Digital Dave

Gotcha.

So these two clever guys (you might know ‘em), Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, teamed up back in April for a new adventure.  They’ve got themselves a pretty clever idea to assist programmers out here, and the future programmers that come into the world, learn the different tools of our trade.

Even though I really enjoy going over to Borders to poke around at some books, there is no doubt that the programmer reliance on books has dwindled down to fairy dust.  I really just started programming in 2005, and even though I do collect a few books, I can’t remember a time that I actually found a solution to my problem in any of them.  Typically, I’ll jump into Google.  Or now that I actually have a developer ring, I will ask one of my buddies for their perception on the issue.

But you’ve got to admit that the sources for those answers are scattered all over the place.  Sure, Google might make you lucky, but realisticlly, it would be incredibly nice to have one user generated source for programmers.  Think, SearchForHelp->Digg(Wikipedia(ExpertsExchange)) returning a myrid of answers, but one that stands above them all with a bonafied user approval rating.  People come in to ask questions.  People who have been a reliable source to the website can provide their solution to their question.  And then other users can rate those answers, essentially moving them up the pedistal of uberness.

It actually sounds really nice and I am really hoping that this works out. It’s still under development, but I’ve been listening to their podcasts all day (Moving to #12 now, oomph!), while doing some reading on programming.  I highly recommend the podcasts.  They discuss some pretty interesting things revolving web technologies, careers, and programming.  They also answer questions at the end.  Plus, it’s just nice hearing programmers BS a bit.  I’m still in the academic world, so I don’t hear much of this unfortunately.

Check it all out at http://blog.stackoverflow.com

You might be happy to know that I am putting up an installer for Breakout Returns on the website.  I’ve been meaning to do this since, well, since I made it… But for some reason I just never got around to doing it.  Okay, I didn’t feel like fiddling with installers at the time.  The beast used to be around 23MB, but I spent the last hour knocking it down to 11.3MB.

It has been up on GameDev.NET and has had about 740 plays.

Download Breakout Returns

Well the ball has started rolling on this finance project.

I’m working with a finance professor here at Kansas State to do some research on momentum trading.  If you are not finance savvy, the method of trading resembles exactly what the word means.  It’s all about chasing returns.  This is probably one of the most confusing aspects of finance, believe it or not.   Does it really exist?  That’s the million dollar question.  Some of these research papers break out some long winded equations.  Others bring it down to more of an investor behavior.   And none of these papers are confident in their findings…

Anyway, that’s the boring stuff.

My role, beyond understanding the method of trading a little, is to write an application to help my professor study this stuff.  I still don’t have the exact details, but what I can say is that I get to deal with a massive amount of data.   We’re looking at daily, and monthly, data over the past 7 years to analyze.   Not, bad… Right?  Yeah, well, this is dealing with the over 4,000 companies.  So we’re looking at around 8,000,000 entries for the daily returns, and around 700,000 for the monthly returns.   Each of these entries will have around 5-10 things associated with them (stock price, ticker name,  daily return, volume traded, etc).

Obviously, the kudos points really come from developing a program to analyze this data fast and memory efficient.

I still haven’t decided on what language I’m going to write this in.  I need to find some comparisons on file reading, among other things, with java, c#, and C++.

I have a meeting with the professor next week so hopefully I’ll get to write some more detailed information.  Until then I’m writing a bunch of test/performance code to get an idea of what might work the best in terms of speed.

Having to reinstall/setup libraries all over again…

SDL…

OpenGL or DX…

Boost… <- Especially

Lua… <- Especially

…

They are one of those things that never install the same, twice.  At least, it feels that way. Argledargle!

I decided to start another Flash project before the summer kicked off, and before I started to work on my main summer project (to be determined, still).  Here are some early user interface shots that are subject to change, but to keep with the spirit of development progression, I thought I would share them.

This is definitely inspired by the Lemonade Tycoon games.  It was this, or a Harvest Moon inspired game! Mmm, Harvest Moon. Err, Pictures:

I made a couple changes to Reaching For Stars.

This concludes the 2 weeks that I intended on spending on this project, which ultimately ended up being about 5 nights of actual work. Overall, if you understand another programming language, coming to AS3 will not be any issue. Like they all say (books, friends, instructors), once you learn one language, learning another is a matter of syntax. Coming from C++ and Java, this wasn’t an issue for me. If you have a background in Java, coming to AS3 definitely won’t be an issue. The syntax is scary similar.

Play Final Version of Reaching For Stars

I’m not sure there is anything I can say about GTAIV that hasn’t been written, throughly, through several reviews, but this game is pretty slick. The storyline, especially, has incredible depth, which I’m having a blast with. Not to mention, all of the other side quests and things that you can do… I haven’t tried the multiplayer aspect of it, but I hear that’s another bag of treats. Overall, it’s an awesome game. No, this wasn’t a review… Consider it a reassurance of excellence. ;p

Well, the progress on Reaching For Stars has come along pretty smoothly. I can’t say that I’ve had any major hurdles other than the hi scoring system, which is taking longer then I anticipated. So, in light of that, I decided to show it off anyway. I’m not going to lie, I chuckled to myself a little bit after I looked at my prior release.

You should definitely have a bit more fun with this release. I know my girlfriend is enjoying it, even if she hasn’t had the pleasure of touching this particular release.

Feel free to share your experience. My last run through netted a 7000 point gain. Not too bad. Let me know if things seem strange, stupid, too hard, or not even fun at all and I should go back to playing World of Goo. *thumbs up*

And as always. The project is not complete. The last things I will be add to it is a high scoring system and a few more nasty treats. But this is essentially what the project will be.

Link to Reaching For Stars

I wanted to keep these tinkering events contained within the blog post, but I made the project 800×600 and it’s dinking everything up if I shrink it. Forgive me.

This is the product of yesterday and today. Just a simple ‘things drop’/catch them game, which sounded easy enough for a first project. I’ll be adding more levels to this, so you’ll get to see it develop into something fun to play. This first level is like any other level. To introduce you to the game, controls, and the idea.

Thanks, Dave, for mentioning that Flash book. I went ahead and ordered it, so I’ll be sure to get some good things out of that. I watched a few tutorials and his way of presenting material is great. For those that don’t know, this is in reference to: “ActionScript 3.0 Game Programming University ($31.99)” Link to Video Tutorials

Anyway, enjoy a tinker, will you?

Sounds like it could be a pretty bad ass cartoon…

So, I haven’t tickled with flash for a LONG time. I mean, long (*cries* my age!). I think the last time I remember messing with flash was when it was still a baby. After hearing the conversations at the GDC, a whole lot of people really liked flash for it’s ability to help developers prototype an idea. And, well, those guys at 2dboy really blew me away with their flash prototype. I have some ideas, and I really don’t want to spend a ton of time tearing my hair out while drinking a hundred or so cans of my favorite soft drink to get things to work right. So I decided to go down this route. A) I’ll learn something new (Actionscript 3, ftw… o_O (AS3 != (AS2 || AS1) by far) and B) It’ll be a lot easier. I hope.

But for now, this is my simple test I spun together in an hour for the sake of A) Can I do something? Anything? and B) Can I embed this thing into my site for those that enjoy tinkering?

I’d have to say, Yes, and Yes. Enjoy this quick beast.

I decided to make a texture class that will handle the creation and loading of resources. Right now, I call the texture class to create a background which is created using two display lists so that I can scroll the background. I also call the texture class to build the panel, and a misc object that I just wanted to test out. This is working well so far.  I can now move on to getting objects flying around the screen.

I’m thinking hard about building a level editor right off of the bat. Basically, I want to be able to “Create a new mission”, and within the mission, I want to edit “Level 1″ through “Level 10″. Each level will have it’s own set of creatures, and their corresponding path during the level. Each level will have a certain amount of ‘waves’ and I need to somehow have a data file that regulates the positions. I could do this several ways, but I’m thinking that being able to drop down to this level of customization would be great for me (speed of creation++), and could possibly lead way to user customized add ins. I want to be able to ‘draw’ the paths creatures will take, save it in an XML file, and then load that beast up during game play.

While the thought of building a really fun and interesting 3D game definitely crossed my mind, and even got me to the point of writing out a few pieces of documentation on it, I just couldn’t commit to it.   So, instead, I decided to drop back into 2D mode while setting the bar pretty high with things that I want to get out of this.  It’s definitely been a slow start due to flopping back and forth on a idea, but I’m moving now.

For this project I will be using C++, OpenGL, SDL, and Adobe Photoshop.   My goal on the art side is to actually find an artist that wants to work on a project for fun. I also have somebody that will be helping me create audio for it.  And I have somebody open to improve the design, if needed.  There’s networking in action for you.

So this is a vertical scrolling shooter game.  My inspiration for this project are recent titles released by Big Fish Games: Star Defender 4, Alien Stars, and others.  I played several games, wrote several ideas, and added bits and pieces to the design that I thought were missing.

My approach to game design is rather simple.  I have 4 principles that guide me through this process.  In fact, you may have seen my prior logo (Made a few years ago; used to be on my GD.NET journal):

Blue: Fun
Yellow: Rewarding
Teal: Immersion
Red: Challenge

Once I have solidified a genre, I start thinking about how this game is going to reward the player, while being above all else, fun.   I love rewards, and I see their effects every time I watch my girlfriend play a game, or my nephew.  Players want candy, and they are more than willing to accept it.   I don’t want subtle rewards, I want to see my rewards!  So right off of the bat, I will be introducing a Ranking system, similar to the Military’s ranking.  I’ve designed 10 different ranks that will take the player from the Enlisted side, and over to the Officer side.

What will being a higher rank achieve?  Better, unique, weapons.  A Captain will have special weapons that he/she starts the new mission with that a Private would not get.  These include “Helper” ships that will flank the player, and as you progress, they will become stronger.  This also leads to more advanced bombs (guided, and others) and shields.

The promotion system will be based off of several factors.  The players kill to death ratio, time in rank, bonuses, and special kills.

Special kills are also a new addition.  Consider this a bounty.  On your screen you will have an image of who you need to seek and destroy.  These are special creatures/ships and they will not go down easily.

I also plan to introduce quests to the game that will trigger between missions.  These will involve capturing, instead of killing, specific creatures/ships…  Destroying specific landmarks…  Among other things. They won’t be hard, just something to add to the game that will give the player another option and a way to tie the player into the story.

And I have more that I will wait to share until I start making headway into this.

So, the programming started a few days ago.  I haven’t devoted a lot of time to it, but that will begin to change.  I had to spend some time re-developing how I do things since I’ll be using OpenGL for my graphics, and I’m still trying to piece that together.

I have a scrolling background and the game windows main panel.  This is programmer art at its best.

I am running into some issues, already.  The scrolling background scrolls without the panel, but with it, it doesn’t.  The reason is because I am using display lists for the background, and simply drawing the panel.  Well, to get the display list to scroll, I translate it’s position each tick.   Well, when you translate, you’re translating the entire screen… I don’t want to do that… I also don’t want to burden the game by redrawing the polys each cycle.  I seen on NeonHelium something regarding creating different ‘viewports.’  I’m sure this could be one way to fix this, but I really don’t want to go that way, yet.  I’ll tinker with it some more.

Here is the first screen shot.

Game Window : Right Click, View Image for a Larger Size