  Cubegasm's First Dev Journal Entry | 
Posted - 6/24/2008 12:51:29 AM | In lieu of actually doing any development tonight I, instead, chose to write a gaming article (still no Metal Gear Story; I'm still thinking about that) and then a particularly-lengthy GameDev.net Daily. Now, since I've given up hope of getting work done tonight and have accepted the idea that Battlefield: Bad Company will dominate my nights for the next few days, I'll write about what I'm actually working on for the moment.
I've never worked on a project that had any sort of physics simulation occurring within it before; when I found out that Havok released their SDK that could be used by hobbyists and by any commercial product that retailed for less than $10, though, I retreated from my previous stay at Hotel XNA and back into C/C++ Direct3D9 Land. I didn't want to spend months writing a framework and a rendering engine, though, since I'm currently in the kind of mood where I want to put out a game every two-three months -- a timespan which is variable based on game release dates, occasional social interests and obligations, and work schedules. It is a direct result of this mindset which led me to using OGRE. I spent a few days configuring my project, the engine (and all of the modules for it which I planned on using), and Havok in Visual Studio and then got about implementing a basic Havok simulation and rendering aesthetic worked out.
  
While doing these tests I had envisioned a bright, solid-colored color palette with a very minimalistic lighting scheme for the scene all with a slight HDR/Bloom glow attached. I had the Havok world and the cube objects all set up and working at the time the above screenshots were taken but, in movement, something felt wrong about the way they were interacting with the environment. I looked over all of the environment values that I had set and things looked alright. Then I realized that, when a cube-like entity hit a ground surface with a high restitution value from eighty meters above the surface that the chances of it rotating are, well, almost a certainty. And I wasn't taking an entity's orientation quaternion into account for the OGRE cube graphic whatsoever. So, yeah, fail. The right-most image in the following trio shows that OGRE is having some difficulties maintaining high rendering speeds with all of the cube objects which, really, seems not so good. I'm either adding the entities/nodes to the scene in an unoptimized fashion or the debug rendering runtimes are extraordinarily slow. This is something I'm still playing with at the time of writing.
  
I got back to this codebase about a week and a half after the previous set of images was taken (Metal Gear Solid 4 needed some love and attention) and when I started up my project build I realized I didn't really like the look things were taking. The aesthetic didn't really match the one I had envisioned for my game so, this past weekend, I went about remedying that (with the most current image being the far right one):
  
And, now, I'm just cleaning up the codebase as it exists right now and thinking about what, specifically, I'm going to do for the game. My current idea right now is a sort of Fort Wars single-player game against the AI; each player has a structured composed entirely of cubes and each one is attempting to blow up the other person's fort first to reveal a large target-like item in the center that, when exposed, must be hit a few times before it explodes and, then, ending the match. My idea is to make differing types of cubes that have a variety of effects once they are hit: some will give positive benefits to the player (increased damage radius, multiple launched projectiles per shot, etc.), some will give negative benefits, and some will simply be explosive that can take out a number of surrounding boxes at once. Whether this what I'll actually do for the game is, at this point, completely up in the air. I'm going to code some initial mechanics and play around and see which seems like the most fun for me.
That is, of course, once I devote some time to Battlefield: Bad Company.
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| Grid | 
Posted - 6/23/2008 10:24:42 PM | I know Grid isn't the greatest arcade racing game ever but, goddamn, I love it so much. It has the perfect blend of a career mode where I can make money, buy cars, hire teammates and then merges that with a with a more arcade-like set of racing mechanics. The game has a great sense of speed and an absurdly good damage model that makes events like the Demolition Derby -- an event I haven't played since Destruction Derby for the Playstation -- an absolute blast to play. One of the game's bullet points is an instant replay system which allows players a number of attempts to go back in time in the game (a la Prince of Persia: Sands of Time) and undo whatever mistake was made the first try; this is a mechanic that, at first, I was annoyed by due to the unnecessary menu-work that was required to use the feature but, after some time with the game, it's a fantastic addition to avoid the video game racing gamer's urge to restart a rice a few dozen times to perfect a given event.
  
Story time:
I got my first team driver yesterday. His name was Seth Brown. He didn't even finish the first of our two races in an event. I want to not only fire him, but tie him to a tree in the middle of the forest and make him pay me back for the event winnings he took. The fact that I couldn't is clearly evidence of lazy development but, anyway, I fired him and then replaced him with a much better teammate and then I got an achievement for it.
Tonight that new teammate and I fucking annihilated the Europe rookie cup and took Team Kitten to the top in every race. At one point I was in second and then I got too aggressive on the final turn and flipped over, did a complete 360 in the air, and managed to make it over the railing onto the other side of the turn, beat out the first place guy, and zoomed to a first-place finish. Then I went back to finish the last (sixth) race of the America Rookie cup, finished that, and then beat some jerk that challenged me in head-to-head and got a million dollars.
Then I drove a Lamborghini for another team and failed to finish 24 Heures Du Mans (a twenty-four minute race) since I got impatient and overly-aggressive and, with no flashbacks left, ran head first into a wall which was surprisingly well-built.
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| Metal Gear Gameplay | |
Posted - 6/20/2008 12:52:24 AM | Over the course of the last week I was able to play the final chapter in a franchise which I first played as a rental on my NES way back when I was a munchkin; Metal Gear was a thoroughly confusing game for the four-year-old me. I very much doubt that I made it much past the first few areas as I was not a patient child. I may or may not have played Metal Gear 2. I did, however, play the hell out of Metal Gear Solid for myPlaystation back in 1998. I played it through about four or five times, got Snake's tuxedo on New Year's Eve 1998, and have very fond memories of Psycho Mantis and Meryl and the boss fight with Revolver Ocelot. I would be hard-pressed to think of a franchise which, to this day, I remain so positively nostalgic about aside from Metal Gear Solid (and Final Fantasy VII and Resident Evil). So, now that I've completed my first play-through of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, I want to write about the two halves of this game: thegameplay and the story.
  
When the first Metal Gear Solid came out the game was absolutely revolutionary. It merged action, stealth, and cinematic storytelling like no game before it had successfully done. Everything had fullvoiceovers , the graphics were phenomenal, and the violence was realistically gruesome. The series stagnated after this first iteration with the release of Metal Gear Solid 2 riding on the first game's coat-tails and, what's worse, forcing the player to play as someone other than Solid Snake for 75% of the game and containing unnecessarily lengthycutscenes that felt longer than necessary (especially its heavy-handed ending). Metal Gear Solid 3 improved on the Metal Gear Solid formula by leaps and bounds without changing any specific aspect too radically. Much like Resident Evil, the Metal Gear Solidgameplay was still utilizing fixed camera angles and by the time the third iteration of the franchise rolled around gamers began to tire of it -- though Metal Gear Solid was so remarkably well-done that it escaped a large amount of the potential criticisms which could have otherwise befallen it.
Loading up Guns of the Patriots was a fantastic surprise; gone was the top-down camera angle -- ditched in favor of an over-the-shoulder camera -- and the inability to fire weapons from first-person and still move around. Gone, too, was theHUD's radar that showed enemy positions and their line-of-sight. In the first ten minutes of Metal Gear Solid 4 a franchise veteran is suddenly faced with an abundance of viable play styles as nonlethal measures, stealth, and murderous rampages are all interchangeable. The nonlethal and stealth approaches both become powerfully tempting the moment that a key character is introduced that is capable of being used as a weapon launderer at any point in the time. Players no longer will face a dearth of ammunition or weaponry as dozens upon dozens of weapons can be purchased and customized with limitless ammunition for each being a triangle button and some in-game currency away. And, oh, these guns have gravity. Each possesses truly booming sound effects and carry with them a feel of destruction like no Metal Gear game in the past.
The implications of making the gunplay of Metal Gear Solid absolutely fantastic are that the entire flow of the game becomes radically different. Players have a deadly arsenal that puts the greatest weapons in Metal Gear Solid 1, 2, and 3 all to shame and this actually makes an entirely offensive strategy completely plausible. Finishing the game with a large number of kills andheadshots yields different end-game items and badges than, say, a game where no one was killed or a game where a single alert was not set off. From my first personal play through I wanted to be stealthy but once I accidentally killed a private military contractor and heard a group of rebels behind me shout phrases of thanks (one threw me some rations as payment) I realized that I could, instead, kill a bunch ofPMCs and aid the rebels in their fight. This, to me, was a far more enjoyable and worthwhile endeavor than sneaking around both groups of combatants. I also earned a lot more currency to upgrade my M4 into a grenade-launching, silenced, long-range killing machine.
  
There are other subtle additions to Snake's arsenal this time around as well. Snake's camouflage will automatically change the match the environment when he goes prone or presses up against a vertical surface and remains stationary for a few seconds -- a much improved mechanism from the menu-heavy method of performing the same task in Metal Gear Solid 3. The "threat bubble" that pops up around snake when he remains stationary while crouched or prone is also a superb way of highlighting the danger in Snake's surroundings by showing "blips" in the translucent circle that hovers and follows Snake around. And the agme is full of streamlined additions to the tried-and-true gameplay of the series and just serves as further evidence of the ridiculous level of polish present in Snake's final chapter.
For the first time since the original Metal Gear Solid I finished the entire game and still wanted more. The gameplay didn't feel like a means to advance the story or to just make my way to the next plot point; the story provided the impetus to search my environment, kill the PMCs, and make it to the objective that I actually enjoyed reaching. The basic mechanics all function so responsively and the levels are designed to promote both stealth and violence that alternating between the two feels completely natural.
What's more telling than this is that I started up a new game on the hardest difficulty tonight because I wanted to jump back into the game world and play more. Maybe this time I'll actually play through the game without setting off any alerts or attempt for a non-lethal means of progression.
I really, really doubt that will last.
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| A Digitally Distributed World | |
Posted - 6/19/2008 10:54:18 PM | As more and more developers and publishers realize the benefits of distributing their products online, more types of digital distribution applications have been created to benefit the cause. At this point in time gamers have their choice of applications like Impulse (a rebranded and revamped Stardock Central), Steam, Gametap, and EA Downloader (which is now simply the EA Store) and then digital distribution websites like Direct2Drive, Greenhouse, and GamersGate.
Among gamers, though, the most oft-used and oft-mentioned means of acquiring new games is Valve's Steam. First released in September of 2003 as little more than a means for Valve to distribute and update their own titles, the application was widely criticized for an extremely high memory footprint and its sluggish performance. Now, though, the service has been continually updated and refined into an industry-recognized method of acquiring and updating Valve's titles along with a huge assortment of third-party games. The most recent major upgrade that the platform received came in the form of user stats, achievements, a community system (complete with friends lists, groups, and event calendars), an in-game overlay which gave users access to all of Steam's features in any game launched from the Steam game list, and a revamped store. Up until the release of Steamworks most of these services were only properly utilized in Valve's own products but, now, developers partnered with Valve can implement the same Steam-specific features in their games as well. Steam Cloud has also been talked about which would give Steam users a sort of virtual storage space for game save files and preferences.
One of the other digital distribution applications that I install whenever I format a computer has always been Stardock Central. Before I ever even thought about working at the company I was a fan of Stardock's games and a couple of the applications that the company produces. Back when the actual game catalog was slim-pickins all I ever did was launch the program, download a game or an update, let the thing install, and then I shut the program down again until I felt like checking for another update a few weeks later -- all of this was around the launch of Galactic Civilizations back in 2003. It wasn't a very pretty program by any means (though it was a far cry from Stardock's very first digital distribution app, Component Manager, back in 1999), but it didn't really have to be.
Earlier this week Stardock launched Impulse which is more than just a pretty face on top of years of knowledge gained from the development of Stardock Central; the best write-up on the program available was published by Brad Wardell on the day of its release. As a game developer, though, I think of Impulse as being an incredibly open and community-accessible distribution platform unlike any other in the industry. We're developing a set of tools called "Impulse Reactor" which we're planning on giving to third-parties so that they can easily access community features and -- since I'm a gamer and a game developer -- game statistics, matchmaking, achievements, friends lists, and all of the other things that users of Xbox Live have been using and relying on for years.
I play a pretty ridiculous amount of games; specifically, I play a pretty ridiculous number of shooters and strategy games. Valve's multiplayer shooters are the best I've played since the days of Quake 3: Rocket Arena. Last year I played in a giant Shacknews Team Fortress 2 tournament (no, really) and, before that, I put a pretty crazy amount of time into Counter-Strike: Source and, for both games, Steam has been absolutely invaluable. I've taken part in tournament games that our team leader threw into the event calendar and had a little message box pop-up to notify me when and where I should go for a match and, after a game, our entire team joined a group chat room to talk about the match and what we needed to do better for the next game, and so on.
But why aren't there any applications which have this kind of integration for real-time strategy games? The amount of time I've sunk into Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne, Company of Heroes, Supreme Commander, and Sins of a Solar Empire is, quite honestly, embarassing. This same fact is true of Civilization 4 and its expansion packs. Of all of the digital distribution applications that exist for the PC none of them have the kind of Xbox Live statistics, matchmaking, and general game integration for the genres of games I enjoy the most. In conversations that we've had around the office this is the kind of gap that we want Impulse to fill (and, with Impulse Reactor, give other developers the tools to bring the same features to even more oft-forgotten games and genres).
The only thing that comes from overzealous application zealotry and exclusivity is a lack of competition that brings about new features, more content, and more innovations.
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| The Daily GameDev.net | |
Posted - 6/3/2008 1:38:34 PM | So, yeah, I realize I absolutely fail at updating my own site; luckily, though, I'm excellent at updating other peoples' sites. Like GameDev.net where I can be found writing news entries that have been described as distinctly me (which works out well).
Anyway, here are links to the last nine as of the night of this posting.- June 3rd 2008 -- Konami and Crytek Woes.
- June 2nd 2008 -- Phil Harrison, Ben Mattes, Gabe Newell, and Free Havok.
- May 30th 2008 -- Hideo Kojima's thought on games and movies and quality of life in the games industry.
- May 29th 2008 -- True 3D gaming and the "nearly catastrophic" Playstation 3.
- May 28th 2008 -- The end of disconnected single-player games and in-game advertising failures.
- May 27th 2008 -- Age of Conan, Brett Ratner and games, and Capcom and movies.
- May 26th 2008 -- ESA Failures and the last generation of consoles.
- May 23th 2008 -- Gamestop makes lots of moneyhats and Microsoft on delisting Xbox Live Arcade games.
- May 22th 2008 -- Niko Bellic voice actor complains about royalties and World of Warcraft bots.
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| Age of Conan | |
Posted - 5/28/2008 12:51:23 AM | I posted this in the lounge but I figured I'd mirror it here since these screenshots wouldn't fit on my site's main page. Anyway, this is Age of Conan and it's surprisingly fun.
A mammoth and his groupie ganked me :(
The greatest archer guards ever in the history of ever
Mufasa told me this would all be mine one day
Typical virgin sacrifice
nevicata and I admire the tree
Look! I'm Altair!
...
Strom sucks
This is the kind of resistance all games need
Johnny Cash would be proud
M means short hookers with big boobs
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| Grand Theft Auto 4 | 
Posted - 5/18/2008 12:45:45 AM | 878,598 dollars earned (of which $376,945 was spent), 860 killed by one of my 161 cars stolen or ventilated by a number of my 16,367 bullets fired, 94 missions completed, and 28 hours and 34 minutes later I have completed Grand Theft Auto 4, a game sitting at a solid 98% overall score on Metacritic three weeks after its release. It's a game that cost $100 million to make and a game which grossed $500 million in its first week. The question that no one is asking at this point in time since it's been answered by eight media outlets already is: does Grand Theft Auto 4 live up to the incredibly high expectations? Absolutely.
Grand Theft Auto 4 starts with a sweeping introductory sequence designed to introduce the protagonist, Niko Bellic, as the fresh-of-the-boat Eastern European that he is. Once disembarking from the ship that carried him to Liberty City, USA, players are introduced to Roman Bellic, Niko's cousin. At this point, the two characters which fuel the single-player storyline are introduced and the game's pace begins at the snail level. Through the next ninety-three missions the epic storyline will unfold as missions progressively get more difficult, wider in scope, and the plot elements become more and more deadly. Rockstar is so confident in their design that it has the first five hours or so of missions serve as a running tutorial where the body count remains in the single-digits unless the player feels the need to cleanse the sidewalks of the first of the game's four boroughs. This very slow, meaningful pace is the game's greatest asset: the first time a player is thrust into a situation where numerous people have to be killed is about six hours and feels like the major turn of events that it should feel like.
At its heart, Grand Theft Auto 4 is still Grand Theft Auto. It does very little to deviate from the franchise's traditional game flow: mission begin marker, cutscene, mission execution, cutscene, [...], mission end. Within the confines of the game, this formula works better than most games could ever hope for. The game succeeds because of this fact; every aspect of the experience is fine-tuned to perfection and is comfortable within the tapestry of mechanics that exist around it. The driving feels realistic (a first for the series), the gunplay is visceral and feels surprisingly natural once the unique control scheme is understood, and the gunplay while driving is a joy to engage in. A single bank robbery mission in Grand Theft Auto 4 is executed to a level of perfection that entire games based around the concept (Kane and Lynch) can't reach. At no point throughout the nearly thirty hours of gameplay did I ever frown at the idea of a firefight or a high-speed escape from a four-star wanted level.
It is a surprise to me that the biggest complaints I have with Grand Theft Auto 4 are related to the cinematic aspect of the game. The epic feel comes natural to the game as a result of the developers' patience with their storytelling so why, then, does the game start to fall flat in its final act? Every few hours spent with the game I feel as if I've reached the climax of the game and there was no way that a mission could be topped or a cutscene could enthrall me more and then, a few missions later, I'm overcome by the same feelings. But, as a result, at around the 85% completion mark (of the story which entails a total of 63-64% of the in-game "completion" marker) as the game's various plot lines started to end and the sources of missions became fewer and fewer, Rockstar seemed to choose the least interesting plots available to them. Early in the game the player is introduced to a member of a once-infamous Irish family that, as one character points out mid-mission, used to "own" Liberty City. Niko comes in contact with every member of this family and each of these characters had a very deep persona with a wealth of available back story to develop on. Instead, the writers chose to go down the path infested with the scum that composed Liberty City's Italian mafia. As I took each of the missions given to me by members of the mafia it seemed like I started dealing with very unlikeable two-dimensional characters instead of the vast number of the incredibly well-written people that made up the first three-quarters of the game.
While GTA4 puts a far greater emphasis on character interactions and the maintenance of relationships, I still can't help but feel that the Niko I'm playing as I make my way through the game as a player is a vastly different one from the Niko I see portrayed in GTA4's numerous cutscenes. These amazingly well-produced, directed, written, and voiced movies that serve as bookends for the missions given throughout the game are a joy to watch but I still feel that when it comes time to get in a car and execute the orders given to me during the CG movies that I'm disconnected from the meat of the story. The dates (casual and romantic) which make up a significant portion of GTA4's sidequests did a remarkable job of lessening this feeling of disconnect, but it remains one of my primary problems with Grand Theft Auto as a series.
And since I don't care to elaborate on these much since they've been harped on endlessly elsewhere, here are my only two real gameplay complaints: no checkpoints for the especially long missions and far too many artificial chase missions where I was not allowed to harm the targets of the chase until a certain scripted event happened.
It's a shame that Grand Theft Auto 4 may be the last major single-player Grand Theft Auto game ever made by Rockstar North because the switch back to a very gritty, realistic setting with a scaled back map size and feature set made Grand Theft Auto 4 one of the greatest video games ever created and I'd love to see what the fruit of their future labors would produce. Just, please, don't make an MMO. Please. I'm begging.
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| The Political Machine 2008 | |
Posted - 5/8/2008 11:49:48 PM | I've been working every day (and what long days they are) for the last couple weeks on The Political Machine 2008 as we make our final surge to the game's gold date and figured I might as well plug it here since I haven't had time to write about anything else lately. My role on the game is primarily as a gameplay programmer (which has been awesome). Anyway, pictures:
  
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| Asplode v1.2 Release | |
Posted - 4/27/2008 10:17:01 PM | For this update, my role in Asplode! was absolutely minimal. While I'm in the middle of a mild crunch for The Political Machine 2008 and then away at Rochester, New York for a Paramore concert, Josh was working asininely hard on version 1.2 of Asplode!. As started, my role in this update was purely peripheral as, in my spare time, I've been working on the start for Bipolar and taking some of Josh's code for his game and turning it into a more generic library that both of us can use in our current and future projects (the library is HardCat Library, obviously). Anyway, major changes:- Fixed a bug where the player's time alive, score multipliers, etc. weren't getting reset for successive game sessions.
- Fixed a bug/leak related to game audio.
- Complete rewrite of the particle engine's rendering (GPU-driven now).
- Refactored the enemy code.
- Now entirely functional on the Xbox 360.
- Added an option for full screen.
- High Scores!
Asplode! Installer
Asplode! Source
  
[Edit]: For some inexplicable reason, the XNA redistributable may still fail to install using the installer, so you may want to manually install it: XNA redistributable.
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| An Asplosion! of a Re-Release | |
Posted - 4/22/2008 11:12:32 PM | On Sunday, I linked to the source/executable for my top-down, arena space shooter Asplode! and one of the things I wasn't really proud of was how terrible the performance was for the game. Well, one of my friends took the burden of fixing it up a bit and made an installer. He then passed all of this new fangled technology onto me and, in return, I edited a couple more of the source files, added him to the game's credits, and made a new, updated installer for the game. So here, ladies and gentlemen, is a far more proper release of the game.
This installer will execute the DirectX Web Setup, install the .NET 2.0 Framework if it isn't already, and the XNA redistributable, but it does not contain the source for the game. Like any XNA game, this will require Windows XP or Vista, and, at the very least, a graphics card capable of Pixel Shader 2.0.
Asplode! v1.1
[Edit]: I failed part of the installer, so the XNA redistributable will also need to be installed.
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| An Asplosion! of a Release | |
Posted - 4/20/2008 10:37:08 PM | Yeah, so, I'm releasing Asplode! now and such. And, along with the game, comes all of the source to the game.
I originally wasn't planning on releasing the source but as development winded down and I started to play the game for longer sessions I soon realized that the game became virtually unplayable on my machine after about seven-eight minutes. I thought this may have been a result of poorly-managed graphical assets so I took a couple days to optimize them (and, as a result, the VectorModel and VectorParticleSystem bits of the code are an absolute mess to comprehend). After I finished doing that I jumped back into the game and, while it ran better for a while, the horrific mid-to-end game performance was still very much a factor. I went through and tweaked and optimized bits of code in other places that seemed like they would cause issues and, still, the performance problems persisted. At that point I decided that, since I got the game to a playable state and I didn't want to devote a whole lot of time to what is, essentially, a Geometry Wars clone, that I would just throw a main menu screen on the thing, an end-game screen, and release the source code and call it a day.
So that's what I'm doing. Here's the game; tremendous performance issues and all.
The Game: Asplode! plays out pretty much like you'd expect; on the 360 controller the left joystick handles movement and the right joystick aims/fires bullets. There is a score multiplier which is slowly increased with every kill made up to and the multiplier reaches a maximum of nine; every time a player dies, the multiplier is reset. There are also three possible weapon upgrades. (which persist after death) which are awarded based on the number of asplosion combos -- any death with a red pentabomb involved. A player has only three lives; I thought about implementing a way for a player to earn more lives but, since I have no life, the least I could do is minimize the amount of life a player can have. So there's three. That's it.
The Source: Uh. Yeah. Just try not to learn anything aside from what never to replicate. Ever.
The Requirements: One of the issues with an XNA title is that there are a few necessary items to install to get one running. So, I'm sorry about that. If it wasn't such a beautiful creation, I wouldn't use it. XNA Redistributable (Included), .NET 2.0 Framework, and I believe a run of the DirectX Web Setup and/or Visual Studio SP1 Redists if the first two don't get the job done.
Asplode!
And now off to start the game which isn't a blatant clone.
 
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| Chronicles of Cloud (and Bipolar) | |
Posted - 4/17/2008 12:21:17 AM | I've been playing a very time-intensive game of musical chairs with various three-dee engines over the course of the last two-and-a-half weeks in an attempt to find the one that would be best suited to my particular development style and the kind of game I want to create. And I can safely say that, tonight, I have reached the ultimate solution. That's right, after toying around with things like TorqueX, Torque Game Engine Advanced, OGRE, Irrlicht, Nebula3, and, finally, PowerRender. The latter two of the list appeared to have the most potential, with PowerRender being the closest thing to what I was looking for, but the most recent iteration of the engine is still under heavy development and, what was the most troublesome, seems to be getting very infrequent updates. So, after all of the wasted time, I decided that I was going to dig out my old C++/D3D9/D3D10 framework and just rip out the D3D9 parts for use in a new framework which I could use in the future.
I got exactly an hour-and-a-half of work done on that last night before I realized that it felt way too much like the kind of engine work I do at my job every weekday. So now, and for realsies, I'm back with XNA. I'll be releasing Asplode! this weekend in its terribly-performing state (and open source) and, hopefully, everything I learned in the development of that will help me create a far more useful toolset this time around as far as memory management is concerned. The most important lesson I have with me that I learned from Asplode! is that the most important thing about memory within a managed environment isn't necessarily the allocation of memory so much as it is the deleting of it. Apparently the garbage collector is a wicked beast that must be appeased in order to maintain stable gameplay performance. I don't know. I'm still getting the hang of the intricacies of C#. When I was working on Asplode! -- and this will be readily apparent in the source if people peruse it -- I didn't know anything about C#. I simply coded as if I would code a game using C++ and, when code didn't compile, I read up on why the error occurred and what I needed to do/learn in order to fix it. Hopefully, this time around, I'm a bit more well-prepared. It also helps that Drilian and I are teaming up for some of the more game-independent stuff.
As a random note, I beat Final Fantasy 7: Crisis Core earlier this week. While I have the same issues with it that I do most RPGs (that the combat becomes asininely annoying by the end of the game), the game did the Final Fantasy 7 universe -- and FF7 is the only JRPG I've ever enjoyed (and loved) -- absolute justice. The story was incredible and provided a lot of great depth on Zack, the inner workings of SOLDIER, and the root for Cloud's identity disorder. And seeing Sephiroth function in more "normal" times and take actual solace in communication with friends/peers was cool. I'm just waiting for my copy of Advent Children to arrive so I can re-watch that. Now it's back to Wipeout Pulse, AoE3: The Asian Dynasties, and more Rock Band. And GT5: Prologue. Grand Theft Auto 4 can come out anytime now as well.
Anyway, yeah, that's about it. I hope everybody has been The Daily GameDev.net news pieces I've been posting every weekday morning. They're almost asininely fun to write up but they do tend to take the place of dev journal updates at times, so if this thing has become a bit more stagnant than usual then that's probably the reason.
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| Blergh | 
Posted - 4/8/2008 11:29:35 PM | I hate so many things about game engines. I spend all day coding graphics/engine stuff so, when it comes to my hobby projects, I would like as much of my work to be as gameplay-focused as possible. Yet it seems that the kind of game engines that would spring to mind first are the most annoying in a number of ways. GarageGames' engines, for instance, are either too immature/buggy/undocumented (TorqueX) or so filled with features and reliant on scripting that it's primarily useless for someone like me who wants as many components/features as possible to be handled from within code. Though Torque Game Engine Advanced, too, suffers from a lack of documentation except for what it has generated from XML comments within the source code.
Anyway, yeah, anger.
I'm looking at some other alternatives for my blob game now. It's very unexciting. And my cat is experimenting with varying orientations of his ears. It's alternating between cute and aerodynamic.
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The entries in this journal have all been posted, along with many more, at mittens' personal site at www.polycat.net.
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