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posts tagged with: csharp

Dev Log: Using the Debug Console

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I think I've finally got this debug console working the way I want to for the time being. Right now I'm able to push log messages to it, and send commands that have been registered from the engine. The more I think about it, the more I don't really want to go all out on using reflection to invoke any method that exists in the program from the console, just because it doesn't seem to really match what I want the console to be used for.

One of the main purposes of this console will be the ability to debug large content games, like metroidvanias or something along those lines. Debug commands can be set to something like giving the player items, warping them to a specific location, and even summoning enemies or NPCs into the scene to test.

I also added the ability for the console to advance the game frame by frame, or however many frames the user wants. I can type "next 1" to advance the game one frame, or "next 60" to advance it 60 frames. This should come in handy for figuring out weird timing issues and making sure things are happening on the exact frames they should be.

I'm getting closer to the release of this framework as the last couple of things come into place. The last thing I'm looking into is better shader support, and after that I think all I have left to do is a lot of bug fixes and polish, and finally an example game to go along with it.

...but first I'm going to mess with shaders for awhile!
programming csharp sfml
Posted October 8th 2013 1:11 AM (General)
2 Comments

Dev Log: Debuggin Stuff

Dev Log: Debuggin Stuff
I'm trying to now take care of the last couple of things on my checklist before a public beta/release of my framework! This includes the elusive debugging and command console.

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This is the quick first pass of the debug console running in my Offspring Fling mock up using my framework. Right now all I can do is just type into this box, but eventually what I want to do is have commands being run from this console, as well as debug output being sent to it.

I'm also toying around with shaders as well and I think I'm starting to get a grasp on it, or at least fragment shaders, but I still have a lot to learn. Exciting!

--

Hey I'm editing this blog post to show the progress! Here's the console as it looks after working on it for the whole day:

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Still no fancy reflection, but for now it has cool enough stuff to debug a game, I think!
dev log csharp programming
Posted October 5th 2013 3:07 PM (General)
3 Comments

Dev Log: Drawing Lines

Dev Log: Drawing Lines
My to do list continues to grow shorter with my framework! Today I finished getting my draw line utility functions working. Check out these beautiful lines.

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Being able to draw things like rectangles, circles, and lines on the fly can be really useful for prototyping, debugging, and even effects for a game. The regular old line drawing using OpenGL results in just a one pixel thick line from point A to B, and that's no good for most cases.

For the red line I'm converting the line into a quad using some vector magic that doesn't really make sense to me yet but it works. The ends of the lines are hard edges, as it's just a quad. But the blue line is where the true magic happens. It's a line with rounded ends, WHOA! It took me awhile to figure out, but I'm drawing it using similar logic to the red line but adding a bunch of points to go around the outside of each end point of the line. It's using a TriangleFan to draw, whatever that means.

I've also been spending time attempting to document things in the code to prepare for a public "beta" release of the framework. It's coming very soon!
csharp sfml dev log
Posted October 3rd 2013 1:40 PM (General)
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Dev Log: Quick Prototype Testing

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Just playing around with things today -- I figured it would be a cool test to implement some Offspring Fling stuff in my C# framework. It was surprisingly easy to pull off and only took me about 2 or 3 hours to get to this point (and a lot of that time was spent debugging some errors I made in my Ogmo Editor helper class, WHOOPS.)

Right now I'm working on the ever so annoying bug of the game rendering once before it updates once. It's proving to be pretty difficult to hunt down even when I wrote the damn thing myself (FlashPunk had this problem too.)

Oh and if anyone out there listening wants advanced access to my framework before I publicly release it then let me know. I'm looking for a handful of people that will tinker around with it! (You can use the form at the bottom of my site to contact me, or send an email to hi@kpulv.com.)
dev log csharp sfml offspring fling
Posted October 1st 2013 6:03 PM (General)
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Dev Log: Ogmo and Reflection!

Dev Log: Ogmo and Reflection!
One of the things that is super important to me when working with any framework is how fast it is, especially in a game jam type scenario. I spent the weekend working on more utility stuff for my upcoming C# SFML framework, including more handy ways of loading up Ogmo Editor levels.

Here's what my current Ogmo Editor project looks like for my example game:

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And here's what it looks like after I just do a simple init with a few lines of code:

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OgmoProject = new OgmoProject("assets/Example.oep", "ExampleGame", "assets/");

OgmoProject.ColliderTags.Add("Solid", (int)Tags.Solid);

Game.Color = OgmoProject.BackgroundColor;

And for loading levels, all I have to do is this!

OgmoProject.LoadLevel(source, this);

That code snippet is from my Level class which extends Scene (which is sort of like Flashpunk's World class.)

This is pretty awesome for game jamming since the OgmoProject utility classes uses reflection to figure out which stuff to load into my levels. With reflection I can just create any entities that I need to from the Ogmo level files. Back in AS3 land I had something similar to this, except I had to register each entity that I wanted to have loaded in the level, but now with magic in C# I can just look up types to create based off of strings. AWESOME.

I only really do this kind of stuff for loading and initializing things though, as doing something like this during a game's update loop could be pretty costly in the performance realm. Reflection is awesome but I gotta be careful about it!
csharp sfml programming dev log
Posted September 30th 2013 11:29 AM (General)
2 Comments

Dev Log: Setting Up UI

Dev Log: Setting Up UI
I've been stuck on this for longer than I wanted to be, but one of the main things that I want to get working for my C# framework is easy to use UI stuff. I'm talking about super basic UI though. Right now I'm not even considering mouse input, only keyboard and controller input.

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Basic menus are the only thing that I'm after right now. Eventually I want to have something that will allow for rapid construction of more elaborate stuff, but just organizing this code in a way that keeps it easy to use and generic is proving to be pretty difficult! My whole goal with any framework is to make to super fast for the purposes of game jams -- game jamming is the true stress test of any game development software or framework in my opinion!

I just trashed a bunch of code that I wrote over the past couple of days, and I'm changing my approach a little bit. I ran into a wall when it came to having menus inside menus and only wanting one of those menus to have focus, so now I'm reworking it so that each time I want to make a menu system I have to load it all up inside a base UIManager class. That class is a Component that can be added to any Entity in the game, so all I have to do is have an Entity in a Scene with that Component. Maybe that sounds a little complicated... but I think I'm on to something here! I haven't been able to find many resources on how to go about doing this though, so I'm just flying blind.

Not the most exciting update in the world, but it's pretty hard to make UI coding exciting.
programming csharp dev log
Posted September 24th 2013 1:49 PM (General)
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