I recently was introduced to a bug in my game. I had 20 AI units and only 19 of them were actively doing something. Number 20 was just standing there. The problem eventually lied in using '#enemies' to get the amount of enemies.
Here is what happened:
A lua table index by default starts on index 1. This in contrary to many other languages where it starts at 0. However, you can assign a value to index '0' if you want. Since I use C# on a daily basis, I am more comfortable using the 0 in
The last year of my Game Development study has already started. With only one year to go it is time so look ahead and view the possibilities that are available.
Focus
The coming 20 weeks I am following a minor in advanced software engineering and Game Technology itself will be put in the background. Game development will mostly be something I will do in my spare time. I thought that this year would be really busy one but so far it has been very quiet. The focus of the minor lies on Java, t
So school time is over. I graduated from the Hogeschool of Amsterdam as a Game Developer which means I can officially put 'ing' (from engineer) in front of my applicant name. Now that the 'study' period of my life is over (although it isn't really, right? I mean when do you ever stop learning!) it is time to get a job and start earning some money.
Guerrilla Games
For the past 6 months I did my thesis internship at Guerrilla Games. Which was awesome. I was surprised at first that they offere
So now that game week is over lets have a look back at how things went.
Game play
Gameplay itself was done really quickly. The idea for Lenga is basically Jenga with a twist of colors. I thought of creating an AI that would remove blocks based on a calculation. However I though it would become really boring. So instead I let the player remove a block of a specific color.
Scripts on the wrong entity
At some point during testing I came across a script error. I lost a good hour trying to
As of next year I will be studying Game development in Amsterdam This is going to be awesome!
At the moment I am taking an extra course math. Although it is really tough, I really enjoy it! (in contrary to most of my surrounding living organisms.)
Leadwerks
It has been quite a while since I have been active on werkspace or with Leadwerks. Still, even after working with severall Engines and Frameworks, I allways come back to Leadwerks. I don't know what it is. The coding? The Visuals? The ease of use? The lighting? Anyway, I had some time of, since homework was fairly quickly finished. Spare time has been scarce so I am glad I can finaly make some time werkspace...
Year 2
Year 2 of Game development is an enormous improvement on the f
Today I learned a pretty basic but very usefull programming principle. It is about declaring multiple initialisers in a for loop. I am working with a mobile application and speed and memory are more of an issue than on computer right now. My application is finished when you look at its functionality and construction, but it has to be optimized.
Here is a narrowed down example of what I am doing:
for(int i = 0; i < veryLongArray.length(); i++)
{
DoSomething(i);
}
This is very b
I downloaded the Saturn tutorial project yesterday to see how the project was holding up after all this time. After some bug fixing and adjusting some of the scenery ingame, I came to the conclusion I really liked the parcours part of the scene. So I thought lets just turn it in to a run and jump game real quick and add it to the winter games tournament.
http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/page/viewitem?fileid=616857680
I have been working on some new features for the SplineTools package for Leadwerks. In the video below I demonstrate 2 new features
Reverse spline followers: Reverse any spline follower at any given time on the spline. Just call the Reverse() function on a spline follower and enjoy the ride.
Closest point on the spline: helper functions that can check what the closest point on a spline is based on given position.
I started out 7 months ago with splines and it turned in to one of those annoying projects you start but then fail to finish even to it is in the back of your head the entire time. The reason this time was that I managed to delete my online repository and my local files, leaving me with nothing of the work I had created. I finally had the spirit to sit down and start rebuilding.
Quite some time ago I was playing Rainbow Six Vegas with a coworker (not during work time). We were doing terrorist hunt on this construction site map and we were having a great time enjoying this classic game. At some point I wanted to throw a grenade quite far away. Of course with my pro-fps skills I managed to hit the electric pole standing right in front of me. After I was done facepalming, something caught my eye: the wires on the electric pole were swinging, probably by the grenade's shock
Besides making tutorials I am also working on my own project. It is my biggest one yet, but I think I have enough knowledge to get at least really far. Right now I am building my own engine on top of Leadwerks 3. The entire project is written mainly in C++.
Component Based engine design.
Since Leadwerks is very flexible you can do a lot of different things with it. The Lua scripts in the editor are a good example of component based design. However if you switch to C++ you don't have this d
After creating my Component based engine structure for my main project, I have now moved on to the next stage of development: an in-game console.
Possibilities
To sum up what you can do with it, here is a little video demonstration.
On the To-Do list
Although the core of the console is finished and working the way I want it to work, there are some slight improvements.
Grapics are simple boxes at this point. I want to go for Valve's in-game console look , which looks simple b
Some new possibilities
I have spend another evening on my in game console and it is shaping up nicely.
To-do or not to do
I am happy with how the console works right now. There are enough things that I could implement to make it even more usable but I don't need those (right now) for my project. Possible to do's
Intellisense.
Saving command log to a file.
Adjusting color, settings and size of console via commands.
In a previous developer blog I showed how I use spline paths inside the Leadwerks editor. The cool thing about splines as that they are extremely multipurpose. I started working on generating meshes based on the splines. Think about ropes, wires, rivers, rollercoasters and of course roads
Ropes and wires are in progress because I find them the coolest. Especially rope bridges are awesome to make and see in play. They require a lot of finetuning so I have put that on halt for now. In the me
The easiest, but none the less effective, way to optimize a large outdoor scene is setting a view range for an entity. Here are some basic rules that I used during the rebuild of the Return to the Zone project.
Max: Here you can think of essential buildings and large structures. Think about distant buildings, powerlines, bridges and entities that stick out above the vegetation or water plane.
Far: Here we have the larger props: containers, trains, vehicles, walls, statues. This als
In follow up to Andy, I also want to do a little blog on my experience with Leadwerks 3 so far. The first week after purchasing I didn't have much time to spend on it. Luckily after that week, there was quite some time left for the start of a new adventure.
Lua
In contrary to Leadwerks 2.3, I now want to lay most of my focus on C++. That is kind of Ironic, since a lot more people are interested in Lua now that Leadwerks 3 has arrived. It is not that surprising since the advantages of
Technically the title isn't really correct since game development hasn't really started yet. The first 10 weeks are introduction weeks, which are probably neccesary for a lot people who do not know which business unit they want to choose. As for me it has been clear that Game Development is my direction but in the mean time I get all sorts of classes from different IT directions:
System and Network engineer
Software engineer
IT manager
Human Centered Design
Technical Computing
