What are you doing in game development today?

[Dracos]

Are you doing something like:

Draw black over x,y coordinates?

Or something like:
Take image (that is all black) and blit to screen?

The first would be significantly faster in software.  The second in hardware.

That could be it, just thinkin' on it.

Anyhow, Capstone advisor requested an interim presentation in front of one of the local game development company CEOs.

This, naturallly, causes me to panic.  Especially as my BCRANs are next week.

I suspect a fun weekend of content development and tuning is in my future.

Dracos

[twentytwo]

Are you doing something like:

Draw black over x,y coordinates?

Or something like:
Take image (that is all black) and blit to screen?

The first would be significantly faster in software. The second in hardware.

That could be it, just thinkin' on it.

In Managed DirectX, you use a simple call to the function:
 backbuffer.ColorFill(Color.Black)
Which, under the hood, is more likely the prior than the latter...
In which case, yes, you would be right on that.

I'll try the other with Hardware settings and see how it works out...
-22

[Dracos]

A color fill?  Yeah, that's precisely that.

Take an actual image of black, try blitting it, and then try setting it to hardware, it should be significantly faster, if less flexible.  I suspect the idea set for emulated surfaces is to be able to quickly create odd ones and then blit them into a mostly hardware system.

Dracos

[Dracos]

Things to watch out for:

Forking extra servers.  Smashed an odd bug this weekend where rendering would just go insane, alongside other silly glitches.  The problem?  I was forking a new server each mission to handle the mission rather than handing a new mission to the existing server.  The engine just couldn't take more than two things writing to the same rendering window at once.

Dracos

[Dracos]

Working on documentation.  Almost finished with the massive tech doc for pirates. @_@

Dracos

[twentytwo]

Well, I finally managed to get Managed Direct3D to work. Not bad. It ought to be fun to work with for a while...

As for that ColorFill, I tried out the Hardware settings with a bitmap blit and that DID work faster (not too surprised). For simplicity, I used a small color bitmap then performed a StretchBlt, which isn't as fast but allows for me to switch between different screen modes easier...

As for my Game Programming class, I completed my Cat Mouse project, though the results aren't in as to how "smart" mine are. I have my fingers crossed...

But then again, doesn't mean I'm lying...?
-22

[Dracos]

Neat to hear.  Hope you did well there, twentytwo.

Was supposed to launch off a test version of pirates this weekend.  It did not happen.  -_-

Interface is more clean though and I suppose I might as well finish end game scoring and such.

[Dracos]

Writing more documentation.

And fixing a few crash bugs.

But basically everything is documentation from me these days.  Fucking leadership.

Dracos
Hasn't done crap design in days.

[Dracos]

Never ever do an 'engineering' supervised game.

I think I've surpassed the entire game development class combined in documentation written.

Dracos

[Dracos]

Presentation 2 of 3 of my failed game project pirates.  I think I might toss the postmortem up here just to share a bit of how it went right and wrong.  I admit though, it's very not fun presenting what you see as a failed project.

Dracos

[twentytwo]

Presentation 2 of 3 of my failed game project pirates.

Hey, that's too bad. I was hoping the best for that one...

***

Argh... classes are killing me.

I want to spend all my time working on my game project but I can't seem to get a break. It looks like my project's not gonna get finished in time... (why did I have to go with bone animation...? - 3D...)

Oh, well.

Over the summer I think I'll go ahead and try making a pattern-matching action-platformer or a seiken densetsu game (both 2D...). That ought to be fun...

1 week and counting...
-22

[Dracos]

Yeah, getting time and energy for its a killer.  I'll be tossing up my notes/postmortem/funstuff soonish for pirates.  Brutal presentation 3 done with.  I admit there's few things more awkward than having to put folks who simply aren't remotely trained to talk to folks up on stage to talk.

Dracos

[Dracos]

Tossed up Bullshit in Storytelling.

Going to get some energy later and get up pirates and such.

Today, i write. =D

Dracos

[twentytwo]

Well, I'm going at it again, this time in OpenGL using the Tao Framework (a .NET wrapper).

Only, I have this weird problem where the machine I want to run this on clocks at 20% CPU usage in windows mode and 0% in fullscreen (the program loop doesn't even DO anything but sleep). It's really got me beat - even NeHe's lessons all do the same and those are in C++. Oh, well... two days is about all I can give to that problem...

Right now, I'm focusing on my artwork and planning my next great attempt at Game Design.


... why does it seem I do MORE work in the summer...

-22

[twentytwo]

Wow. I'm surprised how good the Redbook is. I went ahead and ordered it and the Orange book (Shaders). Might as well see what the future holds...

-22