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General discussions / Insomniac Game Engine Developer Shares Some Thoughts On Engine Design

« on: October 15, 2014, 01:15:16 pm »

Thought it would be interesting to those who still haven't seen it. The video comes from the last CppCon and it's about Data Oriented Design. The speaker talks about what he thinks is wrong with the mainstream approach to programming - and especially in the case of C++, he discourages the use of templates, exceptions and STL altogether.

He's also against design patterns and the impression is that he's not too fond of the entire OOP too, as it focuses on writing the code which is based around idealized models of the world, as opposed to the actual, "real" data. Apparently, it is very important to have as little L1 and L2 cache misses as possible in triple-A game engines, and the mainstream approach to programming doesn't really care much about it.

http://youtu.be/rX0ItVEVjHc

2

General discussions / CLion - A new IDE from JetBrains

« on: September 08, 2014, 06:59:58 pm »

Although not necessarily related to SFML, it'll certainly be interesting to those developing in C++.

JetBrains (the company behind the famous ReSharper plugin for VS) released an early access preview of their brand new IDE for C/C++. It supports both GCC and Clang compilers and uses CMake for project files.

You can read more about it here and here. I literally just installed the IDE and it looks quite promising so far.

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General discussions / Visual Studio "14"

« on: June 06, 2014, 08:16:32 pm »

A couple of days ago Microsoft released a CTP of their new upcoming Visual Studio. It'll support a lot of C++ 14 features, such as generic lambda captures etc. A better overview can be found here. The IDE can be downloaded directly from Microsoft.

Has anyone tried it yet? In order to install the new Visual Studio, all the older versions must be uninstalled, so I haven't really had time to do that yet (or rather, didn't want to set up a virtual machine just for that). Apparently this is still an early build, as the final release is scheduled for 2015.

4

SFML projects / The 8-Bit Encounter - My Open-World 2D Game Demo

« on: April 14, 2014, 11:10:29 am »

Hello,

I’ve been recently working on a 2D game engine for Open-World adventure games. The core feature of the engine (and de facto its “selling point”) is the ability to program it with XML and Lua alone. The engine is still in its early Alpha version and there are yet a lot of things to be added (such as a proper interface, battle and inventory system, as well as trading).

That being said, I have decided to create a simple demo game in order to test the features that are already implemented. The game is called The 8-Bit Encounter and it presents a simple (and quite honestly, kind of lame) story set on a fictional island. The player’s objective is to move around the world, explore different locations and talk to NPCs while progressing through a simple quest. Note that the story itself is not of much relevance, as it was created purely as an excuse to test various features of the engine in the state it is right now.

I think sharing the game here could give me an opportunity to receive some broader feedback, while (hopefully) providing at least a couple of minutes of that nostalgic 2D RPG-like experience to those playing it. Therefore, if you find my project interesting enough to try it out, I’d appreciate some feedback on just about anything related to the technical aspects of the game (and thus the engine itself).

Thank you for your time and attention.


Alpha 0.3.1

(Changelog between 0.2 and 0.3.1)

• [FIXED] Collision detection wasn't sometimes accurate enough
• [FIXED] Velocity for diagonal movement was too fast
• [ADDED] Controller support
• [ADDED] Day and night cycle
• [ADDED] "Interriors" with specific lighting can now be defined in the map editor
• [ADDED] Cutscene mode for in-game scripted events (while in the mode, the dialogues can be skipped by pressing Enter)
• [ADDED] Music fading functionality
• [ADDED] In-game message boxes
• [ADDED] In-game dialog boxes
• [ADDED] Interactive menus
• [ADDED] Multi-line dialogues
• [ADDED] Splashscreen
• [ADDED] "Action Button"
• [ADDED] Various adjustments to the tech demo

► DOWNLOAD INSTALLER ◄

OR DOWNLOAD .ZIP (REQUIRES VC++ 2013 REDISTRIBUTABLES)

5

General / Visual Studio 2013 - Linking Problem

« on: December 19, 2013, 11:42:10 am »

Hello. I'm trying to build my project in Visual Studio 2013, however it throws linking errors, such as:

1>sfml-window-s.lib(WglContext.obj) : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol __imp__wglMakeCurrent@8
1>sfml-window-s.lib(WglContext.obj) : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol __imp__wglShareLists@8
1>sfml-window-s.lib(JoystickImpl.obj) : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol __imp__joyGetPosEx@8
1>sfml-window-s.lib(JoystickImpl.obj) : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol __imp__joyGetDevCapsW@12
1>sfml-system-s.lib(SleepImpl.obj) : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol __imp__timeGetDevCaps@8
1>sfml-system-s.lib(SleepImpl.obj) : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol __imp__timeBeginPeriod@4
1>sfml-system-s.lib(SleepImpl.obj) : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol __imp__timeEndPeriod@4

And there's more.

I'm trying to link against the static libraries I built myself from the source code from the GitHub repository. Here's a short list of steps I followed:

• Downloaded the source code from https://github.com/SFML/SFML/archive/master.zip
• Unzipped files and built solution with CMake with BUILD_SHARED_LIBS flag being unchecked.
• Compiled both the debug and release versions.

And in my project:

• Copied all header (include) files to an appropriate folder.
• Copied all .lib files to an appropriate folder.
• Set my project to look for headers and .lib files in the appropriate folders.
• Defined all .lib include inputs, as following: sfml-main.lib, sfml-system-s.lib, sfml-window-s.lib, sfml-graphics-s.lib, sfml-audio-s.lib, sfml-network-s.lib for the release version and debug equivalent files (with the -d postfix) for the debug version.
• Added SFML_STATIC flag to preprocessor settings.

Am I missing something? A very similar setup worked fine on Visual Studio 2012 (with everything compiled under VC++ 11). I have no idea why it doesn't work here, any advice would be highly appreciated.