Archive of March 2010
7DRL3 - Wrapping it up
Well, I've almost recovered from 7DRL madness. It was interesting having much more time to throw around... we easily spent 10+ hours each day on the project. The week of intense development will hopefully rub off on my coding habits for the next few months :P I posted a postmortem for the project here.
7DRL3 - Day 2 and 3
Day 2 was pretty uneventful. More thinking and planning than actual coding. In fact, I felt pretty bad about lack of progress after day 2. Interestingly enough, we didn't really get to coding until after some beer. I think maybe being too wired (coffee) can have a negative impact on productivity if you're still in the decision making phase. For example, I spent probably 4 hours reading, reading, and reading about different ways to do what we're doing, and what is more "standard". Wondering if we should use std::string instead of char[]. Exploring every alternative for the message system. Whether C++0x would make anything we're doing easier. Good reading, but time that could have been spent actually TRYING some of these methods. There is merit to careful planning, but at some point you get diminishing returns and you need to just jump in. Apparently beer does the trick ;)
I'm sorta bummed about our message system that different parts of the engine use to communicate. I hoped to minimize the amount of memory allocating/deallocating/copying we have to do manually, but the idea fell short and we're back to the same old memcpy fun. If I have time (haha) I'll revisit the message system and attempt to make it less hideous.
Day 3 was a lot better. We have most of the 'major' decisions made and a good framework to deal with. We ALMOST have a basic battle up. Hopefully tomorrow we get a battle going and can have some screenshots to post :)
7DRL3 - Day 1
It's that time of the year again! The 7DRL has begun. buub0nik and I are attempting to make a steampunk multiplayer tactics RPG called "Vapourtek Theatre". Gameplay will be similar to Final Fantasy Tactics. We have been planning for a few weeks and have some fun ideas for units and abilities. The idea is a little ambitious but we're both currently unemployed so hopefully we'll have plenty of time to pull it off :P
Not too much to show for day one. Lots of structuring and putting to code some of the ideas we had for how messages are handled. For example, the client behaves exactly the same playing a game locally and over the net. This is due to a 'translator' module that handles all the message passing, and decides whether to deliver them to a local data structure or a socket. Hopefully this will allow easier testing without always requiring a connection to the server.
buub0nik worked on GUI classes such as message box, list, etc. Look for his post if you want some eye candy :)
Also, never underestimate the time-wasting potential of external libraries. I thought I was being a good code monkey by compiling the libs I planned to use beforehand. Turns out that one (mysql++) compiled cleanly but simply wouldn't run. The program wouldn't even start when I used a function from mysql++ :/ Three hours later, I find out it's because part of the compile process ran against a 64-bit lib and well.. that didn't go over so well. So, compile AND test your libs before using them :P