Google Wave

Got the invitation for Google Wave, accepted it so I am on Google Wave as simplegoogly@googlewave.com, still some tweaking is left, I can't find a workable extension to post to blogger, if anyone knows how please share.

Flash Back : Making of TankX

TankX was my first game, made in C++ 3.0. I could only use the graphic library that came with this version and sixteen colors was my limit. TankX had 936 lines of code and five header files. I made specific header files for player tank, enemy tank, power-ups, score, enemy movement. The main file had stuff to make all these things get together and make a game. There was some really heavy programming included for the collision detection and enemy movement. At first the game was really slow and jittery, because of the afore said heavy functions. I made some nice improvement and really got a performance boost in the gameplay. The limitation with C++ 3.0 was that there was no thread system, everything went in procedural kind of way. So I had to check and maintain the code in a single loop which was to end whenever the player hit something.

At first my collision detection involved checking for the co-ordinates of all the enemy tanks and matching them with the player tank, this was really crappy and took a lot of processor power to run, after that I came up with a solution to this one, instead of checking for collision detection every loop, I just checked the vertical position of enemy and matched it with player's (plus minus the radii of both of them added), if this is true then it means that the enemy is in the same vertical position and then I checked the horizontal value of both and if they match we had a collision.

The other header files were really easy and score.h had a system so as to encrypt the data so that possibly someone will have a hard time changing it manually, this thing was stored in a file and if viewed would show crap values and characters, it was only meant to be read in-game.

Another problem that I faced was limited use of Arrow keys on the keyboard, so I had to make do with WASD for the player movement and k,l to speed up or lower the speed of the tank, this feature I never saw before, all these vertical scrolling games have the level and power-up increase the speed of the player with no option to decrease it.

After all this, I had planned to add more power-up and stuff but I never really got to make it as is with all the indie game developers, we get all other exciting ideas and the old one is scraped. The world of Flash opened up many possibilities for me, and I do plan to make a better version of TankX in Flash. Hope those who play the game like it, it can be downloaded from my games site http://simplegoogly-games.blogspot.com/

Unity3D vs. Torque

I hope you all know that these two are big time Game Engines. Here is something that is either different or same in both.

Both of them have different pros and cons. Unity3D can be used to make browser based games. Torque is more detailed like having shadow depth and volume, whereas Unity3D has only projected shadows. And shaders, physics, meshes, networking systems are almost same in both. Though torque has an in-built editor for GUI and texture, unity employs the use of 3rd party but good editors (like Maya, 3ds Max, etc) it has a feature which enables Unity3D to import and export data from all these editors seamlessly. There is also the difference in how they animate, Unity uses keyframes though Torque employs inverse kinematics. Torque only support C/C++ but Unity3D supports C#, JavaScript etc. Both of them can make games for Windows, Linux, Mac, Wii, iPhone etc (but notably only Unity3D supports browser based games) some of the earlier version of torque couldn't but now they do and even Torque X has to make do with XNA still it is under construction.Unity3D en-powers the game with good music and video playing capabilities, whereas there have been many objections on the sound quality of Torque Game Engine. Unity3D is more efficient for rapid game development. 

Tutorials

I have been checking out the ways and tricks of games. Especially physics and maths part. For the top-down shooter I have been using a lot of mathematical formulas to get the correct and enhanced game-play. Mostly wikipedia lists all the kinds of projection and vector maths formula and they have been real helpful.

Downloaded the 'N' physics tutorial which tells about collision detection in detail. Learnt some new techniques from it. :)

Ideation and Prototyping

The three ideas of mine which were accepted to be interesting have gone a step further, the prototype is ready for two of them and one of them has a playable demo too. But it is still a long way to go before the final game will come out. The demo that I made has all the fundamental working of elements of the game, the AI hasn't been done yet. All in all, the others had some confusion regarding the game so had to make this demo to make them visualize what the game will involve. And after that I have started working on a new top-down shooter.

Multiplayer and Trainings

So, these days I am all into having training sessions and playing multi-player games like AOE 2, Quake 3 Arena, Counter Strike, etc. Been busy with all these.

Over the weekend

So, over the weekend I played on PS3, which has been bought by my co-workers. And on the second day itself we got into a problem with the wireless controller. Have to get it changed. The new firmware upgrade recognizes it as a fake controller.

So I am now onto a TPS (third person shooter) demo. Lets see till when I can finish it.

Ideation Recall

So 3 of my ideas have kinda been taken as good and I have already developed the demo for one of them. Looking forward to making another demo and last one will be created by the team.

Play head

So today we played AOE 2 in office and it was quiet a fun.

Especially since I have challenged a person at office on a game of AOE 2. Won One, lost one with team.