Quake3World

Since shifting away from level-making and into coding - I'm sorely lacking a SSOWYD outlet... Even though I know there will be far less traffic through these parts - why not!

I'm building a geometric algorithm visualizer this summer using Qt:

What does it do? Try to find the outer most points? Isn't there a faster way than brute-forcing that? At least, it looks like that's what it's doing.

Well, here's a very old video of a Geometry Wars clone I've been working on. The project is kind of dead in the water the last few months but I intent to pick it up and wrap it up after my new Q3 map is done and then maybe start on building some new game.

Ignore the dumb sound track on the video, it's some free music file YouTube offers.



Here are some more recent screenshots:

[lvlshot]http://jplamon.home.xs4all.nl/upload/2ss_13.jpg[/lvlshot]

[lvlshot]http://www.xs4all.nl/~jplamon/upload/2ss_14.jpg[/lvlshot]

[lvlshot]http://jplamon.home.xs4all.nl/upload/2ss_15.jpg[/lvlshot]

Eraser, I've always wanted to do a GW clone! It looks pretty similar to the original - what sorts of building blocks does XNA give you? Are you going to work on E+ anymore?

There are much faster ways of computing the hull, but I chose the slowest one because it was easy to implement and I could then focus on visualizing what was going on. Next task is to implement one of the fancy ones

Currently I'm building a new Q3 map for EntityPlus and I bet I'll run into some things I want to do that require some coding as well. To be honest, the main driving force behind most of the mod has been my own EntityPlus map because I needed stuff for it, so after this new map is done, I'm not sure how much more time I'm going to spend on the mod. But I will always be open for suggestions.

As for XNA, it's basically a very extensive wrapper around Direct3D. I haven't actually used much of the fancier features of it, but it allows you to do all sorts of 2D and 3D stuff, HLSL, sound effects and music, input (KB/Mouse/XBox 360 controller), XBox Live support and of course you can compile it to Windows, XBox 360 or Windows Phone 7.

is xna actually available on a dutchee xbl account? i thought it wasnt for a slew of redtaped reasons.

XNA is a development framework. All you need is a copy of Visual Studio to use it for developing games. Playing these games on Windows PC platforms is possible for anyone as well, all you need is the correct XNA runtime which you can grab from MS' site.

What you probably mean is the XBox Live Indie Games (XBLIG) marketplace. This is part of the XBox Live market place to which you can submit your games for distribution, to be played on XBox 360 consoles. I'm not sure if XBLIG is available in The Netherlands. If it is, I don't know how to gain access to it.

Looks nice, Eraser. The things I'm working on aren't very visual-ish, unless you guys like looking at gdb backtraces. Still mainly working on node.js and libuv, hacking on a Lisp JIT VM in my spare time.

I read some article about LinkedIn depending heavily on node.js for their mobile app. I'll see if I can find it again.

Yeah, I know. I spoke with their head of development (I think) a couple of times.

They're not the biggest node user though, that's voxer. They peek at hundreds of thousands concurrent users each day. Pretty good for shaking out obscure bugs. :-)

Eraser wrote:XNA is a development framework. All you need is a copy of Visual Studio to use it for developing games. Playing these games on Windows PC platforms is possible for anyone as well, all you need is the correct XNA runtime which you can grab from MS' site.

What you probably mean is the XBox Live Indie Games (XBLIG) marketplace. This is part of the XBox Live market place to which you can submit your games for distribution, to be played on XBox 360 consoles. I'm not sure if XBLIG is available in The Netherlands. If it is, I don't know how to gain access to it.

indeed. I thought the XNA license was also only available in the countries that had access too the XBLIG. I also thought it required a fee, tho that might be only applicable if you're publishing content.
RBN also uses XNA and it's content isnt available in the Netherlands, which bums me out.
so your talk of devving for XNA made me confused and also a tad hopeful for a minute

Yeah sorry mate, strictly Win32 stuff here. Publishing games to XBLIG does indeed require a subscription with the obvious fee attached to it. But as I understand it, XBLIG is slowly dying. Devs are retreating from it because the revenues they get there pale in comparison to Steam, for instance. Also makes me wonder how long MS will keep supporting XNA. Then again, they're pushing it for WP7 as well, so who knows. Either way, my bro pointed out the Unity engine, which I'm eyeing as a possibility for my next project somewhere down the line.

Here's one of the cleverer CH algorithms. It takes as input a simple polyline (chain of edges, no self-crossings) and computes the hull using a deque for storage in O(n) time. The code for this is actually much simpler than the brute force O(n^3) one! Unfortunately my visualization doesn't tell the real story about what's going on quite yet.

Just finally started making some solid progress on this project that I'm excited about:

[lvlshot]http://i.imgur.com/FsqEO.jpg[/lvlshot]

I've been line by line porting the Q3 engine to JS. Just got the first pass at networking done - people can run around and see each other in the maps.

Cool stuff. How does it perform though?
The colors you chose for syntax highlighting really hurt my eyes

Eraser wrote:Cool stuff. How does it perform though?
The colors you chose for syntax highlighting really hurt my eyes

It's rendering each frame in sync with the browser, so 60 fps in Chrome. It's solid there.

I don't foresee any obvious problems related to JS performance in Chrome/V8 at least (what I've been primarily testing on).

[lvlshot]http://i.imgur.com/jK37F.jpg[/lvlshot]

Progress made on models, menus and loading/saving of user configs in the browser

Seems like it'd be a huge undertaking to port all of that to JS, but neat nonetheless! Wish I had time to do stuff like that

I spent last weekend playing around with Bullet and Awesomium - something inherently great about having jQuery UI in an OpenGL app. Here are some flying Utah teapots.

[lvlshot]http://www.freemancw.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/usercontrols.png[/lvlshot]

Plans are forming to create a game using Cocos 2D-X. Anyone have experience with this? It's a 2D game engine with a write-once-run-anywhere approach. Build the game in C++ for the PC platform and then you can relatively easily compile that to iOS, Android, WP7 and other platforms. There's also HTML5 and XNA ports of the engine.

[lvlshot]http://i.imgur.com/mcWXA.jpg[/lvlshot]

Still chugging along - last week saw animated models and light grid data being used for vertex lighting the models.

This weekend I'll start implementing weapons so you can do something other than run around looking at other players

i'd love to take a look at the source

MKJ wrote:i'd love to take a look at the source

Large portions (e.g. physics, collision, cg/gm code) are direct ports of the q3 source, so it's not very exciting.

I'll make the source public in another week or two, it still needs a few core features (patch collision, delta compressed packets), docs and the correct licenses plastered all over (I know nothing about those things). Also, on the server-side node.js has to currently be built from the latest dev branch for one small feature, so I'd like to hold off until 0.9.4 hits.

Pending that, everything is starting to come together - I'm so stoked about having a solid FPS engine available natively in the browser

Eraser wrote:Cool stuff. How does it perform though?
The colors you chose for syntax highlighting really hurt my eyes

I use the exact same color scheme in Sublime Text

It's the default scheme and also the one I use too.

(I think Eraser just hates rainbows and seeing colours makes him angry.)

The default? Really? Those colors just seem very hard on the eyes. It makes me angry. Very, very angry.

tis also the default for VS12 now.
i turned it off posthaste.