Dev-Diaries @ JGF

General Discussions
#21

Plus you are making assumptions about the resolution the user is view the page at. Your site for instance is incredibly difficult for me (notice I’m saying me) to read because the frame at the top is sucking up a large amount of space.

I do this every day, it is my job to make complicated J2EE applications perform well under heavy loads. Haven’t had an issue yet.

EDIT: part of my job

EDIT2: Again, since you are the one who has to deal with maintaining the site it is obviously up to you. :slight_smile: Some food for thought:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9612.html

http://www.webstyleguide.com/page/frames.html

http://www.doghause.com/top15.html

of course you can probably find one hundred pages saying frames are great. :slight_smile:

#22

I’m absolutely fine with long pages. I really prefer em over those 20+ site articles.

However, frames are really annoying, because you end up with wasted space. In 800x600 it’s one third(!) wich is unusable for reading the articles. It’s full with that booring navbar you just don’t care about while reading.

Well, I helped myself with opening the links in a new tab (mouse3), but it was a forward-backward-forward (cha cha cha) experience :>

#23

Have you (gasp) gone back on-topic, and are referring to JGF? :slight_smile:

I’ve already shrunk Kev’s original down once, but I hadn’t seriously thought there were still people surfing at that res who played games :).

Personally, I use mozilla and just ctrl-click anything like articles so that everything opens in a new tab - scroll down the page, ctrl-click every article that looks interesting, then ctrl-tab to go from one article to the next. I guess my use of state-of-the-art (10 year old) browsing paradigms lulls me into thinking other people have a good browsing experience too, and I tend to forget the poor sad miserable people using that pile of horse manure called MSIE. (although, looking at stats of various website I have access to, the conversion from MSIE to mozilla in the past 12 months has been pretty phenomenal on win32)

#24

Ye… dunno. Wanted to bitch about that anyways and it looked like a good opportunity :slight_smile:

Oh and more back to the topic. Read the articles (apparently) and they are pretty interesting imo. I had also alot of “fun” with snap to grid. Almost went postal, but I remembered that my text routine resets everything at the end - doh :stuck_out_tongue:

On thing I don’t understand - why does the level editor of survivor uses floating point? That just doesn’t make any sense - especially if the coords are relative to their room. I just use 32bit ints and that’s really good enough (there is no way that I could ever build a level wich goes beyond those bounds [most likely I’ll die in about 40 years - so there just isn’t enough time to do that]).

For example the levelbounds in GTKRadiant (a q3 level editor) are 2^16 units in each direction. Doesn’t sound like much, but the levels can be really really huge and a single unit is somewhat like 1cm. So just think about the scale and build it accordingly. If the player is 32x32 units he would fit into a map with int bounds over 130 million times on one axis. Walking from one side to the other actually takes several days. No one would ever build something like that :slight_smile:

#25

Its probably because all positions in the data model are held in floating point to support the player moving smoothly around.

It could work the otherway I suppose, have the game engine run in a scale where 1 is a tiny amount so integers are high enough granularity. Or had a translation step between editor and game engine. But it does seem quite nice from a code point of view to simply use the same data model for both parts.

Kev

#26

Ah I see. Well, I have 3 data models. One wich is nice to edit, one wich is nice to render and one wich is nice to collide with :slight_smile:

Sounds silly, but I want it run smoothly (60+fps) even on really old hardware (300mhz + some kind of crap accelerator [banshee/v2/rage]). Why? Uhm… just… because! ;D

#27

Ah, but the single data model is nice to do all of these things again! ;D Or maybe I’ll just accept anything.

To be honest, I generally optimise for rendering, since thats normally pretty similar to what you want for collision. The editor code just has to cope. I fear having to update 3 places everytime I make change.

Kev

#28

Ye… well, it sounds scarier than it is. The editable model is spun around polys and the two others are regular grid sektor thingies with different grid sizes. Eg the rendering part uses a grid size wich requires a maximum of 4 sectors to draw and the collide part uses grid a grid size wich requires to check the line segments of a maximum of 4 sectors.

Pretty easy to do and even the worst case won’t take too long.

Well, to tell the truth… I’m only making such a big fuss out of that, because I want to use rather large parts of this project for another game (wich I have in mind for more than one year), too. It will need way more calculations (physics) therefore I try to get as much “air” as possible. It’s also quite nice to do it this way (spread the work across two projects), because both will take about an equal amount of time.

I’m actually quite surprised that I managed it to plan a bit ahead of time :slight_smile:

#29

Yet another direction for this thread :wink:

With regard to web page design and stuff, have you seen this:

http://www.csszengarden.com/

It’s a verys nice page to see what can be done with style sheets.

the rescource link onthat page is also pretty good a well (mezzo bule).

Dan.

#30

Onyx, see here:

http://www.java-gaming.org/cgi-bin/JGNetForums/YaBB.cgi?board=Announcements;action=display;num=1086379007;start=90#103

#31

Yet another direction for this thread :wink:

Ooops… my bad :stuck_out_tongue:

Ye… guess I went a bit offtopic… these days. Can’t even remember in wich forum/topic I’d wrote all that stuff (#1 offtopic indicator) :slight_smile:

So… uhm… hard thematic air break! ;D

ahem survey time.

#1 Has anyone else written a diary? If yes linky / if not why not?

#2 And are you going to write a diary for your current game? If yes I’m looking forward reading it / if not why not?

@1 Yes, kinda. But it was graphics only side (gfx forum), in german and it’s kinda incomplete. Well, it was more like a test and there isn’t much to see there (just me bitching around about minor pixel errors ::))

screenie

It was done in Java2D and the whole thing was <8kb (it’s just a brainless rendering core). Well, at least I learned alot (about rendering that is).

@2 Hmyea, but not really in “real time”. I’m taking notes and screenshots on my way… so well I guess it will be a diary in post mortem flavour.

#32

You could link back to the XAP and Alien Flux dev diaries hosted here on JGO for posterity. They’re kinda interesting if you’re into that sort of thing.

Cas :slight_smile:

#33

[quote]You could link back to the XAP and Alien Flux dev diaries hosted here on JGO for posterity. They’re kinda interesting if you’re into that sort of thing.

Cas :slight_smile:
[/quote]
Is there any chance you might write them up (summarised) into an article form? Many people find old forum threads daunting to read, especially long ones :slight_smile:

#34

Would you consider doing a translation to english, perhaps fleshing out some bits, and we could put it up on JGO?

Unlike articles, the dev diaries are just being posted “raw”, without editing etc (although I could find someone to spellcheck for you etc if you wanted…). IMO they are best just as an outpouring of whatever you were thinking at the time, without much thought or care for how much sense it makes :). That does best at giving readers an “inside view into the mind of a games developer” and seeing what it’s like to try writing these games.

#35

[quote]@2 Hmyea, but not really in “real time”. I’m taking notes and screenshots on my way… so well I guess it will be a diary in post mortem flavour.
[/quote]
So…why didn’t you ask us to put it up on JGF, hmm? :stuck_out_tongue:

Is it because you realised I would nag you every couple of weeks for the next installment ;D ?

If you just write them quickly, as a sort of “five minutes just writing whatever comes into my head” they are really easy and un-stressful. I think they even sometimes help you to keep your project in perspective, and to take a step back and see how far you’ve come (very handy when it all starts going horribly wrong, and you find yourself losing the will to go on…).

But they are definitely best written “in the heat of the moment” rather than in arrears (not that I’m a shining example: half of the survivor diary is being written in arrears)

#36

Blah - was actually going to summarize them in an article for Puppygames’ articles section but it’s up to Chaz to do the HTMLifying.

Cas :slight_smile:

#37

@1

Well, it’s like I said more about the graphics, but I could whip a short game related povray article together. That would make more sense, because everyone can see me here ranting around on a daily basis anyways (heh) and all these tiny details wich you need for rendering sprites/textures are literally cluttered around in povray’s huge manual.

@2

I’ll try it for some days, but I can’t promise anything :wink:

#38

[quote]@1

Well, it’s like I said more about the graphics, but I could whip a short game related povray article together.
[/quote]
A dev-diary doesn’t need to say anything about programming, necessarily - it just needs to be a window inside the pains and frustrations (and delights) of developing a game.

The way the XML is setup for JGF dev diaries, we can actually have different members of the same time each provide a different diary entry each week (or other timeframe) for the game, with each having a different perspective. No-one’s tried doing that yet, but…

#39

sounds to me like someone (not mentioning any names here) thinks that game development is 66% pain, 33% enjoyment!

The human race is a strange one isnt?? :stuck_out_tongue:

#40

It’s a hard life, sob, sob… players never realise how much blood, sweat, and tears go into our games - they just say horrid things like “it sucks” and then tell cruel jokes likening it to Daikatana. And even when they like it, they still say it sucks if it’s too hard for them.

Although, of course, I don’t actually write games professionally :).