Project Introduction

As part of my course as you may know in the 3rd year a good part of our grade is deterministic on a project. The actual subject area of the project we undertake is very much our own choice, although of course it should probably relate back to games development. I don’t wish to reiterate over what we have already been given so please refer to this pdf(http://unorthodoxgamestudios.co.uk/Downloads/GamesDevYr3_Overview.pdf), on the last page is a brief description of the project as-well as expected learning outcomes.

As my project progresses I will try to continuously post updates relating to my progress on this blog which may or may not be used as part of the documentation for my project in the future.

for my project I want to create a lightweight Game Engine, which I have already started work on in regards to the base of the engine and the planning but I won’t have the OK on it until I get back to uni in September next year. Game engines do have the potential to be quite complicated so hopefully all the work I do between now and then will help me to getting the OK from lecturers, and convince myself that I’ll be able to produce something worthwhile in the time given. Having worked on largish projects before I know how things can go horribly wrong and that is definitely one of my biggest worries, getting half way through the year then realizing that its all gone wrong and I’m going to have to rework the entire engine. So basically i’m trying not just to convince the lecturers but convince myself as-well… I do know if everything does go wrong with the engine I could always cut a few corners in order to get it complete on time.

In my next post I’m going to start going over the design of the engine, I’ll be looking at some of design choices I’ve already made and the general architecture of the engine it’s far from finalized though a lot could change between the current design and the final design.

Uni – End of Year 2 (Now to get on with some real work!)

Finally university is over for this academic year and I can finally get on with some of my own projects and produce something a little bit more worth while and impressing, and start to post on this blog a little bit more often.

I have to say though getting all the work done and handed in, in time this time round was a bit of a nightmare. It somehow worked out that we had 2 weeks left and 4 assignments to get handed in.3d Modelling final Castle Animation, Maths no.2, Torque 3d AI 2 and OOP&D(Object Orientated Principles and Design). The main reason however that it became a struggle to get all the stuff completed probably comes down to the 3d Modelling and Animation, I mean seriously it took up the first week alone just catching up with all the work that I had neglected to complete already. Modelling is by far one of the most time consuming things that I have ever done, it takes countless hours to model things and that’s only the half of it, if you want to render it and near HD quality a full scene with a good amount of lighting and particle effects scattered throughout the scene, on your average gaming PC this is going to take the best part of a day to produce a render only a few minutes long. So I must say the rendering alone sponged up a lot of time.

<— About to go off on a tangent about Torque 3d

The other big issue of course was Torque 3d, a piece of software that many of you may have heard me saying that I’m indifferent to. The kind of software that I can work in if I try but really don’t like to. And so here is my list of 7 reasons why I don’t like working with the Game Engine Torque 3d at university. Why seven? because I was planning 10 but got tired of thinking about Torque.

  1. At our university were using an older revision of the engine and so it is literally littered with bugs, some of which I have researched how to go about fixing the bugs which as I though requires the engine source code something that we aren’t presented with at university, not like we have time to go through the engine fixing all the bugs anyway .
  2. The uni is very inconsistent with the versions they give us, so rather than being a bug here then there’s a bug then instead and its a bit confusing and rather annoying .
  3. Torque 3d is naturally frustrating to work with, this is probably a combination between the amount of bugs and bad design decisions implemented in the engine, Unless your making a generic FPS without the source code making other games becomes quickly excruciatingly painful.
  4. We get given very little to work with by the university just some stock assets and some poorly written scripts, That and all the assets we do get feel very dated. Games are a constantly evolving, changing and Initiative media I really think we should be working with things a little bit more up to date and naturally sexy to look at, the torque assets make me die a little inside, Could’t we make things a little bit more interesting.
  5. This leads onto my next point Torque 3d feels very dated, behind the times. I played there demo on there latest engine and I wasn’t overly impressed my thoughts exactly were if they can’t even make a good game on their own engine, how can they expect me to seriously.
  6. Its about the only Engine that I don’t actually have fun working with and I’ve worked with a lot of tools, apis , frameworks,engines and languages. I dabbled in things such as Playstation Suite SDK, Source SDK, UDK, NeoAxis engine, Cry Engine, XNA,c , c++, c#, basic, SDL, Unity 3d, Javascript, html, php, Newton Game Dynamics, JigLib physics, Torque2d*, python and a lot more just all I can think of on the spot.
  7. I don’t see many benefits in the future of knowing the ins and outs of Torque 3d, Its outdated and barley used in the gaming industry, from what I understand most employers will be looking for good underlining programming skills and experience in industry standard tools as-well as of course experience working in the industry(Catch 22 when I’ve been checking out jobs in the gaming industry in the past a lot of employers want experience programmers with so many years in the industry having worked on so many commercial games in the past.). Anyway I feel it may be better just to get a core language under your belt and get to grips with underlineing game and game engine architecture and design principles. It may even be worth studying an engine such as unity 3d for one main reason it’s a very robustly built engine and has a lot of documentation which can start to give you an idea of how the engine functions as a whole. Its also got the benefit of being incredibly easy to work with so you can really get a lot of ground covered when working/ studying with it and get a good overview of a complete development life cycle of a game.

 

Its a shame really part of me feels my grade at university is going to be affected by the fact we are using this engine, I feel as though if we were working in something better I would put so much more work in. It really would make a difference all the assignments so far me and pretty much everyone else has pretty much just been handing in virtual crap. Having talked with some of the other people in the class I’m not the only one that seems to be disappointed by the choice of software and the module structure, in fact I haven’t talked to anyone that doesn’t feel in someway indifferent to Torque 3d or dislike it in anyway, although I haven’t talked to everyone in the class. My comments are those of my own opinion and experience with torque 3d and nothing more please feel free to comment on any thoughts feelings you have towards this software, I understand that there are people out there that enjoy to work in torque 3d and i respect you for it I’m not here to start a debate or war I’m only hear to express my opinion but feel free to do the same but keep it friendly. Please may I remind you this is only related to the software Torque 3d and not any other software created by linked with garage games or partner company’s.

Anyway as far as the other 2 assignments were concerned they were pretty much a breeze the maths only took a few nights even though there was a lot of dossing in-between. The OOP&D really was a shame though I was literally running out of time and I produced nowhere near what I wanted to produce and had to skip out on some of the coding, one of the assignments I was looking forward to and might enjoy working on and I ran out of time a real shame really.

Nether-mind there’s always next year Hopefully I’ll get my first. My next post will most likely be related to my final year project as I start to get the ball Rowling ready for next year. Posts should be a little more frequent now that I have nothing to do.

Thanks for reading, Please feel free to Comment, critisize spelling and grammer’s”?!.

Been Busy(Uni Work) – / Next year project.

Just in case anyone out there is interested why I haven’t posted anything in a while, the answer is quite simply uni work… it’s coming up to the end of term and we’ve got quite a lot of work to do so I just quite simply haven’t had chance to update my blog but I will get back to regular entries as soon as my uni work is complete.

Throughout the summer there will probably be regular updates that are going to be more development related as I will be working on my project in preparation for next year. If you don’t already know I’ve been planning to create my own lightweight game engine for my project which I have in fact already started work on, so throughout development I will be producing a lot of documentation in respect to the design and planning as-well as the implementation, and I would very much like to document my progress on this site as- well so anyone that’s interested in my work will be able to check it out, whether it be my friends or my lecturers so they can make sure I’m still on track.

I’ve already spent a lot of time just planning this engine and basically just sitting and thinking exactly what I want to do, creating an engine isn’t necessarily the easiest thing in the world but I am planning on making use of a good selection of libraries and to cut a few corners to speed up development. Already a lot of questions have come up related to the design where I’m going to have to make a decision. One of the first crucial decisions in my mind is the actual engines focus, what sort of games do I want to build on this engine?, will they be 3d, 2d, 2.5d?. Do I want to take an abstract approach here, do I want to cut a corner there. How can I make sure it’s well optimized?. I’ve actually done a serious amount of research and I’ve actually looked very deeply into these question even If they may seem like simple decisions at first glance, the reality is they really do steer the engine towards what the final outcome is going to be. I guess my biggest fear though is that I spend a great deal of time working on this engine and through a few minor bad design decisions it leads to the engine becoming painfully slow and un-optimized and very messy and turning into a catastrophic nightmare. I’ll be honest I’ve made a lot of bad decisions in the past when it comes to software development and I’ve really had to pay for them and I really don’t want that to happen again.  Term ends for me on Friday when all my work is handed in so I will be able to get back to posting then.

Uncharted Golden Abyss

So I literally only a few days ago got myself a PS Vita and one of the first games I got with it was of course Uncharted Golden Abyss. Personally before this game I haven’y played any of the Uncharted selection of games before and I’ve herd good things so that’s literally the reason I bought it, And the fact that at the moment there are very few games that are available for the vita but hopefully that’ll increase as time goes on.

Right from the first moment I started this game I have been impressed, a lot of time effort and hard work has gone into this game. The general game mechanics themselves are very good as-well as having a good story-line that is easy to follow. The graphics are generally quite impressive although not necessarily very refined the lack of AA on this title really stands out in places but nether the less the graphics are pretty much stunning considering its a handheld device. As far as AA goes I really think it was probably a trade off between detailed graphics and well defined graphics, So if AA was implemented I doubt we would have seen graphics as detailed as they are. Although I would very much like smooth graphics I think its a good trade off and the graphical detail is definitely to a very high level comparable potentially with current generation consoles such as the PS3 and 360 although falling short as may be expected considering its only a Handheld device and of course it hasn’t been out long so I highly doubt the developers have truly used the hardware to Its true potential and I’m sure this will increase in time as we see more developers releasing games for the device.

 

My new PS Vita!

So yes my ps vita did arrive the other day but I’ve been soo “busy” just playing around with the vita and getting used to the SDK that I just couldn’t find time to add to my blog. So anyway I’ve been playing the vita the past few days and I’ve got to say from a technical stand point it functions pretty well. The screen is crisp very good quality and well lit, The touchscreen is very responsive feels very similar to what you may expect from the iphones/ ipods and whatnot, The layout of the controls is good so basically from a hardware perspective I would say its pretty sound. And of course not to mention what its got under its bonnet the quad core arm processor and what not but I don’t really want to get into the technical nitty gritty.

Okay so there’s a few good points about the system so I may as-well mention some bad points. One thing although minor that I noticed is on the home screen the circular icons appear to be slightly jagged obviously due to a lack of Anti-Aliasing which to me ruins the finish. I’m not exactly sure why the didn’t implement some form of Anti-Aliasing on the Home screen, but maybe they felt it took a big performance hit to the device and deemed it unnecessary considering the performance loss. Who knows?… Sony obviously. But I bet it merely is for performance reasons maybe we’ll see it implemented on future firmware. But anyway it’s not really that bad you can’t judge a device on silly things like that, but it certainly would be a nice finish.

Naturally Just Cool Features Section (part 1, Part2 Tomorrow)

  • AR- Augmented Reality, Obviously not a new thing we’ve seen it before on the Nintendo 3ds and even on smart phones and tablets, and now here it is on the ps vita. With the console you get a set of AR cards for use with some games that have been provided free that can be downloaded from the PlayStation Store they are literally just a small selection of mini-games quite fun just a good little thing to see on the vita, I do still prefer the ones that come with the 3ds but nether the less its fun to mess around with.
  • PlayStation Store – Its really good to see Sony is on the band wagon and has a ready installed app on the vita so people can access the store and digitally buy ps vita games, psp games etc… However annoying contrary to what “Sony Said” (Don’t take my word for it its just what I herd)… the vita games are cheaper to purchase on Amazon to be honest, and i would rather have a hard copy anyway soo I don’t think I’ll buy anything off the store anytime soon…. Anyway good point I’d like to make about the store is the ascendancy of psp games, which is great and quite a few seem to have what I would consider reasonable price tags on them. Its just a dam shame though that if we want to play any of the games we bought for the psp back in the day on umd.. we will have to purchase them again if we want to play them on the vita.

PlayStation Suite SDK (Open Beta)

It looks like PlayStation Suite SDK is now in Open Beta, so if anyone was planning on checking it out now is the time. Just click here if your interested. So I’m literally downloading it as I type so I don’t have a clue what its like yet, I’ll probably write another post later after I’ve checked it out.

Just from my initial impression from reading through the page it looks really good quite impressive, I think I’m going to get quite a bit of fun out of this. An interesting thing to mention is it looks like you don’t need to sign in/ up or anything to download which is good  and saves a bit of time –> especially considering it always takes me about 10 minutes to remember my password.

edit: The awkward moment when it opens the release notes using my default program for opening html files —> Notepad :/

PlayStation Vita

So through what is money I’ve saved and what I have left over from my bursary I found myself with a nice bit of cash in hand. Although I was planning a slight pc upgrade but I thought you know what with a little donation from my parents from my upcoming birthday I should be able to afford to get myself a ps vita now and still be able to buy my upgrades, which is great because I’ve been looking for something to replace my busted psp for a while and hadn’t had the spare cash… So anyway earlier this evening I took the plunge and ordered a ps vita (wifi only) from amazon with of course a 4GB stick which was free and two games–> Rayman Origins and Uncharted Golden Abyss, which by far to me seem to be the best games available for the vita at this point in time… So hopefully they’ll be good. This all came to under £250 which is reasonable in comparison to how it is prices elsewhere, definitely the cheapest place I’ve seen it.

On another note related to the vita I noticed the Playstation Suite SDK is going into open beta soon if not already I haven’t seen anything from Sony to say it has but I’m not entirely sure whats happening with that I haven’t been able to access the pages from the UK, but hopefully there will be more news soon. I did however found this link, which might be worth a gander if your ever thinking of developing some multi-platform apps for some of Sony’s devices in the future. Its good to see Sony opening the doors for the independent market a little bit, however I have a feeling due partially to the cross platform nature of the SDK itself that were not going to be able to use the ps vita to its true potential and were going to be limited to what we can do. But we’ll have to wait and see, it’ll probably still be a good bit of fun to have a mess around with anyway. It also saves having to write large quantity’s of code from scratch when..lets say you take other development routes with things like this, it’ll definitely speed up development on many respects.

Please feel free to comment/ Criticize Speling,.! Punctuation?… I will probably write up a review/ first impression type thing when it gets here.

 

New Blog

Hello and welcome to my blog, I really didn’t have the time in order to update my website all the time and I really needed to start making a portfolio so basically I decided to start a WordPress blog, I am keeping the website but the only thing that’ll probably be updated at the moment is this blog until I have more time.