I moved to a new URL! Check it out!

posts tagged with: sfml

Dev Log: Using the Debug Console

Image


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: 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.

Image


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)
No Comments

Dev Log: Quick Prototype Testing

Image


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)
No Comments

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:

Image


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

Image


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: Example Game Arts

Dev Log: Example Game Arts
For my upcoming 2d framework built with C# and SFML I'm building an example game that at first was going to be a super quick project, but when it comes to art I'm still a little stumped on what the best workflow is going to be.

The game is going to be a little simple platformer, and if this were pixel art then I would have no problem just jamming out a bunch of pixel art for it... but with high res comes all kinds of problems.

I usually have used GraphicsGale for pixel art and animation, but now with high res Gale is no longer a very viable option. There's animating in Photoshop but it's horrible for animating. I really wish the animation options in Photoshop were better. There's tools like Spine and Spriter, but they're more for 2d bone animation and don't really help at all when it comes to frame by frame hand drawn animations.

There's also the problem of tile sets. With pixel art comes a very limited canvas site and color set per tile so making tiles line up with each other is a relatively simple task. When the resolution of color and canvas size increase then it becomes more and more of a pain to make each tile line up. I tried this with Snapshot but eventually I gave up and just faked using a tile set by making a bunch of independent images about the size of a tile and just stamped them on top of each other. Unfortunately right now that isn't an option for this game since I'm using Ogmo Editor as my level editor and strict tiles is probably my only option.

Here's a quick sketch of what I want the game to sort of resemble and I can already tell the tile set is going to be a nightmare because of the bleed of certain tiles (like grass, even stones have bleed, argh!)

Image


So that's where I'm at right now. I'm continuing to chip away at code somewhat as I think about how to possibly solve these art pipeline issues, and I expect to be done with the example game sometime next month along with the first public release of the framework.
dev log gamedev csharp sfml art
Posted September 17th 2013 9:51 AM (General)
4 Comments

Dev Log: Squishy Platforming

Dev Log: Squishy Platforming
I've been at Indie House Vancouver for a couple days now and my main focus is working on my C# framework with SFML. I'm working on a little example game that will hopefully show people enough stuff on how to get started with the framework and use it. When the example game is totally done I'm going to release it along with the framework all 100% open source.

Image


Right now I have some neat little platforming going on involving running, jumping, wall sliding, wall jumps, and a special skid jump technique sort of like Mario 64 but in 2d. Also to make the game more fun with rectangles I added a lot of squashing and stretching to the player rectangle with tweens. I am planning to do a full set of graphics for this game, but right now I'm focused on getting the whole thing playable before I tackle any art.

Today a whole crapload of people are coming to Indie House so hopefully I can make some more progress before the entire gathering turns into a TowerFall tournament.
csharp sfml game jam yay!
Posted September 6th 2013 10:58 AM (General)
6 Comments
« newer posts
older posts »