Inspiration, Motivation, and Fools Gold
I am fairly fond of the title for this post as it does two things. It’s an open invitation to spam crawlers and this is the first blog post in some time with more than a code snippet or two.
In short, it has been almost a year since I’ve graduated Full Sail University and since then I have had a number of experiences that made me on numerous occasions question the validity of my life-choices. Read the rest of this entry »
Wordpress Pagination
Today while striving to wrap up Michael Kofman 2009 I found myself spending longer than I would have liked trying to get a “wordpress page” to loop through all of my blog posts with enabled pagination. The intention was to become familiar with the wordpress framework, install a few plugins and be on my marry way. Sadly things didn’t quite go so smoothly. So to make this a lot less painful for future readers here is a short list of steps and plug ins used as well as a final code snippet. After I’ll discuss some of the alternate methods I found, share my work cited and hopefully put some value into the community.
Read the rest of this entry »
Getting Started with wxWidgets
I wanted to explore what wxWidgets was all about after learning that tool programmers in the game industry commonly use it in their development environment. Getting started with wxWidgets on a windows platform is fairly straight forward.
Download the latest stable release http://www.wxwidgets.org/downloads/
Go ahead and grab wxMSW – installer for Windows. Make sure your visual studio is closed so that the environment variable gets set up correctly.
Next your going to need to compile the library. So go ahead and navigate to installDir\build\msw.
Open up wx.dsw and convert it to your native Visual Studio format. Close visual studio back down and open up each vcproj in the current directory through notepad or notepad++. Search and replace each of the following:
– RuntimeLibrary=”3″ with RuntimeLibrary=”1″
– RuntimeLibrary=”2″ with RuntimeLibrary=”0″
Once your done. Open up the solution again, and right click the solution in the solution explorer. Select Batch Build. Select only the release and debug for each project. Once complete your ready to create your first wxWidget application with the added work of including all the directories and .lib in your project settings.
Here are two good links to help you get through this:
http://wiki.wxwidgets.org/Compiling_WxWidgets_on_Windows
http://wiki.wxwidgets.org/MSVC_.NET_Setup_Guide#Project_Properties
If it doesn’t work out right, go ahead and triple check everything!
What I learned from all this was that while wxWidgets are great for multiplatform development they are probably not a solution for developing game GUIs. I’d love to hear what others think on this subject, meanwhile I’ll move on to setting up my own GUI framework after a few hours of sleep.
New Sandbox
During a casual conversation someone brings up the idea of writing their own game engine. This is usually met rather stern remarks about complexity, lines of code, and a unworthy endeavor. Well for the most part I would say that is a true statement, and let me just say that is not what I’m trying to do. Well I’m trying not to think about it that way. My goal over the course of this week is to assemble together several sub systems I’ve done before, and some that I haven’t into a comprehensive sandbox. Then split it into several plug and play DLLs that I can use in future projects.
What I have so far:
- Math Library
- Event Handler
- Win32 Framework
- Resource Manager
- DirectX Initialization and Callbacks
What I’m tackling this week:
- GUI Framework
- wxWidgets Integration
- Network Framework
- Console Debugger
My Full Sail Experience
What drove me to take the plunge?
After high school I was very frustrated by the core classes that defined the first two years of a regular University. I was becoming even more frustrated by the partying, and lack of vision most of my friends and peers were only concerned about. I don’t remember what conversation made me remember Full Sail but it was a school I had known about since middle school and I truly felt my passion was in game development. I decided that I want two things out of my career. First interesting and challenging work that would keep me ever interested. Second I wanted to work at a fun place that allowed for creativity. So long story made a little shorter, Full Sail University is one of two schools at the time that might hope to provide for the sort of education that really teaches you the internal workings of making a game. I took the plunge. I packed up everything I owned into my car at the time 1998 Nissan Maxima, and drove it from Philadelphia to Winter Park FL. Thankfully my apartment was ready; I choose to stay at Winter Park Pointe apartments because they were the closest and cheapest in the area. I also decided to not have a roommate after a few disappointing attempts. So for the next few months I slept on nothing but a mattress.
The first three months are crucial at Full Sail; they help separate those who can and cannot handle the program. Odd schedules that have classes end at 1am and start again at 9am the next day. It was interesting trying to adapt to it, and many of us became nocturnal. The next month the schedule changed again. Oh yes, a semester is only a month long and classes are 40 hours a week. The pacing was perfect for me and I really dug all the knowledge. I was excited to be there, and I was just amazed at the different types of people I was surrounded by and all of whom held a strong interest in video games. I bought a PS3, and started playing games a lot more than ever before in my life. At some point along the way I think I lost sight of my goal and what was at stake. After the first three months I felt like I had C++ down solid.
The rest of the year we spent learning MFC, Win32, C#, DirectX, and Design Patterns. Along the way we also had a few general education classes needed for accreditation, but they too were all geared towards Game Development. This included an English course that had us write a full game design document. Math in Linear Algebra, Calculus, and Physics all laid out the foundation for what was to come.
The first game making experience was defined by two classes; Software Game Development and Software Game Production. I feel like both experiences deserve a post mortem but the lessons learned cannot be learned from reading this.
After the half way point it felt like we did something really great. We made a game! A great one at that. I, Casey Flach, and Charlie Prouse put together a 3D top down shooter in a roughly five weeks. Who knew that making a game doesn’t take months but weeks? Well we were hungry for more knowledge and the next few months more than helped satisfy that appetite. We took classes in Artificial Intelligence, Networking, Machine Architecture, OpenGL, Optimization, and Engine Development.
And we finally made it … final project… to be continued….