4th of July Weekend

Dunno what you guys are all doing, but here are some cool ideas! Esp. the last one if you are near good fireworks!!

http://www.instructables.com/id/4th-of-July/

http://www.instructables.com/id/Buffalo-Wings-Recipe/

http://www.instructables.com/id/Photographing-Fireworks/step2/Camera-Setup/

Teaser

Thought I'd show you a lil somethin somethin ;)  No more pink rexy!

Quick Update

Okay, well to check in with you guys as I take my 3:30 am break:

Today I have made great progress! As it is, you can spectate or join the game. If you join the game as a human, you actually are a pink t-rex. If you join as a dino, you are a normal looking raptor. So I am now in the process of melding into netPlayer a first person view capability so that the human can actually be a ..err.. human.

Then I am going to hook up the controls and movement for the players so that that is shared through the network as well as everything else. As it is it's only local, as I ripped out the code when I was having some issues from before. I am going to build it better this time, but it's already rather fun as when you spawn as a dinosaur, the camera is behind you, so actually feel like you are running around in a real game!

Decisions decisions

*splash* *breathe*
Okay, well, I've got the webserver now displaying a chat history box so that the website can perform full two way communication with the players in the game. I want to add CSS to the webserver so that it can look a lot better and more organized/user-friendly. Getting the ball rolling here is entirely reliant on a simple line or two, and as I've already given internal tags css ids, I kind of want to do that.

But I also have work to do cleaning up the entity transmission code: animations need to sync over the network too. I've fixed every glitch I've been having, but in the process of re-writing the code the 2nd time the players no longer transmit their positions, only the server transmits its! Kind of an important step hah. So that is also on my immediate to do list.

Third, I would like to add more UI elements to facilitate choosing and switching teams and spectating. Once this is in, it's a hop, skip, and a jump to having actual gameplay being possible. Anyway, this 'lil submarine is goin back down into the coding depths *plunge*

Upperdates

Well, unfortunately I won't be doing much more work on at least one of my recent songs as after a little bit of work it seems to jig Live into only my right audio channel and if I barely touch the set Live just crashes and I have to wait a while so I can restart it. Soo, I am typing this. Networking is coming along great! I do wish it was coming along faster, but who doesn't. As well, it actually has come quite fast, because I got it all working manually already! But, I trashed that after getting an awesome response from the Unigine crew shedding a little more light on their networking system.

Long story short is that I was essentially going to be recreating some parts of what they've already done, so I decided it would be best to use theirs - after all, it will be the most likely candidate if there are somehow any engine-side speedups that can be taken advantage of (in the e-mail they mentioned increasing performance with networking) anyway. So, things have hit a few hitches. Nothing major really, just silly minor bugs - the kind that any really serious project requires attention to. Such as states being shared by the server somehow mismatching the server's actual memory, so that while even ON the server there are the right amount of players, anyone who joins gets anyone who hasn't joined. Most likely I have either missed a command, or something else, perhaps an assert or if-return is running before the right destruction procedure. So far though, the logs on both server and client's consoles read a-ok. It's possible it is a Unigine side problem, but this already spans a good 13-15 files already and it really could be split into more so I am not ruling out that it's my error somewhere. Looks like Live has stopped so I'm gonna play around with some music for a bit and get back to coding. :)

netWORKING

Whooooo!

Working Net

Just wrapped my head around how we are likely to be doing networking in Uningine. Still lots to ponder, will report back here - gonna let my brain rest for a bit hehe :D

Whoo pathing

Hooray! Got pathing functioning. Currently it just uses linear interpolation but we needed it without having to use the standard Uniengine pipeline of using 3ds Max. We are doing it so that we can place out nodes, or trace camera movement, in-engine, then replay that behavior on command. My code is in my personal testbed, as is Michael's in his, so tomorrow (read: later today) we are going to merge them.

Hopefully a pretty video will result once we have all this done. Also will be able to be used for cinematics, object motion, and many other such things!

(edit)
Welp, it's now 6 AM and I have stayed up FAAARRR too long!  BUT!  I created a server statistic/management page and successfully have communications from game to web and from web to game! Victory! Great success! *passes out*

CVars

Today I got console variables working in Uniengine. These will hopefully be quite useful, especially later on once we get game modes in and going for all the tiny mechanical tweaks.

Reboot! *tap, tap*

Long story short, I had to reinstall Windows clean. It will be for the better so all is well, but bear with me as I fall back into step!

Busy little bee

So sorry I haven't been updating! In between keeping up with school work and projects and Red Orchestra I just haven't had even thought about updating! My bad.

Basically I've just been catching up in schoolwork, lazing around for my little Thanksgiving break (way needed it!), and coding on my lil SFML thingy. I am not sure what it's going to be yet, possibly just a template codebase. I got an undo/redo system in and working for the most part - but wanna fine tune it and improve controls for the editor - otherwise the basics are almost all done! I tried implementing CEGUI, which I have done before, but I am thinking in one of the newer versions they changed a fundamental usage of it so I ran into some dumb issues when trying to integrate it with SFML - will have to return to that later..

There needs to be more US-based Red Orchestra servers, and more people need to play on them. I do fine with my pings as it is, but always playing with French/German/Russians get old - wish I was at least picking up on their languages better than I seem to be.. If you play let me know, it's such a fun game! Especially when there are lots of people in the server, it really gives a sensation unique to those sectors of World War II.

Splines!

Sorry for not posting in so long. Went through a super heavy week, then schoolwork catchup, then reading. Anyway, I have returned to SFML and been doodling a little bit in various small projects I'm piecing together. I decided I should kill two birds with one stone and clear out more of my fixfox tabs (down to 71!) AND make a tech demo/proof of concept for myself on splines.

A while back I was reading up on them heavily, I didn't want to use a formula I didn't truly understand. I got them down great, and realized how awesome of an exercise they actually were in matrix maths!

That aside, I never actually DID anything with them. So I just whipped this up in about an hour and a half. It mainly took so long because I was trying different things with SFML's Shape system. I think in the end it came out pretty nice though! It currently supports Hermite, Cubic bezier, and Catmull-Rom splines. I would like to make it more interactive, so that one can simply drag the points around rather than just generating a new one and sliding about it. Probably should eat some supper now though, mmmmm. Beef stew to the rescue!

OpenMP + BSGP

Spent a large portion of my afternoon today reading over OpenMP and then BSGP, which stands for Bulk-Synchronous GPU Programming. Essentially it is attempting to do something similar to what OpenMP attempts to do for concurrency to the GPU arena. By this, I mean it is for general purpose programming on GPUs, and it attempts to also be quasi-cross-compatible across different manufacturer's cards. As it is CUDA et al. is fine, but they are all limited to their respective manufacturer's cards only. BSGP takes a similar-to-C-syntax blurb as a kernel function for a large number of stream based processors to run in parallel (way more than just 2 or 4 cores - but they are only good at certain things as compared to a CPU).

Pretty interesting stuff, I hope to apply OpenMP to my projects in the future especially! Beware jumping straight into it though - I think the guide that I have linked to does a fairly good job of catching you up on it but ANY multi-threaded programming will benefit from a thorough understanding of the intricacies and difficulties-by-nature of concurrency/parallelization.

Fast PictureBox/Graphics Context Drawing (Manual Backbuffering) in C#

While I was working on my Lissajous Curves application, I ran into the issue of re-draw. I was using Visual Studio 2008, .NET 3.5, and everything was going fine except for the refresh rate on the picturebox. It was rather unacceptable. Keep in mind that my very first step had already been to check the Backbuffered property on the Form to true. One would think that it would show similar gains as any traditional backbuffering implementation would, but on the contrary I found no real benefit to the flag. It ended up that manually backbuffering was faster, so I present my implementation.

There are probably other ways to go about this, but this is the fastest I have come across so far. It's rather simple and is just the backbuffering process word for word basically. Instead of drawing straight to our target, we will have two targets, and one we show while we draw on the other. When we finish drawing, we switch out the targets and begin drawing on the one they WERE seeing, and repeat.

If you are doing any serious kind of computer graphics work then you should probably already be familiar with this concept, so I will stop elaborating on it. On to the important bits!

First, I presume you use CreateGraphics(), probably on the component you wish to issue draw commands to. You then use your received context's DrawEllipse() or what have you to draw on it.

All we do differently now, is we are going hold two graphical contexts and one bitmap.

In your declaration, or in the function, or whatever you are currently using, you probably have something as described above, like:

Graphics pictureboxContext;

We will be replacing this, as described above, with:

Bitmap backbuffer;
Graphics backbufferContext;
Graphics pictureboxContext;

Now, in your form's _Load() function, where you should have something along the lines of:

pictureboxContext = picturebox1.CreateGraphics();

We will now add to this and expand it to: (note pictureboxContext remains, so of course match the names to fit - just incase you're not paying attention ;P)

backbuffer = new Bitmap(pictureBox1.Width, pictureBox1.Height);
backbufferContext = Graphics.FromImage(backbuffer);
pictureboxContext = pictureBox1.CreateGraphics();

Now, instead of drawing to our picturebox's Context, we will be drawing to the backbuffer's. When we are finished drawing onto the backbufferContext ( e.g. backbufferContext.DrawEllipse(...) ) and want to display our new buffer, we will need to blit it out to the picturebox's context. We can easily do this using the Graphic's class's DrawImage function:

pictureboxContext.DrawImage(backbuffer, 0, 0);

There is nothing special about this, and I honestly feel that this is what the Backbuffered flag should have been doing behind the scenes all along, but oh well. I found this useful enough of a discovery to back-propogate it to my internship's C# terrain editor's display. So I hope someone else out there finds it useful :o)

~Jasmine

Visual Studio 2010

Soo I have some time before class and was going to give VS2010 a spin. Reading the What's New was awesome, static_asserts for C++ sound great, concurrency system, hooray! I had also heard they gave C++ a GUI editor much like VB/C#'s. Well, I tried creating a New Project, of Win32 calibre, with default settings (not empty project), and upon compilation with no changes...errors.

Boo! So next I tried Console with empty project. Well, same error. Link.exe exits with code 1.

Apparently in Microsoft.Cpp.Win32.Targets this is the offending line:



Not enough time before class to mess with it, so whatever. Otherwise things seem pretty nice, typing the little bit I did in the new editor with its anti-aliased text and whatnot was nice, although I remember reading that Intellisense is missing out on lots of normal features in this edition of C++, at least for now? Wonder if Visual Assist X will put these back in.

Oh well, back to '08 for now.

Curvy!

Thought I would update you, just added the Butterfly curve and Rose curves to my lil Curve plotting app :> Oh, and I forgot to include sources last time, they are at the bottom of this post after the pics.

Source Code (C#)

Differentials Explained

So, in spirit of the last post - and because I shared this on facebook the other day and forgot to include it here, here is a wonderful video from the pre-WWII era explaining differentials! It's a wonderful video.

Richard Feynman - 'Fun to Imagine'

Just found an awesome video from the links section of betterexplained.com. It's Richard Feynman, who was a physicist. This is actually the last clip on Youtube of the film this is from (specifically note it's part TWO of the last clip). Link to the beginning is below clip. Hope you enjoy as much as I did!



Linksies

The beginning of 'Fun to Imagine' (above talk)
Betterexplained.com - This is an informative site. He breaks down a wipe variety of math topics into nice, easy to understand versions. I think much in the same vein as Feynman would encourage. "Learn right not rote." is their motto. The links section I linked to earlier in this post leads to his "Links" page, where people can submit things they found that fit in with this - it led me to this video.

Lissajous Curves

Well, the internships are going great! Got the fists in and animated, now we just need to touch up the animations and get 'em skinned and get better sounds. It's looking good though! I can't wait to get it playable, and to show you guys :o) I actually have a few in-house videos already but I'm not sure if it's ready for public release yet..but I do have something I can show!!

I was reading some thread on cymatics when this guy in the comments used the word Lissajous to describe sand movement. I googled this strange word and found no definition, but instead a Wolfram's and a
wikipedia mathematics page. Quite informative, but fairly heady. There was once a time when I would shy away from this, but this time I decided, "Hey, I want to make a program that utilizes these!" And so, I did.

Here is the result of a total of about two hours, I suggest you download it and play with it :) I hope the Dance mode works as smoothly on slower PCs as it does on mine..let me know what you think! It's fairly silly but was a great learning experience. Here's some pics to show it happened:





I am including a link to the Release .exe. It's written in C# and so will require the .NET 3.5 framework.

Click to download Lissajous Curves Win32 Binary

~Jasmine

SIO2

Well, had a meeting today for my iPhone internship and we are currently undergoing a test checkout of SIO2, an iPhone game engine. It actually looks pretty sweet so far, it's very close to how I would currently design a game engine which is good: it utilizes Bullet, an open source physics system, it also of course utilizes the OpenAL/OpenGL ES already on the phone. At first I was rather wary about throwing out all the Quake 3 engine work we've done because I think we really are close to the ball starting to roll downhill rather than up, but oh well, what can you do. There are definitely big pros and big cons to both choices. We'll see how this thing does.

I can't say I'm not excited though. I'm getting my little schoolgirl squeal excitement about playing with this thing as I go through the videos - I've been itching to start up with Ogre again recently (was actually gonna post a thing about it actually) and on the forums I read that the current version utilizes an Ogre scene graph-inspired layout! It's almost like a nice refreshing dream come true. Built specifically FOR the iPhone, open source (I think? sort of? At least there are user patches on the forums for some thing (faster PNG loading in particular)), fairly sexy, etc... But it's not Quake 3. :~(

I really would like to develop on Quake 3, and I really would like to explore SIO2. I'm not sure about estimation for time frame with SIO2 though, but I guess when all is said my answer I don't care either way. Hell, I'd like to do them both if we had time and energy to spare lol


spoon!