Ubuntu Repositories do suck!

So i just tried to link against lua5.2 with the QtCreator and... well lets just say it was true pain.

In the respositories there is a liblua5.2-dev version that seemingly provided all the needed headers but if linked at failed at finding even the lua.hpp. I still don't know why it didn't worked. But to fix it I had to uninstall my full lua installation and to compile and install the whole thing manually. At least lua came with a nice readme and fully preconfigured. So all one had to do was use 'make linux' and 'sudo make linux install'.

Also had an similar issue with the json spirit library where there was a whole header(!) missing in the Ubuntu repository. So in the installation was pretty much unusable. It's a shame because one easily looses track of what one does have installed, which version and so on. For the moment switched to the jansson library instead that seems to be working through the repositories.

At least a spark to not giving up on the whole thing...

Maybe I should start my own repository one day. God sooooo much stuff I need to do...

Git Useful Commands

This was very enlighting!

Stack Overflow: "git add -A", "git add ." & "git add -u"

The Circles of Sadness

Just yesterday i had an... well kinda sad talk about humans and there uncontrolled emotions that rule them in drive them doing mad things over and over. Spreading pain... but also making us life and keep on doing what we are doing.

It's a complex net of relationship - either good and bad ones - that make this topic interessting and the idea of using it as a concept for a game wasn't able to get out of my head.

So here i am trying to figuring out what it could be like.

The bitter taste to the project actually made me come up with this rather dark title "The Circles of Sadness" i think it would be fitting because it displays well how we all are trapped within emotions. How we wander around in it blind often without a clear target hunting dreams that may remain always outside of our reach.

Well so much for the title... but what is a title without content of course. Nothing but smoke and mirrors.

I still really like the imagination of angels and demons being all around us influencing us being our emotions are random motivators to do thing we will later regret badly.

Everyone player should impersonate such a creature... all having opposite targets. Driving one deeper down in a maelstrom of suffer and damnation while other try to hold one in balance. Holding them even, clear, full of hope.

I'm not yet sure if they all should just try to influence a singel person of there will be a few target beings everyone compete about. Just writing this makes me kinda go for the last...

At the very end there would be a sum up of points each side earned and who won in the end. Though this would only work if there are enough players. Else just one side demons or angels would be played and compete internally.

Another concept i would love to work into the game is the concept of having 5 different elements. Every single one being for it's own not leaving a static right and wrong. It's a circle everything gripping nice into each other.

I really liked how this was done in other games like Magic the Gathering and Starcraft 2 for example. In magic the gathering you have 5 colors of which everyone is having to neighbours and two enemies. But both of it's neighbours can't stand each other.... leading to a lot of tension within the construct evening out the 3 against 2 force.
In Starcraft 2 it's rather that every single race has to face to races against it. Every single one taking a compeltly different attempt to reach that goal. One is setting on organic slow regeneration abilities and massive amounts of bodies. Another one just shoots the hell out of everyone being able to lift off all in a sudden to move to a better position. Being masters in defense. The next on being superious in technolegy using powerful beam weapons and shields that keep there units alive. But good old things like repair and healing seem to be forgotten in the past.

It is the uneven number that brings so much fun in the diversity. But one shouldn't overdo it especially after a while it's getting hard to tell what the difference between A and B is if there are like CDEFGHIJ... so keeping it compact is important too. So 3 is nice but 5 would amaize me a lot more... and what was what i found?!

So lets see what i can make of all that shall we?

Currently was thinking of a card game... i still having a huge hang for board, pen, dices, paper, tokens and miniature games.

I will try to set up a voting for people that are interessted and would like to see me do more in one or another direction.

Undeads do never die!

Hello World!

Back from a break that felt like a life time. Anyway rough time lays behind me for the moment and i finally got myself into my game project again.

Today and yesterdays work were a lot of debug feature that just display the bounding boxes (blue) of all sprites, there weight points (yellow dots - they are just the center of each sprite - no weight based on amount of opacue pixels or something like that so far), the weight point one get if all points are combined (yellow circle connected with to weight points via lines) and all anchor points that connect the individual sprites (red dots).

I also added a small lib of vector calculation i hoped SFML would already provide but no...

Anyway now i also got to implement the Graham Scan that builds me a convex hull from the weight points... Makes no sense? Yeah kinda. But i will be able to use that on any cloud of points to transform it into a convex polygon! Beside i kinda like the idea of having a collision area for missiles and such that is smaller then the object. Currently looks good on the walker... sadly a bit awkward on the player character.

The good part! I'm finally closer to having actually things in my world... that... that will be able to interact! Yea!

Next will be a very rough MUR Bounding Box and as said the first collision tests.

And after that... maybe first test together with terrain!

Also good a few more idea how to handle the terrain! =)

Hope i will have more result a lot sooner...

Byebye!

Branching with Mercurial (and comparison to Git)

I'm about to mess with the robbie GUI we are using for the roboCup and i'm kinda afraid it could disable my teammates so i was thinking about using a branch.

I never did something like that so far but stumbled over a pretty useful tutorial.[1] And it isn't limited to branching on Mercurial. No it also comes with a good comparison and visualisation of your repository!

I at least think that i pushes me a bit forward in understanding mecurial!

[1 - A guide to branching in mercurial]

Code diet

Source now a lot cleaner!

main.cpp lost at least 50% of it's source to other classes! The remaining code isn't run at all at the moment. So the main.cpp will be more then slim after i'm done with it.

It's just the start hook for the game.

Sadly still no fancy loading screen for you folks... i'm sorry. Need to do some graphics to work with first!

Also moved Call of the Sirens to bitbucket! 3 more coding projects i can assign to remaining... Let's hope for the best!

Arc.

Bones of "I"

As i was thinking about the loading screens i realized that i would like my stuff to be a lot more organized.

Currently it is a lot of stuff shoved into the main method and i really need to clean it up! I'm going to create different modules that control the visual environment.

It's a good thing to finally empty the main method and to clean it up.

The most basic stuff now stand in the Game class that allows access to the global game timer, width and height of the current window, mouse position and so on.

Modules and/or Interfaces as they are called currently are more specific and actually load and manage data. A lot of stuff again one can't really see.


Just another random link for you about writing your own particle system: 4 - Particle Systems

Nice Flames - Scaled Sprites making up Strokes

Mmmhh this looks pretty interessting... It's a good, easy and nice idea.

Finally something i can work on without feeling bad stucking at my terrain.