Messages

1

General discussions / Re: SFML + Box2D

« on: April 06, 2013, 01:05:31 pm »

I'm with exploiter. I've built my own very basic physics for my games so far, but wouldn't consider tackling a physics-based or very physics heavy game that way. I'm decent (although not awsome) at maths but the tougher physics algorithms make my head hurt.

I want to try out Box2D myself at some point and create a little demo game.

If it's good enough for Angry Birds:
http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/28/creator-of-angry-birds-physics-engine-calls-out-rovio-for-not-giving-him-credit/

Can't ask for much more usability testing than via a game that's sold squillions of copies across the known universe.

2

General discussions / Re: Just wanted to say

« on: February 28, 2013, 10:07:16 pm »

I'll second that! :-)

3

General discussions / Time Management

« on: February 12, 2013, 09:35:02 am »

Posting on the Community Driven Development thread (http://en.sfml-dev.org/forums/index.php?topic=10589.new#new), made me think about how I do/will find time to work on game or community projects.

At the moment I spend most of my time in IT Contracts (development of database applications primarily) and my game and app development is a sideline. The IT Contracts enable me to take timeouts to finish projects (working full time).

Currently about 1/5 of my income is from sales of my products online.

When I am in a contract, I usually manage 4-5 hours a week on game/app projects. In the past I could manage 10-15 hours but that's not do-able these days, as I spend a lot of my spare time with our little boy (now 2). As a teenager I could probably spend 20-30 hours a week coding between school/college.

How do you guys manage to find the time to do any game development or community contributions?

4

General discussions / Re: More Community-driven Development

« on: February 12, 2013, 09:29:58 am »

The skeleton suggestion is a good one. Laurent can maintain architect status and other coders can be allocated to fill in the meat of the code (sticking with the skeleton metaphor). Before I read the post in full, my first thought was Laurent controlling interfaces.

Laurent has done a brilliant job with SFML but functionally SFML is being left behind by other libraries/tools like Mono Game, Unity and Monkey. I appreciate these have commercial licenses for mobile tech.

Microsoft's Direct-X only on Metro (Windows 8 touch) apps decision means Direct-X code will need to be integrated into SFML to support Windows 8 fully. This is almost a rewrite of SFML (interfaces aside).

I would like to contribute if/when something is set up. Need to find a way to manage my time... discussion of that topic is for another thread!

5

SFML projects / Re: GravNav - simple glitchy planet simulation prototype

« on: February 05, 2013, 09:27:27 am »

Right now it's pretty glitchy and when the player crashes into a planet it actually crashes the game right now. :3

Perhaps this could be a feature. :-)

Kinda like permadeath, particularly if you can manage to cause a kernel fault and blue screen Windows. (Joking!)

Lines for future position and a faded sprite trail might look nice.

6

SFML projects / Re: Exodus : SFML based windows Metroidvania game

« on: February 04, 2013, 05:50:19 pm »

Nice. Upvoted!

Puts me in mind of Shadow of the Beast, the classic Amiga game.

7

General / Re: Compatibility problems on different machines

« on: January 31, 2013, 03:09:25 pm »

Looks like it is using the hardware driver then. I wonder if it isn't using hardware acceleration for some reason.

I wouldn't expect the Intel driver to be as capable as the ATI one, on the face of it.

8

General / Re: Simple c++ Question...

« on: January 31, 2013, 12:05:30 pm »

It was just the purist in me coming out. Encapsulation and all that.

For really simple accessors I tend to bung them in the header file. That way they are typically inlined by the compiler. Moving them to the CPP file does cause a bit more compilation but doesn't break the subclasses.

If you're using .NET, you can declare properties and their member variables on the same line, which is nice. You get the benefit of a nice interface that you can change without separate functions. If you go down the separate function route later, the interface is not altered.

A couple of books I've found useful on OO are:

Refactoring (Fowler)
Applying UML and Patterns (Larman)   - a bit dry, but useful

Over the years I have read a whole bunch of books, best practice documents etc. I couldn't really say explicitly where I first read about encapsulation and separation of responsibility.

I'm certainly far from perfect. I have embarrassing (code) skeletons in my closet, like everyone else!
Just spreading the good word. :-)

Good OO practice is definitely more critical in team development or when developing libraries.

9

General / Re: Simple c++ Question...

« on: January 31, 2013, 10:21:36 am »

It doesn't make much sense to declare the base class member variables private and then try to access them through class functions. Just declare them as protected and you can access them directly within the derived class.

From an OO design perspective, this isn't a good idea. Ideally classes should not be able to access member variables of their parent, otherwise changes in logic in the base class will impact subclasses. For example, if you needed to create an object on first call or delegate responsibility to another class you would have to make the member variables private and use a function. The subclass code would then have to be changed also.

Ideally you should use protected functions if you want to expose data to a subclass.

There could be a slight performance penalty with this, if they are not inlined by the compiler.

10

General / Re: Compatibility problems on different machines

« on: January 31, 2013, 10:14:39 am »

That does sound like the machine is using the OpenGL software renderer.

You could try dumping out the OpenGL information to a text file to see which driver it's using.

These functions will retrieve the information:
(GL_RENDERER tells you whether it's the Microsoft renderer or a hardware driver)

glGetString(GL_VENDOR);

glGetString(GL_RENDERER);

glGetString(GL_VERSION);

glGetString(GL_EXTENSIONS)

Not sure if there's a way to do any of this in SFML. I'm using SFML to initialise the window/screen but use my own OpenGL code for rendering.

Hope this helps.

11

General / Re: Tearing issue probably not related to vsync

« on: January 28, 2013, 09:28:10 am »

If you set VSYNC off using SFML, is the tearing behaviour exactly the same? If so, that suggests that the driver is ignoring the VSYNC (ON).

My experience using OpenGL / SFML under Windows, is that driver support for VSYNC is patchy. My main development desktop allows it no problem but my laptop ignores the flag.

In the game options, I have implemented three choices: (VSYNC) ON, OFF, FORCE.
The first two use the OpenGL flag. The FORCE option utilises Direct-X to check for the VSYNC. This solves the problem on machines with idiotic video drivers.

My experience of Linux is minimal at the moment. I plan to port my game(s) to Linux in the near future. The hard bit for me will be figuring out the O/S itself and the development tool installation / use. I'm not sure if there's another way to handle VSYNC on Linux, perhaps via the operating system API?

12

SFML projects / Re: Tower Trouble

« on: January 10, 2013, 06:54:55 pm »

Makes sense if the enemies can't influence the map by destroying stuff.

13

General discussions / Re: How do you like to handle Multiplatform SFML projects?

« on: January 10, 2013, 09:36:16 am »

I'm in the process of setting up a new development environment for multi-platform development. Initially this will be Windows/Mac OSX. At some point I'll set up Linux (Ubuntu) on a VM and built on there as well.

I have opted for Mercurial rather than git. They are pretty similar conceptually, being distributed rather than centralised. Due to coming from a Microsoft development background, I have used SourceSafe in the past which is horrible and clunky. The bindings always seem to cause grief. Mercurial is much simpler in design, in that the change tracking repository just lives in a folder with the source. So far, I really like it.

I opted for Mercurial because the tools seem to be more complete under Windows. The git GUI tools seem to be in beta. A lot of people just use command line, therefore this isn't a problem. I spent a lot of time using command line tools in DOS/VAX/Unix environments in the past but these days I'm old and lazy and prefer whizzy tools. The graphical diff and history diagrams are nice in the Mercurial tools.

Discussion about source control tools seems to often ignite a debate of almost religious proportions... each to their own I say.

In order to have a central code repository and share media I bought a Synology NAS. This is also very useful for sharing documents, photos etc. and allows testing of PHP/mySQL applications offline. I blogged a bit about the Synology box:

http://suisoftgames.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/nas-box-setup.html
http://suisoftgames.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/synology-part-ii.html

My next job today is setting up the Mercurial tools on Mac OSX.

I'll be posting a blog about Mercurial at some point. I'll try to remember to bob it on here.

14

SFML projects / Re: Tower Trouble

« on: January 09, 2013, 12:06:33 pm »

It's quite surreal with the country music! (Like it).

Maybe the attackers could show how damaged they are, perhaps by showing damage on the sprites? When you have more varied gun turrets this would be useful to see how effective the weapons are on different kinds of attackers.

15

General / Re: I have problem with character

« on: December 31, 2012, 03:51:17 pm »

I think what Laurent is trying to say is:

"Post some code dude!"

As per posting guidelines, a minimal example is best.

I will be very impressed if the problem is on line 42... :-)