2-1
I've decided to extend this daily dev blog for another month, but with some additions to the contract. If I want to do something else, I am free to : So long as I still have something to show for it.
Something Unrelated : I spent several hours yesterday getting a property grid to edit a bitfield value with a bunch of check boxes, instead of a raw integer. This was supposed to be collision category and mask info for the physics objects. But then I realized that that is way too low-level for this, so I'm going to replace it with simple collision groups.
I have a sort of game-making tool on my hands here. The editor is nice. Really nice. The component model is even better. The ability to couple simple scripts to events in the editor is surprisingly powerful. I don't know what to call it. I don't necessarily want to call it Jemgine : Even though I have been calling it that so far, Jemgine is the application/gui framework I wrote in C++ over the last few years. This is something new, and much more specific to a certain kind of game. I'd like to name it after the game. Maybe something like 'Crustacean'. So I have to goals. Not just to produce this physicy-adventure game, but to produce a great tool for piecing these sorts of games together.
I plan to upload binaries of everything tonight. No source yet, sorry; it's not ready. (Don't misunderstand : My code is, as always, very well written. I just want it to be a little more feature-complete before I share.)
And that brings me to the other thing I want to do with this month. I want to write exactly one article, of a decent length, each week, detailing some aspect of the technical design of this thing. I plan to start with the entity component model. And then I think I will write about combining that with XNA's intermediate serializer for loading template definitions. This part might also include bits about cloning components off of the templates. Third part, the script driver, and all that. And finally, the fourth article, will be a simple editor for creating these entity templates - which I need to write anyway. I might have to write a whole other set of 'simplified' code to support this article series.
Ah, remember those binaries I promised? Here they are : http://jemgine.omnisu.com/projects/Crustacean2_1.zip
You'll need XNA installed - the redist should do. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=53867A2A-E249-4560-8011-98EB3E799EF2&displaylang=en
To use the game, you'll need a wired 360 gamepad.
[Edit] I have been informed that there's some sort of adapter for wireless gamepads. Yeah, that will work too. Sorry about the lack of keyboard support - I'm targeting the 360 first, so anything else is secondary. [/Edit]
You won't be able to actually try out any maps in the game - the game requires the map to go through the XNA content pipeline first. I know, sucks! Sorry about that. But, at least I might get some feedback on the editor itself.
