Digital Dave

I sigh for not only myself losing power early before sunrise, but also for the roughly 1 million others, too. It’s dark, cold, wet, and boring. Mmmm, more reasons to move out of this place! Atleast I have a few nice investments for this type of weather. A) a fully charged DS for night time boredom, and B) an iPhone w/ unlimited data so I can vent on blog, and read up on some industry news.One thing has gone right today: my Dr. Pepper has remained consistently cold! :p

People ask me quite often why I want to move to California. The first thing that they normally spit at me is in regard to the cost of living, as if that is something to be feared. Apparently, the millions that live in California, failed to get that Memo. Even though I lived there under the Military, I experienced enough of the state to know that I wanted to live and grow there. Not only that, but it is one of the beacons for game development careers. With my dedication, motivation and passion, I’m confident that I will fit in well. But, one thing steps out in my mind for wanting to move there…

I love rain storms… But I will not miss the snow and ice. At least when you are in California, the snow doesn’t typically come to you, you go to it (big bear). But, yeah, I hate it, and pray to god this incoming storm doesn’t decide to kill my power, and/or my short Christmas break. Doesn’t look pretty, that is for sure. Est: .5 to 1″ ice + few inches of snow; 6PM tonight to 6PM tomorrow.

Anyway, off to code, while I have power. ;

After doing some optimization on my packets that I send to the client, I decided it was time to put in some more functionality into the game.   I still have further optimization that I can do on those packets, but I figured I’d move on so I could get something else finished before the due date.  I did end up testing it on two different machines, and it ran pretty well.

So, when I developed my Breakout Clone, I wasn’t really concerned with anything but firing up, and if it hit something, bounce off into a direction that seemed logical.  I knew that wouldn’t cut it in this game.  I couldn’t restrict somebody from throwing something left, right, up, or down.  So, after refreshing myself on some trig, I got it to the point where the snowball will be thrown based off of the angle where the user clicked.   It was a lot easier than I was making it out to be, but half the battle is understanding what in the heck you’re doing.

Anyway, I have some pictures.  Of course, I plan on restricting this so one player can’t claim complete and utter domination over another, but I do plan on having it be a bit on the chaotic side. >;o)

And My Favorite…

I also changed the cursor. The prior cursor just wasn’t going to cut it.

Well, I’ve completed my initial ‘base’ task for my networking project. The big concern for the project was to at least have it to where I could have two players running around simultaneously. This, alone, should easily net me an A on the project. There are still people who have yet to start on a final project. Call me an over-achiever, but I enjoy myself some game dev time. >;)

I’ll need to do some testing with somebody to make sure that what I’ve got works well from two different locations. Running it on my poor laptop isn’t netting me the results that I need, and that’s probably because when I fire up the server, I have 2 threads running. Firing up a client, nets 1 thread. Add that with two games, utilizing SDL, and you’ve got yourself a ‘lag fest’ consuming tons of system resources, even over the local host. I’m pretty confident that the code is well enough to maintain a constant stream of data back and forth, without all of this other processes going on, but we’ll see.

Essentially, my logic goes something like this.

I have a ‘PlayerPosPacket’ structure that consists of the x, y, avatarNumber, playerNumber, and the totalPlayers (maintained by the server packet) for each player connected.

With that in hand, I can easily pack up the players data points from the current player objects, send it on to the server, the server can unpack it, re-assign the new values to the objects, repack the new values (catching any updated movements), and send it back to the client with the updated structure. And the process revolves just like that.

I would post code, but the project hasn’t been turned in yet and I don’t want to violate any school rules in the rare case somebody finds this blog. I’ll save ‘code-and-show’ until the end of next week.

After I do some testing, I’ll be sitting down to write down the tasks that I want to complete by Christmas Eve, doing some housekeeping on the code base, and moving on to throwing objects.

Well, today it snowed pretty heavily for a few hours.  It ended up blanketing the ground, and giving Calix (my Siberian Husky) quite a treat to feast his eyes on. Enjoy some pictures, will you? I love taking them, although he doesn’t cooperate as well as my girlfriends Chihuahua, so I have to come up with unique ways to trick him into posing.

First Snow

I’m making some great headway on the snowball fight. I should have an update soon, relatively speaking. I have a COBOL project due tomorrow, so I need to finish that first.

Not because I have to, but because I wasn’t feeling tired, so I thought I would spend the night working on my Snowball fight game.  So I picked up some new tracks from iTunes, and went to town.   I want to get this thing working really well for my networking class.  I still have 10 days to finish it, for that deadline.  So, we’ll see how far I get, but there are a few things that I will not even be worrying about until after the deadline.  Modes (yep, modes!), menu screen, user interface, and …. AUDIO… Come one, don’t you want to ping your buddy over the head to the tune of a remixed Jingle Bells?  I think (or hope) I can mix something good together.

I have 2 1/2 weeks until my next semester class begins (Jan 2nd).  So, by Christmas Eve, I hope to have this thing fully decked out for distribution.

I figured I would update the blog with my progress this evening.

Well, my systems were not designed exactly right, particularly how I was dealing with players being introduced to the server and client.  Luckily, it wasn’t bad at all to fix.  I was also having some fun trying to get the client and server to work from the same application, but I eventually got them working.  That was mainly due to downloading boost and needing to get a little familiar with it.  I particular wanted it to use it for Threading.   Right now, I just bump a thread to handle the code that will accept a new connection.

For testing purposes, the server can drop in players, up to 6 (or however many is defined), onto the game map.  Collision detection works fine, the players move around just fine (one at a time), and things look like they’ll work well from a data transmission point of view.

This might look familiar to you, from a few entries ago. But, now we’ve got some multi-colored jackets.

Which makes me wonder if you’re thinking, “Multi-colored jackets? How do we…”

Free for All.

Manipulating the map is simple. I have plans to drop in my Calix Map Editor with the download so the server master can create a custom map, and transmit that new map to the connecting players. So, the mode of gameplay will be: Teams, and Free for All.

But, before all that, I’m going to get back to the code. Next up is to finalize the code for communication between the server and client(s).

Well, first… Activision Blizzard? I can’t say that the name has a nice ring to it, and I’m pretty confident in saying that this merger surprised everybody. I hold no regression on mergers like this, due to the fact that I don’t like to jump to conclusions. I hope for the best for the merger, and with that, there is a Goliath that will be up right next to Electronic Arts now.

But, really… Activision Blizzard? I completely understand name branding, but… Oh, well. Let’s see what games come out of this.

I saw Stephen King’s The Mist this weekend. Somebody really needs to make a game with all of the crazy ass creatures that Mr. King has thought up… That would be one horrifying game… Oh, and the movie? I’d at least recommend watching it once. It’s not your typical movie with your typical ending, which is good.

So, in my continuing effort to become a game developer (programmer, designer, cola boy) some day, I thought I should start experiencing an area of gaming that I have really lacked playing. Board Games. Brenda inspired me the other day when she compiled a list of favorite board games that her users recommended in a prior post (before I found her blog). I saw that list, and was dumbfounded. There were a LOT of games that I never touched.

It’s never to late to do anything in life. I picked up Carcassonne, and the girlfriend and I are having a blast with it.

I’m making slow progress on the Networking game. I’ve put in the ability to start a server, connect to a server, send data, receive data. I just need to get them all to work together now, nicely. More on this soon.