of stuff in the first place, but you should also check out classic roguelikes - NetHack is my choice. This wiki has lists of games that use proceduralism in some way.
Probably not, I only teach in one class and it is masters. Do you spend much time in the undergrad labs?
I didn't bother because its apparently not compatible with the software I'm building, (so says the software's creator)
Took a break from my Thief level to start powering through the grunt work on Gun Bastard. It's getting more and more finished by the day...
Not really... I live close by so I tend not to hang around. No classes there this semester either (except mentoring). Moving out next year though, so I'll probably be frequenting the labs and lounge a bit more!
*is amazed at all the talent*
Awesome work guys!
If its referring to the MS redistributables you can just included the needed DLL in the exe folder (you will find it somewhere in program files/whever_you_installed_visual_studio). Or you can go into Project Settings -> C++ -> Code Generation and change Runtime Library to "Multi-threaded" (without the DLL) which should statically link the runtime instead of needing an external DLL (which will make your EXE slightly bigger as well). Personally, I'd just inlcude the DLL with the game.Odd thing is that now with all the libs fixed, if I compile Dragonslair in codeblocks it works perfectly fine on other PCs without any extra files needing to be installed, but if I compile it in Visual Studio then its still required.
Fun fact: if you look through some of your older games, you might actually often find the vs redistributalbe .dlls right in the games exe folders, so "pro devs" have been doing that too. Also, MS officially frowns upon this and actually wants you to include the redist installer and have it run as part of your main game installer.
Keep in mind these are DLLs that come with VS, and which can be installed on any system via the installer, not something that comes from your OS. Meaning, they are the same DLLs no matter if you run it on XP, Win7 etc. etc. So I dont think statically linking them is that much of a difference. However, I know VS keeps a different dll for release and debug, and I think it also has different ones for 64bit vs 32, so that may be a concern.
That's why I just include the .dll in the exe folder, at least people can swap them out "just in case." Though I haven't mass distributed any of my programs before, so I am not a good person to ask about that tbh.
I'm glad to see you're still working on that, Icemann. Keep it up!
Oh, and whenever you get to the point where you need to test it out externally, feel free to consider me one of your beta testers.
Populous Carpet!
Well, minus the carpet.
Man, I always wanted a game that crossed Populous and Magic Carpet. Make my dreams come true, Yak!
Thread is awfully quiet. COME ON PEOPLE, MAKE SHIT! Here's how I've been spending the past week.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
V
So just because it makes a somewhat interesting story, I just stumbled upon a weird glitch. So after loading a level in, everything is all peachy, until about a minute when randomly, the main ambient light starts to flicker and... goes off. Like that. Everything is suddenly covered in darkness. The other small lamp lights and stuff work fine, but the overall sunlight just... it just had an outage. WTF? It's the most bizarre thing ever.
But then, after another 10 seconds or so, I begin to float up. I push my "fly down" key get back to the ground, and start floating up again. I check my object stats and my velocity is rapdily increasing up. The gravity has randomly switched direction. Wtf?
And it only happens with this one particular level. Both the ambient and gravity are currently hardcoded in, so there's nothing that can dynamically change them right now.
I was working on something. Then I made a mistake, and accidentally deleted over 7 hours worth of work.
I'm gonna go shoot myself in my big dumb ass head now. Kthxbye.
I had wanted to start working on my Sci-Fi vignette idea, but school turned out to be far too busy for me to even attempt anything.
At least I have been working on something interesting. I've been developing a 3D audio engine for headphone listening. I know a lot of companies have marketed "3d sound" in various forms but none of it really hits the mark. So i've been working on a side of it that normally doesn't leave academic circles and traps of proprietary licenses. I'm funding the research myself through a grant I got through my university, and when I'm done I'll be releasing it as open source software so everybody can take a look and maybe even use it. I was hoping to build it for the game engine I was using, but my software design guy didn't want to approach it that way. So we're making a stand alone app. We should be done in April, at least that's the deadline, and it's looking good. I'll share it here and probably even put up a website to show it off when I'm done.
In related news, however. It turns out that all the worrying that i've wasted my year of free updates to the game engine I licensed was without cause. I bought my license to C4 in april and there's been 3 major updates since then and I haven't been tinkering at all. But last week they changed it and gave lifetime perpetual updates to everybody who owns a license. Even dropped the price of the engine by 100 bucks for "standard" and by 400 bucks for "pro". and they'll even honor the extra hundred bucks I paid for standard over the new price for when I want to upgrade. I'm pretty excited. I can finish my work at school and not feel like I ripped myself off by buying before I was ready to work.
Now if I could just get the DX SDK to install without an error....
Found a really nice lighting engine for XNA called Krypton and I knocked up quick top-down thing to get a feel for it:
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/XRKQbTa3IpQ?version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/XRKQbTa3IpQ?version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="800" height="572" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed>
Well, I say quick. Had flashbacks to A-Level maths and eventually got all my camera and projection matrices sorted, and then because I'm a bit of a perfectionist I implemented a proper camera so you can move the camera independently of the player. Currently trying to get a world builder finished so I can enjoy messing around with different tile sets and lights without having to hardcode everything in a very hacky way.
Long I have had dreams of a top-down Space Hulk roguelike. You make my dreams come true.
I'm back to working on the game full-time. But first, some engine development. I had some fun integrating Recast/Detour into Torque, which I am nearly finished with. I just managed to get the navmeshes to build in a separate thread, so even with large navmeshes you can keep playing around in Torque's world editor.
I also started up an open-source automated planning project for my AI. I couldn't find any good implementations of GOAP that I liked, so I decided to roll my own in library form. It's sort of evolving to become a lot more than the very simple GOAP implementation F.E.A.R. used (to the point where I'm intending to add a PDDL parser), but I want to make sure I can still scale it down to a very simple, performant domain for use in moment-to-moment AI. So if any of you out there feels like using some form of planning for your AI, well... that's why I started this project!
There are more details in the post I linked to above about Recast/Detour, or on the project site.
My ludum dare 48h compo entry, very rushed but playable from start to finish:
playable here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum...=rate&uid=3145
post mortem: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2011/...e-post-mortem/
God dammit Eld you never ever answered my PM. That I sent ages ago.
It was kind of an important one.
I check that one like once a year, I had forgotten forums even had PM systems :xGod dammit Eld you never ever answered my PM. That I sent ages ago.
It was kind of an important one.
I have got a mysterious warning/error with c++ ... granted, i am kind of tired and probably messed up something embarrassing, but wtf is going on here:
int32u *cellData[9][3]; // int32u is just a basic 4byte unsigned integer type
int32u const **cellDataZ = &cellData[(int32u(-2+16) >> 4) * 3 + (int32u(y+16) >> 4)][0]; // y is int32 type (ie, signed)
Last line gives:
warning C4554: '>>' : check operator precedence for possible error; use parentheses to clarify precedence
error C2440: 'initializing' : cannot convert from 'int32u **' to 'const int32u **' (Conversion loses qualifiers)
Neither makes any sense to me. Dropping the const takes care of the first and writing "(int32u(-2+16) >> 4)" as "((int32u(-2+16)) >> 4)" takes care of the other - so, not a show stopper, but i would like to know what is going on there.
PS. instead ofconversion constructorfunction-style cast i can also use "((int32u)(-2+16) >> 4)" and let the operator precedence rules do the deed.
"(int32u(y+16) >> 4)" is fine without changes => which makes me suspect there is some compiler bug involved. What do you think?
PS2. This is with VC++ 2010.
Last edited by zombe; 29th Dec 2011 at 20:12. Reason: Erm, that is not a conversion constructor - more like conversion function / function-style cast.
Ignore original reply - now had a chance to check it in VC++ 2010 myself.
I think the first warning is simply because the compiler is making sure that you didn't mean to write something like "int32u(-2) + 16 >> 4" when you used two constants together. I assume you're using preprocessor defines for the -2 and 16 magic values as otherwise it would be unusual to hard code them in the line like that. As you say - using the old C-style cast avoids the warning as does simply adding another set of brackets either outside the function cast as you've put above or inside - i.e. (int32u((-2 + 16)) >> 4) also works. In either case, the compiler appears to generate the correct code so it's more informational than anything else.
For the const problem - do you want the cellDataZ variable itself to be constant? If so, I think you want "int32u ** const cellDataZ = ..." - i.e. with the const just before the variable name? Otherwise you'll need to declare cellData itself as const to work in the manner as you've originally written it.
Last edited by Al_B; 29th Dec 2011 at 18:33. Reason: Once more with feeling
Hm, writing "int32u((-2 + 16))" also fixes it - i think you are right. VC likes (thankfully actually) to warn about stuff near << and >> as their precedence is a bit peculiar (not seeing it as justified in this particular instance tho).
The magic values are not magic in their context and are written the way they are to be clear about the intent and meaning of it (there are many lines similar to it and all use the same form).
Yeah, assumed as much (it is just a warning - the is no actual ambiguity) - just never seen it warn about this kind of code.
I have a habit of using "const" quite aggressively - at that time i was adding const for all the stuff referencing the int32u data itself. The correct constness for the stuff is (which i actually use. the previous code was the mysterious wtf i got while in progress of fixing the constness):
int32u const *cellData[9][3];
int32u const * const * cellDataZ;
// PS. i always use "type const" instead of "const type" for consistency (the "const type" exception is only usable with the "type" part and nowhere else).
However, i still do not get why it failed with the code presented originally. Still a mystery :/
----------------------
Yay, progress:
Pretty darn fast tesselation (*) of 16x16x16 chunked map. Smoothed plain and simple cubes (ie. not generated using marching cubes alg). Vertices are shared (using "glDrawRangeElementsBaseVertex" for drawing). Full adjacency information for normal generation (chunk borders inclusive - something i forgot to take into account the first time around) - currently not generating the normals tho.
(*) Avg. 120 ticks per voxel for the given map - expecting that to triple-quadruple when i am finished with it.
edit: Ah, forgot to mention, there are 2 lines per voxel per axis on the pic - just to give an idea how big the voxels are.
Last edited by zombe; 29th Dec 2011 at 19:56.
I'm not a huge fan of const although it obviously has its benefits. When you start dealing with double (or higher) level indirections it just seems a little easy to end up with issues like you came across.
With your original code you'd be able to assign a value to *cellDataZ which could be used to modify constant values. As a simple example - I'm sure you accept that this is invalid:
The equivalent with your code would allow the same thing to be done by a slightly longer route:Code:int const MeaningOfLife = 42; // Answer to the meaning of life - must never change int *NonConstPtr = &MeaningOfLife; // Not allowed because ... *NonConstPtr = 54; // ... this could happen (oops)It's not likely you would write code that would do that - but as it's possible it is simply disallowed.Code:int const MeaningOfLife = 42; // Answer to the meaning of life - must never change int *NonConstPtr; const int **SomeConstPtr = &NonConstPtr;// Equivalent to your error - compiler will complain *SomeConstPtr = &MeaningOfLife; // Perfectly legal - NonConstPtr now points to MeaningOfLife *NonConstPtr = 54; // Also legal (Oops again)
Looking interesting - will be good to see it when you've got some alternative textures on it (assuming you're not going for the psychedelic vibe!)
Const helps the compiler considerably (+ __restrict__ where needed) and sometimes prevent me from shooting my legs off. True, sometimes the compiler spots some pesky distinction i do not particularly care about, which is a bit annoying, but it happen very-very rarely.
Yes. NonConstPtr is of type "int *" and at the right side is "int const *" => attempted breach of const contract.
Yep - good example. Aliasing issue - and as compiler can not possibly detect such problems at compile time => it assumes the worst. Mystery solved.
Hehe, psychedelic vibe is not the goal (1). Speaking of textures: that is just a shader - have not written any texture loading yet. Low priority (2). I am more worried with other stuff (3).
(1) Used that for testing - easier to see how things are smoothed and sport problem cases. Speaking of which - having the whole resource system built with "hot-swap" capabilities (any external changes to any resource files will take effect immediately in game and problems reported in log [Using an xhtml/javasript logViewer that auto-updates / prettifies etc + auto-scrolling option {defaults to it whenever it detects a new logging session}]). Adjusting the shaders etc/without needing to restart nor manually reload them => is just totally made of WIN! Highly recommended.
(2) Currently it just ignores block material and piles it all in default-material mesh assembly - fairly trivial to add other materials as the renderer already handles all the state sorting/combining (where needed) etc.
(3) Considerable obstacles i want to ensure i can reasonably solve before i delve into easier issues:
* Physics: should be relatively simple ... erm, physics never are. Quite optimistic with it tho (at the midpoint of tessellation i have the needed data in a form that is fairly compact and still in "physics" friendly state - ie, before it gets bastardized by mesh generation).
* Lighting: i need 4 directional ambient lights ("ambient" as in minecraft which has 2 non-directional ambient lights) - updating thous will be painful and highly worrying.
* World gen (currently just glm::gtx::noise::simplex(pos*scale) > 0.0f for testing): i do not want to use anything that uses floats as i need guarantees that given the exact same input i will get the same output. Floats simply cannot do that (One can set the FPU flags/state to some fixed state and prey [yeah, from personal experience, not fun figuring out who changed it] no-one else fiddles with it. Disable all FP optimization and force it to write out all intermediate values => x_x). I have some ideas tho ... will see.
Posting Permissions
