I'm back

edited November 2014 in General discussions
Upgraded 2 computers from 32 bit linux to 64 bit. Reason being that I had gotten to the point I had to build everything because of no packages available. Problem now is my 3d game engine is running at half speed. Not good! But, I'm moving forward now on ORX for 2d game play and have high hopes for good results. I look forward to discussing progress with you folks. You're a great community!!

Comments

  • edited November 2014
    Welcome here again, coosadog! :)

    I'm glad you made that choice, and, let me write it one more time: do not hesitate to ask anything on the forum. There's nothing worse than feeling frustrated when being stuck, especially when sometimes all it takes is a simple advice from other users.

    Best of luck with your 3D engine optimization, I'm sure it'll be something trivial as I can't really think of any good reasons to lose half the performance when going from 32 bit to 64 bit.
  • edited November 2014
    No, me either. I'll get to it. I'm on this now for a bit. I created a development environment for orx and it's all working just fine. I can't tell you enough how impressed I am with this whole thing. It'd be cool with an IDE but not really necessary. I will certainly ask questions if I get stuck. It all looks so nice and easy so far. My first little project is going to be a little 2d football game.
  • edited November 2014
    There have been several IDE attempts in the past, but none were completed so far.
    However, as we speak, Knolan is working on one that looks rather promising. Maybe you can poke him directly if you want more info.

    2D football game as in US football or soccer? At least, the term brings back sweet memories of Sensible Soccer and Kick Off. :)
  • edited November 2014
    Ha! I played soccer way back in my college days, and I enjoyed it. I played baseball in High School and loved that too. I get bored watching either though, when not playing. I was talking about American football, which I never really played. I was a computer science major at Auburn University from 1968-1971, so am a fan of their football team. But, my idea is a strategy game. I don't know if we can do udp or tcp to allow 2 players to compete, I didn't look for that... If not, we can figure something out. I don't need an IDE. I like this stuff the way it is. I can always cobble together something to do what I need done, if need be. Thanks for the input! I love this communication. Please don't think of me as an old man, because I'm not. I've been very actively developing software for over 40 years. There's no telling how many millions of lines of code I've written, and I'm not done yet...
  • edited November 2014
    As far as in IDE goes, there are only 3 options that I'd consider, in this order: QT, GTK, wx-widgets. It'd have to be cross platform. QT now has 3d support too, so I'd lean toward that if it were me. Just my little bit of input on it.
  • edited November 2014
    Yep I am working on an ide right now (commit #118 just pushed). I am working hard to get the alpha version on december. I am not releasing the code / versions right now because it is very unstable and some features are not fully implemented yet (for instance, export scene always save the scene in a file name test.ini).

    I am using kivy for the UI interface. It uses python and my positive experience on python portability is probably the main reason for choosing it.

    If you want to have a taste, here is what it looked like on april (really old stuff, it has multiple selection and undo/redo right now, for instance):

    https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B0UdeUM9pB-nbW93cDVWYmtMeU0&authuser=0

    Here is a video of the collision edition (which right now would only be useful for top down games):

    https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B0UdeUM9pB-na0tadmlCOVpiX00&authuser=0

    There is still quite a long way to go, I need to finish the sprite loader (probably next week or so) and then the layers module to get it ready for an alpha.

    PS: If you want to create something with udp, take a look at enet, pretty good library.
  • edited November 2014
    That looks pretty nice. QT? Yes, I have enet library. I use it in my 3d game engine. So, I suppose I'll just include it in the mix then. Thanks so much for the response. Keep up the excellent work, I'll be looking for the latest version.
  • edited November 2014
    Sorry, no QT, I missed the Kivy part... Never heard of it but just looked at their web page. May study further. Interesting.
  • edited November 2014
    40 years of coding is roughly twice my experience and your input and advice will sure be welcome!

    Regarding the UI approach, there's a 4th solution which would be the one I'd take were I to work on orx full time one day: do it inside orx.
    I actually took a quick stab at a somewhat functional level editor called ScrollEd that came with a convenience wrapper called Scroll that I use for all my own projects. Scroll is simply a few C++ include files, nothing pre-compiled, and the editor is optional.

    What I enjoy the most with Scroll are shortcuts like easy C++-class-to-config-section binding and object-related events wrapped within virtual methods.

    I posted a quick "doc" on this forum about Scroll but my search-fu is failing me at the moment, sorry. Maybe someone else will have the link handy.

    Acksys also started a couple of tutorials on Scroll on the wiki:
    http://orx-project.org/wiki/en/orx/tutorials/community/acksys

    The code itself is in its own repository: https://bitbucket.org/orx/scroll

    More generally, there are also some good information on the orx-dev google group, mostly about new features that have been added recently and not yet documented on the wiki or enhancement proposals.
  • edited November 2014
    Ah yes, forgot to add: I'd probably use an ImGUI-oriented (as in Immediate GUI) approach for the UI-made-within-orx. Either from scratch or using Paniq's OUI/Blendish which are just two single header files. I love that KISS approach. ;)
  • edited November 2014
    Lastly (sorry for the spam), I'd probably take an approach similar to the one Eskil Steenberg took with his Verse tech.

    Here's some reasoning behind Seduce (the UI part of his tech): http://www.quelsolaar.com/technology/seduce.html

    And here's an old video showcasing some of the principle behind it:
  • edited November 2014
    I have to admit that I do regret not doing the entire thing using ORX itself. I think I would be miles behind the point I am today, but it have been the best decision in the long run.
    Right now the whole editor is sitting in about 5.4k lines of code (I am refactoring the resource module, which means some files are going to die soon and the count will drop), so it is a bit late for a restart.

    Also, looking at the video, I have achiev this sync feature by using a file based communiction in the editor, in a very experimental effects editor. So you would have an orx application running in a window and the editor in the other window and the changes were live. It is a little resource consumer, but it ran fine in the core2duo 8400 that I have in my work.

    I dream one day the editor may have live edit and debuging integration, but right now I think I should keep my feet in the ground and focus on releasing an useful tool for the community.
  • edited November 2014
    Well it looks to me that you're already one step toward the live editing part. The file communication part is using orx's resource watch feature or did I misunderstand?

    As for the debugging, we should be able to devise a way to do that if you want. Probably based on some remote procedure call, maybe based on commands? Commands can be executed from the console and timelines, it should be easy to execute them from a network connection. That could be a first step toward game introspection.
  • edited November 2014
    The file communiction is not part of my alpha release plan, just an idea I had to test if file communitation would work at the time. It was just an orx application that would watch a file's last change timestamp and reload it as needed.
    I could have used a socket based protocol, but it would be less portable, so I decided to try with files.

    As for the current state of the project, I am finishing the resources module, which is meant to let you open sprite files (i. e.: http://opengameart.org/sites/default/files/wateranimate2.png) and mark the parts you want to load in the editor (think of a much simpler version of the darkFunction editor). I finished the UI today, so it probably won't take long to get it done.
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