Ludum Dare - Night one

So, I'm going to bed now so I can get a fresh head and prepare for tomorrow, my main coding day. I'm rather excited for my idea, I've had to change it around three times now, but my current idea seems to be simple, and actually kind of fun(yay!), so I'll start work on it tomorrow.

Tonight I just managed to get my tile rendering set up as well as random terrain and a player. I'll probably spend 9/10ths of my day tomorrow coding, and the other time working on my art.

My main issue is probably the time. I always feel like I'm wasting so much time, especially when I'm supposed to be sleeping, like I am now. But oh well, I'll get over it! I'm confident in my ability to finish the game, the hardest part at this point will be making decent assets such as textures and sounds. Come to think of it, I have no idea what I'm going to do for sounds! My life :)

Ludum Dare in two days!

I really can't wait, but I'm frantically learning more functions and algorithms to try to give myself an edge! It would be very cool to have a theme that isn't generic like a platformed or a kill them all etc... I would rather make a puzzle game or maybe even a game that doesn't even involve a little player. Very excited!

Ludum Dare

I decided I'm going to take part in my first LD! Its on December 13th, and I've been scrambling to study code so I can have a chance at receiving a decent ranking! As such, I will not be putting out videos during those three days because I will most likely have to work as well as create a game! I will be doing the jam, not the compo because for one, I don't have enough time to work and make a game, and I want to use my GLUtils library to help me out. Are any of you doing Ludum Dare next week?

The Basics Challenge

Over the next few weeks I'll be coding many small games, and hopefully finishing them. This challenge is designed to grow confidence and coding skills. First up? Pong. Here's the thread:
Pong Clone

Voxel engine series

It's been a while, and I quit the christmas challenge for now, but I started a new Youtube series! I go through step by step and create a simple voxel engine with LWJGL and my GLUtils library. Check it out:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXa65xzz2vplye7cn1HH4GyE6_FjnDSug

Warning

Rose has compromised my blog. Evacuate!! Burn everything! Shred the papers and kill the test subjects! 

~End Transmission~

PoE

power over ethernet

Web definitions

1. Power over Ethernet or PoE describes any of several standardized or ad-hoc systems which pass electrical power along with data on Ethernet cabling.

Christmas Challenge - Day Three

So I skipped last night as I wasn't able to do much. I was actually out trick or treating with my girlfriend! So this morning I made up for it and here's the changelog:

- Added a level parser
- Worked on tiles
- Created a level class
- Other stuff

I really am trying to make the underlying framework flexible and concrete before I rush into the game, so for the next couple days I won't be adding anything too exciting!

The programmer

There is no such thing as the programmer. No one knows everything. Hell, I'll even admit I don't! That was a joke, if you didn't catch that. Today I talked to someone who openly and flat out stated they were a good programmer (which is fine, albeit a little ballsy), and that he could code anything (way too far, no one can code everything). He then proceeded to tell everyone that he had practically no idea how basic networking worked, and that just really ticked me off. I wanted to just rip into him, tell him what he really was. A naive programmer.

Sure, you can be a good programmer, thats fine. Some people are really good! But you'll usually have two groups of people who say they're good; the liars and the truthful. The liars make up 90% of the group, just trying to tell you and show off their "skillz" because they've been programming for a year now. The truthful people, I've found, rarely actually say they think they're good programmers. Why? A few reasons, at least I think. 

1. Humility - People who are good are usually don't admit it because they run the risk of sounding self centered and "prickish". Don't flat out say you're good even if you are, unless someone specifically asks you. 

2. I forgot

Well, that ruined the flow of my rant! I guess what I wanted to say was that if you're a good programmer, you can say you are but you might sound douchey, but never say you know everything because it just isn't true!

Christmas Challenge - Day two in the morning

Just wanted to report my progress before I had to go out for the day! I've created the ability to load and use textures and spritesheets and I created a small texture shader. Now I have to think about some things because the code is starting to get more tricky!

Have a nice day!

Christmas Challenge - Day One

So I finished off day one with almost nothing, but that's ok I have plenty of time! I won't spend a lot of time talking about it tonight since I barely did anything, but here's a changelog:

- Gameloop
- Finished shaderUtils
- Loading and using shaders
- Started on entities and mobs

That's it for 10/32/2013! Happy Halloween everyone, have a good rest of your night.

Christmas challenge - Creating a game from scratch

I decided I needed a little challenge in my programming life, so I'm going to create a game before Christmas for my girlfriend! She doesn't know yet, so don't tell her! What I want to do:

- Game created with my own code (no libraries) using only LWJGL
- Shader support (Will be my first time creating a game with shaders!)
- Advanced rendering techniques and possibly model loading if I need it
- It will be a 2D side scroller
- It'll be a game about a mystery, and you have to follow serial killers and solve crimes. But then you discover a twist in the plot, are the serial killers even real? Have you been making them up to cover for... yourself?

Its a short list, yes, but that's all I can think of now. I have less than two months to make a complete working game that will be good enough to impress my girlfriend, and I think I can do it!

Now I'm going to return to coding my shader loading class, I'll post my progress later.

I seriously don't understand shaders

Quite honestly, I don't understand shaders, or more specifically, the vertex shader. If all it's purpose is to take in an outside coordinate and basically process it, why do we need it? For example, here is the most basic vertex shader you can use (it even uses old deprecated code, making it even simpler than the new core profile):

void main(){
gl_Position = ftransform();
} 

All this shader does is take in a coordinate using a glVertex#f call or drawElement call etc... and supposedly translates the geometry around to where it needs to be. But that is already done in the actual code, so why do I need a shader to do that for me? I can't even just use the shader and never call a draw method upon my vertices in OpenGL, its just not possible. The fragment shader makes more sense to me, however, because you can do all sorts of amazing things you could never do with the fixed function pipeline. You can create lighting effects, blur textures, change the colors of textures super easy; all this great stuff. So I understand the use of the fragment shader, but why a vertex shader? I, as of right now, see no need for one.

 Maybe I'm just an idiot though!

Exceptions

Figuring out shaders

Shaders are just god awful weird. Why would I use a shader instead of just calling deprecated functions like glTranslate? Sure, they're cool for lighting but everything else...

Upcoming games

I have a few ideas for games, and now that I'm done with my voxel engine for now, I'm going to start working on them! First I have to get better at GLSL, and then I want to develop these games, in order for when I need to finish them:

- Something for my girlfriend 

Cant reveal anything about this yet, its a surprise ;)

- Fight 'Em All 

A generic horde style fight them all by yourself game with elements of building and surviving utilizing strategy and structures, excited about this because I think it will be the first game I actually complete after two years!

- Balanced Energy

A RTS game where you take control of a team of little particles that shoot up opposing teams. Dead particles then convert to the team they were killed by so there is always the same amount of players. I've been developing this game on and off since the end of the school year in 2012, also very excited about this because its an original idea!

- Voxel engine

Literally just a voxel engine; its been my goal to create one since I started programming. It most likely won't actually turn into a game, I just want to get the basics of it working because I'm so fascinated with the idea of voxels. I already have a little bit of the engine done, but I have to modernize it to support shaders and VBOs and matrices, which I'm not very excited about. I want to finish it someday, but I don't care when! 

- NEngine

Probably should be finished before the voxel engine, its my 2D OpenGL engine that will support fixed and programmable pipelines. The goals are to make it as flexible and simple to use as possible. I want it to basically be a wrapper engine for low level OpenGL functions, and also incorporate other functions like spritebatching and texture atlases. Pretty excited about this, but its going to take a long time as I've only just started to learn modern OpenGL. 

School and why I'm different

Homework and schooling

Even though this is going to end up being a blog about my games and my nerdy programming life, I want to rant about something. I'm sitting here in school, supposedly learning about subjects that will help me get the jobs I want someday. I call bullshit, that is the biggest lie ever. I have two dream jobs; indie game developer or commercial pilot. I have already started taking my flight lessons, and I have yet to run into any of the math that we apparently need. I have yet to use the extensive array of knowledge I have acquired on history over the years of long, boring and torturous history classes. IN fact, the only thing I've needed to know so far is the cardinal directions and common sense. 

Sure, as a pilot I would need to know the basics of how my plane operates, so you might argue I'd need some experience. Well, do we see schools teaching us this? No. I'll need to know some math, but when would I need to learn that? In college. I don't need to sit through it in high school, when I could be "expanding my horizons", as my dad loves to say. Year after year we learn about the same damn subject, just with the teacher's personal teaching style. Oh, you want to solve this math problem THAT way? Oh, I'm sorry. I won't accept that, this is the correct way of doing it ("Proceeds to show me, ironically, how to solve the problem, but still receive the same answer"). Year after year this is how its done. I've barely learned anything knew in English over the years besides a few vocab words that either I already knew, or could learn easily on my own without sitting in a hour long class. In history, we learn about the same things time and time again; I'm sure I could recite most of history back to you since around grade 6, we have yet to learn anything knew and I'm graduating next year. 

In my other dream job, being a programmer, I would need to know more math depending on where I want to work. If I want to be a game developer (which I really do), then I would obviously need to know trig, which I'm taking next semester. See, this is good. Offer classes I want to take, don't force them down my throat. I want to take trig so I can learn what I need to know for game programming, but I didn't want to have to take that stupid algebra class that I would never use again. I mistakenly took a honors statistics class this year; worst decision of my life. The teacher just throws packets of information at us and expects us to learn it for the next day. Then she hands out pages of homework for us to finish for, wait for it, the next day. Ridiculous. I have learned a lot, sure, but only by her standards. I actually only understand about 20% of what I've "learned". Which brings me to my next topic:

Learning Styles

I learn differently than everyone else, its just a fact of life that I deal with. In school, even though I try, I still manage to get only decent grades. I know I'm not stupid, its just I learn different. I think that I learn by pounding it into my skull, basically, and individual questions. If I need to learn something, I have to sit down for a while and just go over the notes, just over and over. I also love practicing solving problems, like in math. Give me a worksheet, an hour and some notes and answer my occasional question, and I'm good. I could use some music too though, it always makes me calm. The only teacher I've ever had that actually did this for me was for10th grade algebra II. He would listen to is, then work out the problems on the board all period if we needed him too. He would let us do worksheets and listen to music while he went around answering questions; I did the best I've ever done in school in that class because he taught how I learn. Thats the type of class I need, not the learn this information on your own bullshit classes. If I wanted to, I could learn how to do all this stuff by myself, the only reason I go to school is because its required by law and if you don't, you're probably not going to get a good job, which is stupid. Colleges and jobs should look at what you know and what your capacity to learn and retain is, not whether or not you have a degree. 

The thing that pisses me off the most is probably this; I've practically taught myself programming and 3D/2D graphics work and how to make games. My most recent project, a 3D voxel world, has taught me how to do trig, something that my school has yet to teach me. Yet, in school I don't get great grades. Why? Who the hell knows. I'm obviously smart enough, but just because I don't learn like everyone else makes me stupid apparently. My parents the other night told me how impressed they were that I taught myself 3D graphics work in high school without any help, and I realized that what I do isn't normal. I truly am different, yet no one recognizes it because we, as a society want mindless office drones. Oh well

Back to school for me.