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Project Duck Dev Diary: It’s alive!

This week we have been working on implementing basic functionality into the engine. The first challenge was to figure out exactly how the physics engine works and how to work with it. Creating basic boxes was straight forward but when we came to the issue of terrain we had to consider several possibilities. How do we store terrain data? Should we create models and use or do we generate them from height data. Since the physics engine had methods to handle height maps we went with the latter. Today we implemented a camera system which uses ray casting to prevent the view from being obscured by an item in front of the player. This means that as soon as an object covers the player, the camera will zoom in past the object. The way this is done is that a ray is cast (hence the name) from the players location towards the supposed location of the camera. If it hits anything on the way, we place the camera there.

This week we have been working on implementing basic functionality into the engine. The first challenge was to figure out exactly how the physics engine works and how to work with it. Creating basic boxes was straight forward but when we came to the issue of terrain we had to consider several possibilities. How do we store terrain data? Should we create models and use or do we generate them from height data. Since the physics engine had methods to handle height maps we went with the latter. Today we implemented a camera system which uses ray casting to prevent the view from being obscured by an item in front of the player. This means that as soon as an object covers the player, the camera will zoom in past the object. The way this is done is that a ray is cast (hence the name) from the players location towards the supposed location of the camera. If it hits anything on the way, we place the camera there. We have also looked into different ways of rendering stuff. This was also related to the terrain issue. Do we render a model of the terrain or do we create it on the fly. As mentioned earlier we didn't use a model. The way this works is that we have a rectangular grid of points, each point has a height. This grid is generated from a grayscale bitmap. Every point corresponds to a vertex which constitute our polygon surface. In our current implementation every vertex is colored depending on its height but this will change as we will put a texture on the ground. [caption id="attachment_1129" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Project Duck Screenshot 1"][/caption] Among the various issues we have encountered during the week there is really only one we haven't really solved: the question of networking. There is a lot of question regarding how to implement this in a way that gives us a good balance between code maintainability and game stability and precision. We have at least decided on a server/client architecture since we believe this is the easiest to start out with. I did some reading on the subject and there is a lot of sources of to do different stuff. Among the most interesting I found an article from Valve which describes how the Source engine's does network communications. Other than that I don't have much concrete news regarding the game but always feel free to visit the project page to give ideas and feedback. Unfortunately all of the design documents are currently in Swedish so the audience may be a little limited. Hopefully we will have time to fix this later on but right now the priority is to make the actual game.

Project Duck Dev Diary: Project start

Almost two weeks ago some friends and I have started up a game programming project under the name Project Duck. I didn't want to write anything about it until I knew if it was going to get anywhere but today the first runnable test was pushed to the trunk and therefore I'm going to start write about the project as it goes along in this developer blog. I would like to start off with outlining the project's members and goals.

Almost two weeks ago some friends and I have started up a game programming project under the name Project Duck. I didn't want to write anything about it until I knew if it was going to get anywhere but today the first runnable test was pushed to the trunk and therefore I'm going to start write about the project as it goes along in this developer blog. I would like to start off with outlining the project's members and goals. The goal is to create a third-person team-based 3D shooter with some classic game modes like TDM, CTF but mainly a new game mode revolving around a research system. More about this later. We decided early to program the game in C# with Microsoft's XNA framework. We also found a physics engine which seems to suit our needs called Jitter Physics. The graphic style is supposed to be a cartoonish sci-fi style with "cute" little robots battling each other. Basically it started as a suggestion by a friend that we should program something together. A few hours of talking on our Mumble-server we had a few friends who were interested. Right now we are three programmers and a few other guys who will try to help out with everything from concept art to game testing. [caption id="attachment_1113" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Project Duck UML Diagram"][/caption] We decided from the start that is this was going to work we would have to organize and structure up our efforts. Therefore we consciously waited some time before we started coding. The first week was spent pitching all kinds of ideas back and forth. From overall game design to technical details. Last week we had a programmer meeting where we addressed the most important programming questions and drew an outline to a UML diagram. This diagram would be used as a rough sketch over the various components of the game engine. Now we are actually up and running and it fells really good. Stay tuned for more information and developer stories.

Watch out for the Curve! – Source released

As a part of cleaning up this site for the new version I am moving some stuff to external services.

The first step of this was to upload the code for an old game I made, Watch out for the Curve!, to GitHub. The game is a clone of a really old game called Achtung Die Kurve! which I used to play a lot at school with my friends. A few years ago I made this clone using C# and XNA. Now I finally found the code again and put everything on GitHub for anyone to use.

The project is hosted on GitHub. Feel free to download the game and/or the code and do whatever you want with.

As a part of cleaning up this site for the new version I am moving some stuff to external services. The first step of this was to upload the code for an old game I made, Watch out for the Curve!, to GitHub. The game is a clone of a really old game called Achtung Die Kurve! which I used to play a lot at school with my friends. A few years ago I made this clone using C# and XNA. Now I finally found the code again and put everything on GitHub for anyone to use. The project is hosted on GitHub. Feel free to download the game and/or the code and do whatever you want with.

Nytt programmerinsprojekt

Hallå!

Jag har tillsammans med två fransmän och en annan kille startat upp ett litet programmeringsprojekt som just nu går under namnet PHP MPQ. Målet är att skapa PHP-tillägg och bibliotek för att hantera och bearbeta Blizzards MPQ-filer, speciellt repriser och banor från Starcraft 2.

Hallå!Jag har tillsammans med två fransmän och en annan kille startat upp ett litet programmeringsprojekt som just nu går under namnet PHP MPQ. Målet är att skapa PHP-tillägg och bibliotek för att hantera och bearbeta Blizzards MPQ-filer, speciellt repriser och banor från Starcraft 2.