Messages

1

General discussions / Re: SFML Game Jam Submissions!

« on: August 05, 2013, 09:17:41 pm »

LandS

Fun thing and nice graphics! Plus nice music. It's rare to see a programmer that is also a talented artist. Not sure if it really makes enough use of the theme, seems like almost an afterthought. I feel this game would be very similar if you removed the lights & shadow.

TwoFace

I like how it looks. Except for the font. I just skipped the text... too unreadable. But you know that already. The controls feel kinda laggy, I barely made it to the second level. Could have something to do with playing it on a virtualbox, since the assembly wouldn't run with mono. Overall the duality idea is cool, and I think it has potential.

Lightspeed

I like this. With some adjustments (I'd make it faster!), this could be a truly addicting game, just like the similar 3d games. Needs audio (plus some punchy, trancey technotrack?). The space key doesn't seem to do anything.

Lumenumbra

Very nice! A bit short, of course, but the basics are there. So far, I feel this is the game that makes most use of the Lights & Shadows idea*. Like Lightspeed, I think this could benefit from some music to help inmersion. Gameplay wise, I could see this going two ways: puzzle or action. If the former, IMO, it needs more depth than just a labyrinth, if the latter, it needs to be faster.

Just my 2 ¢. Hope I don't offend anyone. All in all, nice collection of little games. I'll try the rest when I get a chance to boot Windows.

*and my own, but I might be biased there  One other thing those two games have in common, is we tried our hands at some sort of reconstruction of 3d from a 2d world, because it's easier to have shadows if you have volume. Fun stuff.

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General discussions / Re: SFML Game Jam Submissions!

« on: August 05, 2013, 10:37:41 am »

My humble submission:

DMZ

Because, somewhere, a better life awaits you.





I couldn't find out how to record the audio, though

Tools used

• SFML and its .Net port
• as3sfxr and Audacity for audio
• The GIMP for graphics
• Paint Cans Free font by graffitifonts. This font is not open-source. Used with permission.

Downloads

• Binaries, which should work on both Linux and Windows, but I have only tested the former (SFML.Net and Windows version of CSML included. Add your own SFML & Mono or .Net, 4.0 should do)
  
• Sources (ugly), zlib license

Please let me know if it runs on Windows (or not).

TODO
I have a few ideas to make everything a bit prettier (if that's the right word, considering the mood of the game), and add more audio layers for better immersion. The map generation is too random; you can get easy runs and impossible ones. Overall, gameplay needs a lot of adjustments to be fun. Online highscores was also an idea that crossed my mind, but the problem is protecting that against fake submissions (since it's open source, obscurity won't work). Not that anyone would care enough about this game to submit fake highscores, but, still.

Conclusion
This was a very fun experience. I was forced to actually design and produce a working game, and, honestly, it came out better than I expected. Usually, when coding, I tend to get caught up trying to make everything perfect, and end up adding layer upon layer of well thought-out abstractions, the implementation of which ends up taking too much time. This was different: since I had a hard deadline, I had to toss aside considerations of elegance and efficiency (e.g. no sophisticated resource managers, instead a  simple singleton class, shudders!), and just focus on having a working and hopefully fun end product.

EDIT. BTW, Jebbs, where is it ok to discuss the submissions? This thread (after the deadline) or somewhere else? I'd love to hear feedback on my game.

3

General discussions / Re: Android/iOS "Soon"

« on: August 05, 2013, 09:02:53 am »

All of the OpenGL code used needs to be done with OpenGL ES code.

Slightly offtopic, but that would open the door to an SFML port to the Web/EGL. Interesting...

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General / Re: How can I serialize my world/level data into and out of a file?

« on: August 05, 2013, 05:04:12 am »

I am not familiar with boost::serialize, but remember Textures reside in video memory, so you can't really serialize their contents. You would have to serialize the identifiers you use to load the textures (filenames or strings or whatever). I am sure boost allows you to define your own serialization routines for a class. Or probably easier: just use the string serialization that boost provides.

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DotNet / Re: How do I get text to look good? It's always blurry

« on: July 29, 2013, 11:56:30 am »

Tried all kinds of different fonts, font sizes, locations, and even versions up to 2.1... but font never looks good.

Is there something I'm missing?

It happened to me when I started using SFML: I tried using a [-1, 1] view, and loading e.g. 0.5 size fonts. Make sure to load large fonts (30 "pt" at least) and scale them down if necessary. That's because fonts are textures, not vector-based.

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General discussions / Re: SFML Game Jam

« on: July 22, 2013, 02:22:39 am »

I'd say technical aspects, besides the game needing to use SFML, shouldn't be that strongly rated. As such, it's ok with me if you wan't to code your game using a little (or a lot) of OpenGL. Typically, using OpenGL also takes longer to code than the SFML counterparts, so I don't really see an unfair advantage there, considering you still get the same 72 hours.

There are thousands of libraries out there, we can't go deciding on a case by case basis which ones are allowed.

Maybe having one arbitrary but simple rule would be good. Something like "You can't use windows other than the one(s) instantiated by SFML."

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General discussions / Re: SFML Game Jam

« on: July 20, 2013, 04:34:29 am »

I have posted a thread on gamedev. If you have accounts on other forums or communities, maybe do the same? That way, and with a bit of luck, we might get some "outsiders" to join in on the fun  and get to spread the gospel of SFML.

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General discussions / Re: SFML Game Jam

« on: July 18, 2013, 02:00:17 am »

A game jam would definitely be nice, but beware that the LD is soon, and I don't think too many of us would enjoy having two jams in a one week period. :p

LD is Aug. 23-26th

I suggest the week before that, Aug 16-18, one month from now, as tentative date. That way, it doubles as ludum dare warmup, for those that want to participate in that. It might be a bit too soon, but I think we should do one version of this before interest fades. The next jam can be planned better.

I think that a 72 hour jam would be nice, but you could host two, one of 72 hours and another that lasts a week, and do the first

IMHO, more than 2 or 3 days and it isn't really a jam anymore. Part of the fun resides in knowing that you won't be spending *that* much time, so you can implement crazy ideas. Also, it lowers the entry barrier. Many of us might not have a whole week to commit. YMMV.

So "huge list of suggestions" -> 'voting' -> "small list e.g. 5" -> 'random chosing' -> "final theme"

I can only say : +1 

Let's start throwing out some suggestions then:

• Classic games combined
• Non-traditional geometry
• Two rights (don't) make a wrong

I'll try to write up a draft for a set of rules today and think about a system for submission and  possible how/where we want to host everything.

I'd say, for a first edition of the jam, let's keep things simple, and use the Forum. On the decided date, Jebbs can create a thread announcing the final theme and any special constraint. People can then answer with their submissions.

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General discussions / Re: SFML Game Jam

« on: July 17, 2013, 11:39:13 am »

Definitely a theme, but we should figure out how to choose one. We could put a list of suggestions together and vote? It would be nice to have some kind of randomness of some kind when choosing a theme though.

I agree. In fact, participants shouldn't know the theme (or at least, the exact requirements) until the jam starts: part of the fun is designing the whole game in just a few hours or days. Easiest would be if someone who isn't participating was to chose the theme secretly, or at least announced extra constraints just before the jam.

EDIT: Or we just resort to randomness.

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General discussions / Re: SFML Game Jam

« on: July 17, 2013, 08:07:29 am »

That would be very cool, IMO. Some points that would need to be defined:

• Time window: 24, 48 hours?
• Any theme?
• Other constraints? Only SFML based games, I guess. Maybe a requirement to post the source, so that it doubles as SFML-teaching material?
• Prizes? 

11

General / Re: Writing Good Code

« on: July 17, 2013, 01:41:00 am »

Here's my code.

https://github.com/ChaoticCactus/SFMLProject

Overall, IMHO, it doesn't look too bad. Of course, it's also really simple. As the complexity of your code increases, you may want to encapsulate stuff: For instance, maybe put your player in 1 class. Then you'll probably discover that's not enough, and want to separate the visual aspects of that class from the logic and from the input, and put each of those in separate classes. And so forth...
I think it's ok to work iteratively and just do what works first, slowly abstracting stuff as you deem it necessary.

Here is an example of what not to do. Mind you, that (commercial) game still shipped.

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General / Re: Angle between two vectors

« on: July 17, 2013, 01:20:44 am »

Does anyone have a function that works to do this?

The Law of Cosines works. If it doesn't, you must be doing something wrong (or not be in Euclidian space, but you would have said if that was the case  ). Since you don't go into detail, here are some things to check:

• You are using the right vectors. If player position is P and mouse is M, the angle from P to M, taking the Y axis as reference is acos([0,1] dot (M - P))
• You are not mixing radians with degrees. Remember SFML uses the later, while most other libraries, including <math> use radians.
• Mouse position is in the same coordinate system as player. See MouseToCoord and similar functions in renderTarget

I know it's kinda obvious stuff, but since you don't supply code, I am not sure what else you could be doing wrong.

Edit: If you need to know the direction (which point is behind the other), remember to use acos2, or that atan2 function you mention.

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General discussions / Re: Ever wondered how many lines of code you have to write for a "succesful" game?

« on: July 16, 2013, 12:44:22 am »

I wonder what libraries do last 3 games use because they have more lines than doom does...

In the case of WorldForge, I think it's because it's a 15-year-old vaporware "game" that was rewritten numerous times and offers several clients (2D, 3D, this or that toolkit) for the same game. In the case of PlaneShift, I think it's because over half of the lines are XML. If you count only C++, the LoC count is closer to 500k.

Then there is Warzone 2100, originally a commercial game, with no less than 799,999 lines of code (was that on purpose?), not counting comments and blanks!

The most interesting cases for me are those of well-establlished, and enjoyable games like OpenTTD, Battle for Wesnoth, naev and Freeciv. Most of those seem to hover around a relatively sane 200 to 300K lines.

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General / Re: Linux , how to link static?

« on: July 15, 2013, 10:29:07 pm »

`gcc -static ...` tries to link everything statically... which is baaaad. So distros go out of their way to make it imposible.

If you want to link some stuff statically, you should just link their .o files, from the SFML compilation. Or, bettter, use libtool to make a libsfml-*-.la, which is actually just a description of what to link, and "link" that.

EDIT: Just to make this clear, it would be e.g.:
gcc -lstdc++ -o my-app my-app.cc smfl-source-dir/Display.o smfl-source-dir/Mouse.o...
If you add -lsfml-* in there it will still try to dynamically link, of course.

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SFML projects / Re: The best SFML games

« on: July 15, 2013, 11:52:49 am »

The games I developed myself are Airport (top view air traffic controller) [...]

I should give that one a try... I am sucker for BSD games, and atc (which I assume served as inspiration for this game) was one of my favorites. Probably second only to sail.

EDIT: It demands libglew1.5, and my distro only offers 1.7 or 1.8
EDIT2: Virtualbox saved the day. Fun little game! It's sometimes a bit hard to click on the planes, though.