I just posted one more quick example for using Otter!

The Input and Basic Interaction example deals with using the Input class to check for keyboard keys being pressed and held down, and responding to that by moving an Entity around the screen. This is the first example to really get into potential video game looking code.

Also as a side note I started an Otter slack team that is open invite to anyone that wants to chat in real time with other Otter developers. Hopefully we can get a solid crew of folks in there to push the framework foward.

Making use of Couch CMS I've finally gotten around to making an example page for Otter!

The first three examples are a very basic introduction to setting up Otter and using it to start putting stuff on the screen. I plan on adding examples every so often since the videos I made a long time ago are now sort of outdated. Otter continues to grow and evolve over time so it's tough to keep a solid set of examples to go with it. For example the controller class has gone through some changes over the past year which makes a lot of the tutorials written for it outdated. Hopefully I can keep examples up to date though using Couch.

Just a little bit about CouchCMS too: this is one of the coolest things I've used in my web dev days. I really wish I had tried it earlier because I think it's going to forever replace my need to write my own CMS every time I make a new site for myself. It really seems to cover everything and it feels way easier to customize than something like Wordpress or Tumblr. Sure it might not be as powerful as those right off the bat, but I think Couch really fits my style more. It also comes with an awesome file uploader and browser which makes image and file uploading a breeze. It makes everything a breeze! You should definitely check it out if you do web work of any kind.

Time for some thoughts!

I have this game engine called Otter. It's heavily inspired and influenced by Flashpunk which I used for a number of years for a number of games including Offspring Fling.

I really like using Otter, and it was a lot of fun developing it, but lately I'm not feeling super sure if I can depend on it for the future. Otter really fits my coding style, and I've learned a lot making it, and I feel like it can always be improved (often times I have to resist the urge to start a new version of it that would improve on the core of it now that I know way more about .net, SFML, and openGL,) but I'm not sure how worth it is to keep using.

Unity is gobbling up a lot of game devs these days. Everyone and their grandma is using Unity to develop games. I don't have anything against Unity, but I have a hard time leaving my fate to a tool that is essentially a black box. I have a lot of friends that use it, and sometimes their stories about core Unity bugs disrupting their entire project can give me nightmares. Being at the mercy of a crazy Unity bug that wont be addressed for a few versions seems incredibly stressful... so I'm not totally sold on jumping ship to the Unity train.

I think the core hesitation I have with Otter lately is its dependency on SFML.Net. SFML has had a lot advancements lately thanks to the recently formed core SFML team, but I think SFML.Net and the C bindings are going to be left by the wayside as they start making progress on the core C++ version. There's just not enough people using SFML.Net, and often times I feel very isolated when trying to solve weird issues since the community is so tiny.

So maybe one of my options is to go to XNA/Monogame, but that isn't a perfect scenario either. Unity's main draw to me right now is the whole built in editor and inspector thing, and XNA/Monogame doesn't leave me in any better of a position than SFML in that regard. I don't have any editors for Otter, and once I step outside the realm of pixel art there's absolutely zero good solutions out there for editing content (for something like a platformer, for example.) There are a couple of spun up editor projects out there, but they are barely useable and have way too many bugs for any project outside of the scope of a 48 hour game jam.

Another option is Haxe, but honestly I'd do anything to stick with the world of .net and C# for as long as possible. I love C# and it's amazing, and I don't want to go back to anything that resembles actionscript.

I'm just sort of using this blog post to think outloud really. I really like Unity's editor aspect lately, but their 2d support still seems really dumb... and relying on a third party tool is something that I'd rather not do (I've been scarred though my years of using Klik & Play and all of it's successors.) Maybe I can port Otter to XNA/Monogame and that would be a good solution, but I'm not exactly looking forward to spending a month or so doing that. What I was really hoping for was for someone to join up with me for Otter development but unfortunately I don't think Otter is cool enough for that to happen. Really what I probably need is more info about how to get started using Otter. The little info I've put out there has now become outdated, so starting up with Otter can be pretty though for the average person.

All in all I think I'm going to keep using Otter for the time being, and I think the most realistic scenario is a port of the internals to something else. The XNA/Monogame route seems very tempting, but I know there are a number of problems with that that need to be solved beforehand. There were some specific reasons I went with SFML over XNA and I'm not sure how I'm going to get around some of the issues there. Maybe I can cut out SFML and just go straight into openGL or something... but then I know things like text rendering is going to be an even bigger nightmare than it already is now.

There's never a perfect solution for this kinda thing! If only I had a little bit better of a programmer brain I could make Otter into the perfect portable engine for different platforms, and I'd make a sweet editor to go along with it... oh well! Really I have no idea what to do right now, but that's par for the course. Guess I'll just keeping working on Sky Sisters and a couple of other projects I have spun up and see what happens.

I finally merged in all of my pending changes into the main branch of Otter! If you've been using the dev branch for the past few months not much has changed, but things finally stabilized enough to the point where I felt comfortable updating the main branch.

Afterwards I've done some minor adjustments and fixes:

* Using Game.EnableAltF4 now checks for either Alt key on the keyboard.

* The RandomElement() function in NaturalLanguage now uses Otter's Rand class to ensure consistency if you're using a preset random seed.

* Added Snake.AddAllVertebraeToScene()

* Axis and Button keys, joysticks, mousebuttons, etc, are now public accessible.

* Renamed Button.AddButton to AddJoyButton.

* Axis and Buttons can now add keys, buttons, etc, from other Axes and Buttons. Useful if you want to copy a button or axis.

* GridCounter now has MoveUp(), MoveDown(), MoveLeft(), and MoveRight()

Slowly and surely moving towards a 1.0 version!

In case you didn't know I have a free to use open source 2d game making framework named Otter. It's built on top of SFML.NET and uses C#. Here are some recent changes available in the dev branch!

* Color.AddCustom() and Color.Custom() added. This is a handy way to define custom colors by Enum and later retrieve them. I didn't like making my own static colors class for each project to keep track of my custom colors, so I added some functionality to the Color class.

* BitmapFonts have been almost finalized. They should be usable now for the most part and you should be able to import fonts from a handful of different editors. You can check out what editors are supported in the class itself with the Enum BitmapDataType.

* RichText has been updated and fixed once again. I guess I've been doing kerning wrong all this time and I think I finally have it corrected. RichTextCharacters also have some new values to play with like their X and Y offset positions, scale and rotation and more.

* Added Enum.HasFlag() as an extension method. This is a handy way to check if an Enum with a [Flags] attribute contains a specific flag. I guess you can use this if you're not comfortable looking at the bitwise operators or whatever they're called (I sure am not!)

* Shader.AddParameter() is now available to register your shader parameters as an Enum. Now you can just define it once and use the Enum everywhere which should reduce pesky typos when working with shaders.

* StateMachine has been scrapped and StateMachine<> has been upgraded a little bit. It's now possible to use a stack of States in a StateMachine<> and it will run the top most state. Also now if you call ChangeState (or if you push and/or pop states) during a StateMachine's update function the StateMachine will wait until the update has finished before applying the state change!

* Fixed a typo in the Shader class whoops (SetParamter?)

* Surfaces now have their Display() function exposed. This is crucial in using a Surface that doesn't render at all, like if you're using a Surface as input to a Shader. Without calling Display() the texture will be upside down.

* Updated Collider and Entity and Graphics with more stuff like SetPosition(), SetOrigin(), and other handy stuff.

* Surface.SaveToFile() will now automatically save with a timestamp file name as a png if you don't specify an output file path. Handy for taking a bunch of screenshots during a session.

* NineSlice has some new utility functions like SetBorderPadding. I found it easier to define the areas of a NineSlice object in this way instead of trying to figure out what the bounds of the rectangle inside the texture was.

* RichText now will always round its origin since setting the origin to a 0.5f value results in blurry text!

* Fixed a bad bug in the PolygonCollider which resulted in the collider not using the transformed polygon for collision checks.

* Added 3D Audio support thanks to Fruckert.

* Lots of little bug fixes and tuning changes here and there.

Once again this is all available on the dev branch. I'll be pushing a whole bunch of changes to main branch as soon as I can sit down and write some documentation up for the new and changed stuff.

Over the past week or so I've been doing some various changes to Otter as I'm still trying to figure out the best way to add Entities to Scenes, and Components to Entities. Currently in the dev branch an Entity's Added function is not called until the Entity is actually added to the scene at the beginning of the next update, and now for Components their Added function is not called until it is actually added to the Entity which can occur at the start of each update.

For now I just did some minor updates and changes

* Changed how Entity.IsInScene works. Now IsInScene will return true if the Entity is in a scene, or queued up to be added to a scene.

* Added SetColor to the Color class. This is useful for changing all of the values on a color especially when using another color as the source values. Mostly used in cases where you don't want to Copy and create a new Color instance.

* Finally figured out how to get colliders to have separate constructors when using Enums as tags. Now you should be able to specify Enums as tags in the constructors of all colliders.