I moved to a new URL! Check it out!

posts tagged with: programming

Dev Log: FNA Font Stuff

Dev Log: FNA Font Stuff
I'm currently in the midst of an actual break from development but I'll try to catch up on some recent developments while I'm loungin' about.

I'm still developing my new version of Otter using FNA instead of SFML. I'm slowly but hopefully surely finding out the best way to go about certain things like rendering and input. Fonts and text graphics are working pretty well now and I also have some basic input stuff hooked up for things like keyboard, mouse, and text entry.

Image


I'm using a C# binding of freetype for rendering fonts and text, and recently I implemented a system to handle huge font sizes. I say system but all it's really just a list of textures for the font instead of just one texture. Unfortunately the upper limit of font sizes is still the maximum size of the texture though... so right now 2048 I think.

I've almost got enough in my FNA engine to make a simple game aside from a few missing collision overlap checks and a handful of bugs. As much as I hate to say it I think I actually like SFML's rendering system better because so far using SpriteBatch feels like a giant pain in the butt most of the time. I understand why SpriteBatch is so important, but it seems like it'd be easier just to pass my own vertices and textures into the renderer... but for some reason that's mega slow. Right now one of the bugs I have to look into is the fact that rendering 10 or so primitives already starts to take a toll on performance, and it's only rendering a bunch of untextured vertices! Nothin' makes sense.
programming csharp dev log
Posted December 26th 2016 9:53 AM (General)
No Comments

Character Sheet Updates

Character Sheet Updates
Not really sure if any portion of my followers play Pathfinder, but I'm still working on my character sheet manager anyhow! It's actually been a lot of fun to work on since web development is way easier than game development, and I get instant feedback on it from my pathfinder group every time we play.

Here's how it looks now.

Image


Added fancy icons from the Bootstrap glyphicons and did some formatting work on some of the headers to make them readable.

Image


Also added a dropdown menu with a "hamburger" button to open it. The icons make it look even cooler than it actually is.

Behind the scenes I made the sheet auto ping the server every 15 seconds so that the player session will remain active and not get garbage collected by the server.
webdev programming
Posted November 30th 2016 5:12 PM (General)
No Comments

FNA and SDL Events

FNA and SDL Events
I've been poking away at the new version of Otter which will be using FNA instead of SFML. At first I thought it would be super easy and cool to use the XNA "state" systems for input. Stuff like KeyboardState, MouseState, etc. The problem with this though is that at lower framerates this way of detecting input can totally miss inputs.

I couldn't find any examples on how to plug into FNA's SDL event loop, but I eventually stumbled into something that worked. All I knew was that I had to use SDL_AddEventWatch. So here's a quick example on how to use SDL events with FNA:
SDL_AddEventWatch((data, ev) => {

    var sdlEvent = (SDL_Event)System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.PtrToStructure(ev, typeof(SDL_Event));

    switch(sdlEvent.type) {

        case SDL_EventType.SDL_KEYDOWN:

            Console.WriteLine("keydown: {0}", sdlEvent.key.keysym.sym);

            break;

        case SDL_EventType.SDL_KEYUP:

            Console.WriteLine("keyup: {0}", sdlEvent.key.keysym.sym);

            break;

    }

    return 0;

}, IntPtr.Zero);
I added this code in the Initialize method of Game, and I'm now getting my own key up and down events. Eventually this will be hooked into my input classes and I should have the same input functionality that SFML Otter has.
fna programming csharp
Posted November 26th 2016 8:20 PM (General)
No Comments

Pathfinder Character Sheet

Pathfinder Character Sheet
Over the past two weeks I built a web based Pathfinder character sheet manager. It's all the way up to version 0.9.something which means that it's totally usable but may have a couple of new features added before it's called 1.0. Actually thinking about it now I have a really bad habit of calling things version 0.9.something forever instead of ever calling it version 1.0.

The entire source, readme, and license can be found on Github.

And now here are some cool screenshots.

Image


Image


Image


Image


I should be getting back to game dev soon! I hope?
webdev programming
Posted November 18th 2016 4:48 PM (General)
No Comments

Dev Log: FNA Primitive Progress

Dev Log: FNA Primitive Progress
In between Super Sky Sisters tasks I'm chipping away at some basic stuff using FNA. One of the tough things to get out of the way early is drawing primitives so I've spent some time getting that up to par with how Otter does it currently.

Image


Circles and rectangles are in and working with camera movement as well. I also went ahead and put in camera zooming and rotating as well so that it matches the functionality that Otter has currently. Primitive outlines for both rectangles and circles is working too! The tough stuff I have coming up is figuring out the best way to do Tilemaps and transformations of a bunch of sprites all at once... basically Otter allows you to do things like create massive graphics, such as Tilemaps, and then give them their own scale, rotation, origin, color, etc. This doesn't seem as straight forward in FNA as far as I can tell right now, but hopefully I'll stumble across something.

Other than that,I've started messing with some basic collision detection which I plan on reworking a little bit from Otter. I'm trying to make it a little bit more organized this time around now that I have a chance to rework things from almost scratch.

The plan going forward is to start up my next game using this framework, and keep Otter SFML online "as is" and probably clean up some stuff to mark it as version 1.0.
otter programming fna
Posted June 14th 2016 5:06 PM (General)
No Comments

Dev Log: Early FNA Experiments

Dev Log: Early FNA Experiments
While I'm taking a sort of break from Super Sky Sisters I've been messing around with something called FNA which is a recreation of XNA but in an open source style with maximum portability in mind. It differs in Monogame in that it tries to be as close to XNA as it can possibly be and doesn't branch off into its own thing.

Why FNA? I mean, I'm totally not sure. The only thing I can concretely say is that it's been recommended to be from developers that I highly respect. People often say that XNA is dead because it is no longer supported by Microsoft, but there is still a huge community of people making games with XNA and that is driving things like Monogame and FNA to exist. I feel a lot better about using something that seems to be more in the forefront of game development back ends.

One major point of FNA that I like is that it's only a csproj or a bunch of dll files. No need to install project templates or content pipelines or any of that stuff. One of my goals with Otter is to make it as easy as possible to get something up and running without having to install anything if possible, and I believe FNA is the best bet for something like that.

Image


I've made it mostly through the first pass of text rendering, I've managed to get some basic shader stuff working, and now I'm working on getting primitives to show up. These are the three things that I'm most scared of so if I can get them out of the way it may be smooth sailing from there.

Basically when I do start getting serious about my next game I want to be working in something that has the possibility to be ported to other platforms. SFML does have that potential but it is not used very much in the game development community, so less people are familiar with it, and that means when it comes time to port I'm kinda up the creek without a boat.

More on this as it develops! You may even catch me working on this on one of my fancy game dev streams (warning: it's all programming and not super exciting.)
fna csharp programming otter
Posted June 5th 2016 11:34 PM (General)
No Comments
« newer posts
older posts »