#order nexus

[ordernexusdev]

faildozer said: Are you doing this map editor as just a learning experiment? If not, you could probably save yourself a lot of time and just use Tiled Map Editor

Yes, one of the many reasons I'm building it all from the ground up is to learn and practice. I'm aware that everything I've made so far already exists in some more advanced and more pristine form, but this is much more rewarding to me. Learning and feeling good about myself aside, I just like having complete control over what I'm working on, and I will share what I've learned here, so it still seems like the best choice for me.

With all of that said, tiled is a really good editor that I draw inspiration from on a regular basis. If anyone else wants to check it out, here's the link: http://www.mapeditor.org/

[ordernexusdev]

Working out stupid bugs.

With the right motivation, I've finally managed to dig deep and fix a bug that my spaghetti code has produced in the past. I won't go into too much detail, but it does include doubling of components in a horrendous way.

With that, proper disposal, de-spawning and cleanup of entities is complete, and I can move on to fixing design flaws instead of bugs, one of which is keeping the logic of components inside the component classes. Me being a complete newbie when it comes to Entity component systems is the reason why it's designed like that in the first place, but it's time to rectify that and switch to actual systems of individual components.

All of that aside, it's always nice to do something that's readily visually apparent, so a proper implementation of attributes was born to hold things like health bars (in a correct place this time, no more foot bar):

I'm still keeping myself from posting any code, since the actual implementation of most of these features will change a bit with the jump to legitimate component systems. This shouldn't take too long, since I've done a nauseating amount of reading on the subject and have a pretty decent idea about the implementation. That being said, it's time to get back to work!

[ordernexusdev]

Back to work!

Why hello there, Tumblr! I haven't seen you in a long time. I like this new thing you're doing with your hair.

It's quite apparent that I haven't been posting in a while. Everyone has their reasons for inactivity, and I've seen this happen with many other blogs on here, but it seems that the common theme amongst the fellow gamedevs is forgetting what's important to them, and I don't mean blogging. It seems that due to personal drama, work load, school, procrastination, insecurities, uncertainties and/or nuclear weapon espionage, we tend to distance ourselves away from doing what makes us happy and start giving up on things. Perhaps I fall into that category as well, if you throw in being burned-out for a while, but I have managed to re-capture my motivation once more. How, you ask? Start small, and just do things. Open your IDE and type out a few lines of code. Don't over think the process.

So, for my "few" lines of code today, I've decided to add the long-awaited depth perception to the game and sort the draw order:

It's a relatively small feature, but it adds enough flavor and makes the product look much better. No more paper cutouts!

Some other work I've done behind the scenes has to do with future posts and is mostly related to abstracting away the graphics device, switching to component systems, refactoring my spaghetti code etc. I will not clutter this post with any of those details right now, but it might be helpful if I get some feedback about showing the code for the implementation details for those things. It may just be me, but I've noticed I got less notes on posts that are really long and have code snippets in them.

I'll keep my first post after a long time short and sweet. I'd like to thank all 38 followers of my blog (and the 2 that are actually reading) for sticking around! I'll do my best to keep this updated at least weekly. Now, get back to work!

[ordernexusdev]

Ongoing studies and improvements.

Before I post any additional articles related to development, I figured I'd share some of the books/articles that are definitely worth a read:

C++ Gotchas is a great book. I still make a lot of dumb mistakes, which, as this book states, aren't uncommon amongst the ranks of long time C++ users as well. It goes over plenty of common mistakes and misconceptions, gives plenty of good pointers on how to improve code readability, efficiency and decrease the possibility of digging yourself into a hole.

Game programming gems is a great series of books as well. It contains virtually all subjects that I've ever been curious about when it comes to game development plus more. Some of the earlier additions might feel a little outdated, but it's still worth reading them just to get the gears spinning in the right direction.

Game programming patterns is a great online book by Bob Nystrom that's currently still under the process of being written. It lists programming patterns used in game development with long articles about them, very good examples and sufficient code snippets. Definitely worth taking a look at: http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/index.html

I've been meaning to re-design the whole "component based entity system" I have so far. Lots of articles on this stackoverflow page have proven to be more than helpful:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1901251/component-based-game-engine-design

OpenGL 3.0 and up is also quite a learning curve. Jamie King's youtube channel offers great tutorials for the newest versions of OpenGL, as well as assembly programming. Definitely worth to check it out:

https://www.youtube.com/user/1kingja/videos

I will list other resources related to topics such as collision resolution as I'm writing up the articles later. For now, get the fuck back to work!

Also, a better version of Game of Life, using SFML and custom rules to generate a maze, just because:

[ordernexusdev]

Making progress with items. The most important parts of the World Inventory Control System are done. Next is the Character ICS followed by a full post on how it works, including code.

[ordernexusdev]

^^^^ Click to view an animated GIF.

Since my brain refuses to work as I want it to today, I've decided to muck around with some basic GUI elements for the beginnings of an inventory system. There will be more on that later, once it's more developed. Also, the new map format now allows entries for NPC spawning now. Again, more on that another day.