Absence

Starting today, I will be absent from any Oddrose-related tasks. I will return from my band-duties at the Emmaboda festival on sunday.

From what I've heard, Tobias will also dissappear this friday and he will also be back on sunday.

See you then.

A Treasure Hunt with Sound

Now I’m back from my holiday, and can start working on this project for real.

The most of the most important parts in the game has been started on already, 3D,2D, animation etc. but we still don’t have any audio prepared for the game, so that would be my task for a while ahead. The library I has thought to use is called OpenAL, a library that, if you believe the description on OpenAL’s homepage, seems really interesting and should be very useful.

"The library models a collection of audio sources moving in a 3D space that are heard by a single listener somewhere in that space. The basic OpenAL objects are a Listener, a Source, and a Buffer. There can be a large number of Buffers, which contain audio data. Each buffer can be attached to one or more Sources, which represent points in 3D space which are emitting audio. There is always one Listener object (per audio context), which represents the position where the sources are heard -- rendering is done from the perspective of the Listener."

To have OpenAL to work together with Ogre without any issues, thankfully the add-on OgreAL exists. Today I have spent a long time finding the correct header files that OgreAL required. These would seem to have disappeared without a trace, but after a visit among the header files in an old version of Ogre this mystery was solved. But, unfortunately, I haven’t been able to build it successfully yet, but I hope this won’t take to much time getting working. But now it’s time for a break and a good night’s sleep.

Goodnight!

Expo #1

Thought I'd post a concept sketch of one of the side-characters of the game. He is a fisherman that lives close to the main character's block.

Mum, I've got nothing to do

There is a certain way of noticing that more structure is needed in a larger project. That is when you start to wonder what you should be doing today. Since Tobias left for the woods, we haven't had a full-team meeting and thus we haven't been able to arrange the daily goals that are so important for productivity. Speeking for myself, the last days have past in slow-motion and I've been jumping from task to task. One of the functions that I'm working on is a class that handles tasks sent to the engine, by either the game itself or by the user. The tasks shall then be executed in a certain timeframe. The thing is that the free and open source TaskScheduler has just this ability. The problem is however, that TaskScheduler has given the project some unwanted bugs and to them I have yet not found a solution. Luckily, there is much work to be done even if you don't always know what to work on.

Yesterday, I instead started working on a collision handler that determines what happens upon the collision between two types of objects. For instance the character and triggers etc. Sadly, I have no new pictures to show but when the work with models picks up speed, you'll get more to rest your eyes on.

A new 2D GUI

Hi you guys!
During yesterday’s meeting me and Fredrik made some serious progress on the CEGUI-front. But as time went on our mind got more and more clouded with doubt on if this really was our thing? And this morning after finding a quote that was at least to say painfully striking we unanimously decided to widen our vision and maybe to remove CEGUI from our project. You can say that this quote sort of confirmed our doubts.


" It's not that we hate CEGUI (hate is such a strong word), it's just most of us have realized that there is much room for improvement in the area. I mean, come on, it's the year 2007 and all we have is Taharez-Look? "


As a complement to CEGUI we have found another open source GUI as Fredrik earlier mentioned. The name is not yet final but it’s called RBGui (www.rightbraingames.com/tech.php). And that is pretty much what I’ve been spending this day trying to fix (integrate with our Ogre-application). It was a lot trickier than I would have expected because RBGui have a lot of dependencies that had to be built from source. Mocha was one of them and had its own dependencies such as zLib. Another dependency of RBGui is an engine that handles the fonts, it’s called Free Type. I most likely will have an extremely interesting time ahead of me as I explore all of the possibilities with these new (to us) third party libraries. I shall return with a status report when I feel I’ve got something to present.

To make things more graphic I made an image that’s sort of showing a small hierarchic overview:

Screenshot

Hi there!
Just thought I'd post an early screen from the game engine:

I play around with the main character of the game.

Yesterday, it was time for another meeting, but sadly only two of us could be present. We went through some ideas concerning 2D and GUI, and came to the conclusion that there is some work to do. Today we heard about a new open source GUI (http://www.rightbraingames.com/tech.php). This will possibly (read probably) replace our current GUI, CEGUI

2D > 3D

Hey everyone!

Just like Fredrik said, I'm temproraily in charge of 2-dimensional functions in the game. The Graphics engine Ogre3D cannot render 2D grafics on it's own. So we are utilizing a third-party library called CEGUI (Crazy Eddie's Graphical User Interface). It's a C++ library that's integrated in Ogre3D so it's very user friendly. But CEGUI is not enough so I am currently using two other tools along with OGRE and CEGUI: SDL and Lua

SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) Is a free library with extended possibilities for 2D and Lua is a scripting language. The nice thing about Lua is that you can replace much of the programming with scripts which makes it possible to rebuild the program without compiling (saves a lot of time)

The first goal I want to reach when it comes to 2D functions is a Health-meter of some sort. We need to discuss this in detail at the next meeting

Over and out..

Serious Stuff

The last few days, me and Joakim have continued to program functions for the game and even further improved our knowledge of the tools and libraries we are using. Joakim has mainly worked with functions that consern the 2-dimensional content of the game, and I must say: it is going splendid. Myself, I have been working on what will become the thing that loads our scenes from a possible scene editor. Everything has gone greate and we now have the possibility to load worlds from xml-files. This week and some time forward, we miss our third happy programmer Tobias who is on vacation.

The nextcoming weeks will be spent building a strong framework to implement our game content into. The functions are still, however, on a very basic level and we try not to write any project specific code.

Board meeting

Today we held the first real meeting with the crew of the project. We went through some points that we had put down on paper, things touching the basic idea of the game and some of the functions we would like the game to have. The meeting went very well and we really covered some ground. In addition to that: we got to code a bit as well. At present, we have fully implemeted the physics engine and we can now load complete scenes in to the world.

After the meeting I made a short conept drawing of the main character: