Topics

1

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?

2

Graphics / Screen Resolution Change - White Textures

« on: September 20, 2012, 12:20:22 pm »

I'm improving my game engine at the moment and have implemented an option to change the screen resolution in-game. I had originally hoped it would run at desktop resolution on all reasonably modern machines but I am receiving complaints of bad performance from some players.

The code I am using is:


sf::VideoMode   newMode (width, height, 32U);
m_window->Create (newMode, m_title, sf::Style::Fullscreen);

glViewport(0, 0, m_window->GetWidth(), m_window->GetHeight());

CalculateGameViewWidth ();      // aspect has probably changed

glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION);
glLoadIdentity();
gluOrtho2D(0.0f, m_gameViewWidth, m_gameViewHeight, 0.0f);      // top and bottom flipped to reverse vertical axis to match game engine (0=top)

// Synchronise SFML view system (for font usage)
m_window->GetDefaultView().SetFromRect(sf::FloatRect(0.0f, 0.0f, m_gameViewWidth, m_gameViewHeight));

m_window->UseVerticalSync(true);
m_window->SetFramerateLimit(61); // Limit to 60 frames per second (slightly more to prevent occasional stuttering on Mac)


This works nicely on my development machine but when testing on Oracle Virtual Box (Windows XP) all of the text and fonts turn white after changing resolution. Note that I am still using SFML v1.6 and the sprite rendering is my own OpenGL code, rather than SFML's. I am using SFML Graphics for text rendering.

I know from reading some other threads on the forum (and from Googling) that context loss is an issue on some hardware and causes the white texture issue. I also know that SFML 2.0 solves this to a large extent but won't help with my own OpenGL code.

If someone can point me in the right direction, the questions I have, are:

Can I detect the state that causes the white boxes somehow?

How does SFML 2 detect the issue and reload the textures?

I have been searching around for a solution to this myself, including looking on the SFML forums but I can't find the answer. Most of the Google results seem to relate to Android. The official OpenGL documentation I've been reading suggests that hardware/drivers manage textures and you don't get the texture loss problems like Direct-X, but clearly there are exceptions.

Any help much appreciated.

Thanks.

3

SFML projects / Starfire - Ares Assault v1.01 Released

« on: July 05, 2012, 02:40:03 pm »

Hi All,

I have released a new version of the game.

Following feedback, the difficulty has been significantly toned down particularly on Easy / Space Slug modes.

The next release will aim to fix performance problems on machines with certain video cards, in particular those with limited memory.

You can download the latest version from here: (for PC and Mac)
http://www.suisoft.co.uk/starfire/index.htm

(please refresh your browser to ensure you see the v1.01 download links)

I have also posted a new YouTube video showing a playthrough on Hard difficulty:


Enjoy and please pass on.

If you have any comments or suggestions, please get in touch.
I have added a poll, if you don't mind rating the difficulty.

Thanks.

4

General / OSX APP file very large

« on: June 26, 2012, 05:23:36 pm »

I have built Windows and Mac versions of my SFML (1.6) based game. I have a lot of experience with PC development but I'm new to Macs.

The PC version is about 70 megabytes before compressing into a Setup EXE.
66 of this is game media (sounds, sprites etc).

The Mac version is 129 megabytes (APP file).
The Resources folder containing the game media is 69 megabytes.

I have traced the difference into the Frameworks folder, in particular the OpenGL.framework. One of the files in there (LibLLUMContainer.dylib) is 53 megs.

I also noticed that the frameworks folder contains header files.

Have I done something wrong in the XCode configuration?

Sorry if this has been covered elsewhere on the forum but I searched and couldn't spot anything. It's quite hard to know what to search for.

Thanks in advance.

5

SFML projects / Starfire - Ares Assault released.

« on: June 21, 2012, 05:15:07 pm »

I've posted this here and on the end of the Vertical Shooter thread, now that the name is finalised.


"Starfire - Ares Assault" is now released (and FREE)!

You can download it from here:
http://www.suisoft.co.uk/starfire/index.htm

The main games page is here:
http://www.suisoft.co.uk/games/index.htm

Don't forget to use the secondary weapon on the bosses. There are a couple of tips on the web page.

Enjoy and please pass on or follow me on Twitter / Facebook.

The website is pretty basic at the moment. It needs more work to add screenshots, videos, artwork etc.

6

SFML projects / Vertical Shooter

« on: May 02, 2012, 02:47:32 pm »

Still plugging away at my vertical shooter.

Latest screens and a video are here:
http://suisoftgames.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/asteroids-are-now-coded-up-for-quiet.html

I couldn't find my original Development thread, therefore I've posted a new one.

7

Audio / Scrambled OGG

« on: April 02, 2012, 12:28:35 pm »

The license for the music I have in my game requires that I distribute the music in a scrambled form (i.e. not in standard OGG format).

Currently, in development, I am streaming OGG files for the music.

I need to use a scrambled file format to provide basic protection for the copyright of the music.

I can scramble and unscramble data no problem, as I have done this on prior (non SFML) projects. My question is, can I use the streaming functionality to play a non-standard file format, for example by unscrambling the data on the fly via a custom stream?

Alternatively, I can unscramble the OGG data into memory and play it from there. This would prevent streaming from disk - I would have to leave the Virtual Memory Manager to retrieve the data from disk pre-emptively if swapping occurs (not sure how well this would work in practice).

Hope this makes sense...

Thanks in advance.

8

Audio / Sound Delay

« on: August 11, 2011, 12:30:10 pm »

I am working with SFML 1.6 under Visual Studio 2010 Pro (C++)
(I have Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit).

I have a very odd problem with sound playback, in that there is a noticable delay between pressing a fire button in the game and the sound beining played.

The buffer and sound objects are being initialised outside the loop, therefore it isn't loading the file that is causing the issue.

If I go into debug and step over the sound Play call the sound doesn't play. It only plays when I press Continue in the debugger.

Looking at another thread on the forum, I suspect this is a threading issue.

Anyone had any problems with Visual Studio 2010 builds?
I've Googled and looked through the project properties and can't spot any way to tweak default thread priorities.

I am compiling the same codebase on a Mac (XCode) and it works fine (no delay on sound playback).

Thanks.

9

Graphics / Bitmap Fonts

« on: July 17, 2011, 10:34:51 am »

Is it possible to create a font bitmap from a TTF (via Font::LoadFromFile), export the bitmap, modify it then recreate the font from the updated bitmap?

Ideally I would like to save off the bitmap then reload the font from the bitmap without the TTF being present. This would allow me to use fonts that are royalty free but can't be redistributed as a TTF.

I can see that there's an option to get the bitmap image from a font (via GetImage) but I can't see a way to load a font from bitmap data.

I appreciate this might not be possible, if the font metadata isn't included in the bitmap.

(Hope this makes sense!)

Thanks,
Gary