Got no development work done this weekend as what time I had has been spent trying to track down an elusive bug that caused an almost instant crash when running a release build ... works fine in Debug mode.

Have managed to track it down to something in my animator code, which admittedly has been changed extensively recently, but not found the actual culprit yet!

Hate these things where I shoot myself in the foot and lose valuable development time.

Added my review of the engine to the Devmaster site today > If you're a C++ programmer then this is an attractive engine.

I'd been holding back till I had some reasonable experience of the engine but now seemed like a good time.

(10-27-2013 10:58 AM)Pixel Perfect Wrote:  Hate these things where I shoot myself in the foot and lose valuable development time.

We all know that feel.
I spent a full week tracking down a bug that caused verts on my sphere to randomly shoot out to insane distances. Turns out I just forgot to initialize a variable. :-x

(10-28-2013 03:19 AM)Rubeus Wrote:  We all know that feel.
I spent a full week tracking down a bug that caused verts on my sphere to randomly shoot out to insane distances. Turns out I just forgot to initialize a variable. :-x

Ouch! Yeah it's often something as simple as that, but easily missed! I'm sure mine will turn out to be something similar.

Very frustrating at the time but I guess it 'comes with the territory' as they say

[EDIT]
Ha ... just found the reason, failed to initialise the variable m_bHasFacialAnimation to false in my animator class! I could kick myself

Now have rain in thanks to a modified version of Seba's code (many thanks).

Also have coded an animated quad class for special effects, great for combining with particle effects for spells etc.

Nice, it looks like all the animals are headed inside on account of bad weather.

I'm curious about Seba's rain approach and your modifications - is it by any chance occluded? (ie. not going through roofs) Can't really tell from the short fly through the town gate and youtube's video quality.

I'm assuming you're now at, or past the point you were before switching engines? (with this project at least, any plans with stranded?)

Thanks Para. With regard to Seba's rain approach, yes it features occlusion and is really quite effective. He did a great job on this. My modifications were mainly just to bring it up to date regarding changes to the engine API, but fairly minor. I spent more time experimenting with particle images and colour than getting the code to work.

As far as my porting of code goes, I'm ahead in some areas but still missing quite a bit in others. I'm just taking my time and gradually porting everything across but re-writing things as I go where I think they will benefit. I'm still working on the bare mechanics of the game at the moment. I'm not going to start on the game play / AI until those are fully in place.

Stranded is still on the back burner I'm sorry to say, I barely have the time to keep this project afloat let alone work on others at the moment. Not that I'm complaining, I'm enjoying getting this project up and running in Esenthel immensely

I really like that animated quad effect, what is the benefit of using a quad over an animated particle?

Probably not a great deal. I tend to like to write my own implementations of things that are critical elements of my game design, simply so I have complete control over them.

Often particle systems enforce rotation to the camera as in the example in the video. There are times when I need the orientation to be static, rain drop ripples on a pond for instance, or I just require rotation say on the Y axis in the case of candle lights. Not all systems offer this so I previously wrote my own just to handle anything that can't be done with existing particle systems.

I borrowed the approach from Seba and actually am kind of surprised I can get away with so many Physics.cuts() calls. Haven't gotten it looking the way I want yet, I'm using a circular shape for the drop, streaks don't work well with default particles since they always face the camera. I guess I would need a custom particle system to rotate them only around the axis of movement, and to have a more flexible emitter to better deal with fast or instantaneous camera travel.

Right now, for more heavy rain, when drops collide, I set their life near death, reverse and half their velocity with a bit of rand(), sort of simulating splashes. I don't know about spawning additional particles for real splashes but the effect could be efficiently improved further by just switching to a different frame in the rain texture, with a more suitable graphic for a splash.

(11-17-2013 05:33 PM)para Wrote:  I borrowed the approach from Seba and actually am kind of surprised I can get away with so many Physics.cuts() calls.

This surprised me too, a pleasant surprise I have to say!

I tried circular images for the the drops but didn't really get the effect I was looking for. I ended up using streaks but spent a long time playing with the transparency and colour. Although as you say the particles get rotated to face the camera it doesn't look anywhere near as bad as I thought it might when looking upwards.

I was planning on using a second set of particles for the splashes, that's a nice solution using the existing ones and reversing the direction!

Although hampered by lack of development time (I only get about 2 to 3 hours a week on average) progress is going well.

A basic trigger system is now in place which mixes design ideas from Scarlett Thread, Tottel (many thanks guys) and my own giving me the flexibility I need including interfacing with the external AI engine.

Waypoints are next in line (I should be able to use the Esenthel system as it stands) to act as spawn points for NPCs and patrol/path markers. These will update the AI engine when loaded and can be deleted at that point as the game engine will not be using them directly.

Hopefully that will give me sufficient to start to develop the AI using EKI One and really breathe some life into this game.

I do love working with this engine

I wish people would post more about their own developments, I know lots of people are working on projects but we see so little of them! I'd love to see more info on peoples techniques and approaches to things and get a feel for their progress. I find that motivating.

Some screen shots below of recent work including additions to the level designer and the extended navMesh design for the entire opening level area (will need to be regenerated in the future as I add more level content).

   

   

Thanks for sharing always cool to see more progress!

(12-15-2013 02:27 AM)Pixel Perfect Wrote:  I wish people would post more about their own developments, I know lots of people are working on projects but we see so little of them! I'd love to see more info on peoples techniques and approaches to things and get a feel for their progress. I find that motivating.

I agree.

As usual your work is looking great Pixel. Really nice

Thanks Roland, Greg.

Slight update. Had to code my own waypoint support today as I needed waypoints to contain individual directional information too. Put a directionalWaypoint class together and added a series of waypoint objects for Spawn points (Red), Patrol points (Blue) and Paths (Yellow). These are drawn in debug mode, as shown below, but not in release. The arrows visibly indicate the orientation set.