http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/index.xhtml?c=14&p=1 Copyright mindalex 2012-2015 Coding http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=88 I decided to take a break from game programming. Will probably come back to Pong Revival later on, but user interfaces and building uppon the animation engine are actually less of a challenge now that all the other pieces are in place. The time had come for me to come... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=87 In the last article I was talking about the reasonably complex 2D collision system I had in place for the Pong Revival project. In this second article we're going to think of nice extensible ways of putting that system to good use, by adding a bit of physics in the... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=86 I decided to put a lot of time in the Collision Detection and Physics system, mostly because I yet again felt like being weirdly cautios and complex about the whole thing. So these two posts (one with collision and one with physics) will go through my small journey in the... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=85 With my Hardcore Programming needs fulfilled for a short while, I decided to come back to PongRevival. The board layout is very close to perfection. The only thing that bothers are the small details that can turn the game into an unfair, unplayable game. The way it was left, there was... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=81 While most game elements are well in place, and the infrastructure code is done, there was one major issue that needed to be tackled, namely asset scaling. A game where you have 4 player positions and two of the players just watch is not much of a game after all. With... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=80 With considerable progress being made on the Pong Revival XNA Game Engine wrapper, it was time for some more fine-grained blender and 2D twaking. That being said I decided to take some time and make a really nice glass container for the Pad Loading mechanism. The design and purpose of the... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=79 With the asset pipeline in place, time had come for some real actual game programming. And as it goes with all programming starts, the first step is always the most code intensive. Shaping up XNA for Pong Microsoft's XNA Framework is a very general use Programming Framework. That carries with it a... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=78 With our modeling and materials in order it's time to get everything preped for XNA magic. And while that sounds like an easy task, lots of thinking and preparation goes into getting all the artwork from 3d to 2d exports to workable in game sprites. Some Initial Thoughts Most of our game... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=68 The first month of Mind Alex and Mind Alex Remote has brought some nice articles as well as some nice improvements. As promissed in one of my earliest posts, I really wanted to take some time to go through one of the nicest design aspects of MindAlex and that is... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=66 Well I am glad I was telling you how my blog was getting more media show friendly. Well it did for a very short time by using the number one Javascript Pop Up, TopUp. The library didn't really agree with my development style at all, nevermind it not really working well... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=65 I anounced this with my last post, and I don't like to keep people waiting too much, so seadle up for what is going to be most likely the longest article I wrote so far on this blog, while also hopefully being the most interesting. If you're not yet sure if... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=55 It's been a while since my last game deving post and that's not because of the summer warmth at all. Hobby coding took a full new direction after the realisations shared in the last post. The need for a propper game scene editor had just become real, but in order... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=52 While playing around with shaders and meshes, and trying to get an interesting touch on shader based game development I have stumbled on a very nice shader effect. It all started when I tried to get more detail out of meshes by simply doing texture based shader extrusion. Since hlsl... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=51 After the post of yesterday I just couldn't sit still and I just had to get into the material scripts. This is where the not being in touch with all the 3d math has proven to be quite the set back and also where I temporarely felt defeated by my... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=49 After the addition of Chaos Tabs to the Ogre/CEGUI/Lua setup from my previous posts, I actually took a bit of time to consider the next step. Though keeping the possibilities for the first game based on the engine still wide open, and subject to my parallel discoveries in Drawing and... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=46 I've been cooking this idea for quite a while now and you will not find it at all inconsistent with my game prototyping ideas I've posted so far. So let's get back to where we had a prety good extensible engine base made out of Ogre and CEGUI together full... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=43 I actually anounced this as an interesting potential discussion topic when I was talking about my game engine base. Once you get a scripting language integrated, the first instinct is to script everything in there, because integrating scripting language support in c++ or I am betting any other programming language... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=42 This is a bit of a follow up on a couple of my earlier posts, and it will basically go through the process of setting up a nice Game Engine base with Ogre, Cegui and Lua. As oposed to my other posts so far I'll start with the end result.... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=41 While playing around with quite a few engines, though mostly combinations of Ogre, ODE and CEGUI, I have stumbled on something that is missing, and I for one don't know why. It's also something you don't read about a lot since everyone is wondering how to get that great rendering... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=40 And since I've been doing some random C++ ing recently, I couldn't help organizing up a nice workflow for large C++ projects (yes, I've been playing with game engine component integration again). So without further postponment, here goes the post : The Problem You have a lot of C++ projects, with lots... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=36 As few of you might know, my whole post-bachelor programming life has been marked by the code generation sign. And not because most people don't ever consider it early in their software design methodology, which makes me the weirdo some of the times in software design decision making, but because... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=33 Through all my interaction with people actually involved with software development and perfectioning of software oriented business models, there is one frightening discovery I made and since everything in computer science and software development follows a steep exponential growth curve, I assume this is going to come back and take...