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Canardia

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Blog Comments posted by Canardia

    Josh

    Posted

    It's actually wrong to compare Android and iPhone, since there is only one iPhone (a few different versions), and thousands of Androids. It makes more sense to compare a Galaxy S2 with iPhone 4, because they won't change much and don't have random specs.

     

    As a Indie, I don't really have to worry where my game works. I can choose to make a low-end game which should work on all phones, or I can choose to make a high-end game which works only on Galaxy S2, and perhaps on HTC Evo 3D and the new Motorola Atrix 5G.

     

    Even if I sell only 10 pieces of one game, I make profit, because the costs are shared with all games I make.

    Josh

    Posted

    Code::Blocks is kinda like a graphical makefile maker, so it should work then too. Possibly also CygWin can be replaced with MinGW, although I don't know yet if it's better or worse. Code::Blocks supports CygWin also, so either will work. I will test that when LE3 beta comes out.

     

    I haven't needed an Emulator with my Galaxy S2, because it has USB 3.0, which is insane fast. As soon I have an apk file, I can just do "adb install filename.apk" from the command-prompt, and it's right on my phone's desktop. That command can then be integrated into Code::Blocks as well, so I have a one mouse click action in my C++ editor to install it on my phone.

     

    For debugging I would use in-game statistics displays, I've always done that, and find it easier and faster than some debuggers, which usually then don't even work the same way as the release code. I could also write the output to a text file on my phone, because the phone is just like an USB stick, and I have mapped it with a drive letter, so then I have realtime debugging results on my PC.

     

    I've realized that also, that it's in the end faster to make the game first work in Windows. Because the same game code should work on Android then too, especially if you use only source code libraries, and no precompiled .o, .lib or .dll files.

     

    With modern high-end phones I don't even have to worry much about FPS, as they are sometimes faster than some low-end PCs :) For example my phone can run a game with terrain, physics, realtime shadows and lights at 60 FPS, while some low-end phones run it at 10 FPS. At 10 FPS I can still have realtime FFT water with reflections, but that's too heavy even for my phone.

     

    Then the porting is only one more independant step in your game development pipeline, which needs to be only once also, since then you have already all your libs ported and adjusted for your next game.

    Josh

    Posted

    Also with other engines you have to install 5 or more different SDKs, but that's just setting your computer up, and it's usually very well documented. Also when you install Windows, you have to install like 30 different SDKs, drivers, tools, programs, etc... Which is actually more difficult, but most people seem to have it working.

    The actual compiling should be quite easy though?

    Canardia

    Posted

    You will still need C++ with Lua, because at some point in your game development, you need more features than what the standard Lua commands can offer.

     

    I actually had an idea today when reading other people's Lua questions, that I could add a GameLib Lua template, which includes a custom engine.exe, which then brings more commands to Lua, and also faster commands, because most of the operational code would be in C++, and you only call the commands from Lua.

     

    The FPS template I'm making right now, will also have a TPS feature.

    Canardia

    Posted

    Now things start to get really easy :)

    The most difficult part was to get the first GameLib LEBuilder template working tidy and expandable, so that it can support also bigger game projects.

     

    Now I started to make a GameLib FPS template, which I will then simply add to the GameLib Template Pack.

    So there will be always only one GameLib Template Pack, which you can then download when you see it containing new templates.

     

    And with the new Database class, you can configure your games very easily using the SQLite Database Browser, for the parts which are not configurable in Editor. So there's no coding involved for many things in your game, but only GUI actions.

    Josh

    Posted

    MS Visual Studio for what? It's the most slowest compiler I've ever seen. People say they use Lua because it's instant, but instant is also MinGW compiling times. Plus MinGW creates faster code than VC. VC is totally useless, and LE2 supports MinGW 100%, since I use it every day with MinGW, and GameLib is also tested on MinGW.

     

    And for LE3, it's essential to have MinGW support on Windows, because it's 1:1 with GNU C++ on Linux, Mac and Android.

     

    LE3 development is looking damn good now, just keep doing it, I will then add Linux support, if it's not in the initial release. I know you don't like to support Linux, because it's not tied to money. Although the Linux people are willing to spend more money than any Mac or Windows people. They just don't have a target to spend it on. They had the indie packs, where it showed how crazy the Linux people are, they offered the most money for games, which were free. That means something.

     

    You would be a fool, not to respect a big number of people. There is no such thing as the one big market, but you have to support several markets to get the big market.

    Aria

    Posted

    ShiVa3D doesn't have GPU instancing, so if LE3 comes even close with it's GUI, it will rock the world!

    Unity3D is totally out of the race, since it's slow as hell, and it's slow even without the support of ANY shadows on Android and iPhone, iPad. So the rendering engine of Unity3D must be the biggest **** ever made. And on top of that, they charge you extra to publish on Android, iPhone, and other platforms, how gay is that? ShiVa3D has all in the price of one.

     

    I like ShiVa3D because of its Authoring Tool, it's one mouseclick and you have your game on 20 different platforms. The programming side of ShiVa3D is horrible though, it's a in-house Lua wannabe version, which doesn't support half of the Lua features, and you have to code more than in C++, because you need to put some copy/paste code in every damn entity. It doesn't even have #include directives so you could reuse your code and make standard libraries, but you always have to copy and paste everything. But yeah, it's still good because you can make Android apps with shadows with it.

    Canardia

    Posted

    That vision is not too far away, because I'm sometimes amazed myself how well the foundation libraries work. The source code for Flow for example, is ridiculously small. I will publish the source code soon too, after I have added a few LE2 integrated features into it. Every day a litte coding here and there pays off over the years, as with each cycle things get easier and more powerful.

    Josh

    Posted

    In my robot demo, I got about 20 FPS less in Lua than with C++, because it needs to calculate forces for each 8 limbs of each 40 robots each frame. That's apparently too much iterations for Lua. With LuaJIT it might be fast enough though. Sometimes there were also unexplainable halts for a second, which might be because of Lua's Gargabe Collection. In C++ it there are no halts.

     

    Or did you mean the LE3 is the first C++ engine for Android? Yeah it is, because there are only 3 somewhat usable engines for Android, and one of them is pure Java, one is JavaScript, and one is Lua.

    Josh

    Posted

    I've written some Android apps, and from my experience it's indeed easier and more productive to write first a fully working Windows game, and then compile it for Android. With LE3 that will be super easy, because it's the first 3D engine which supports C++ on Android. Other engines use Lua, or similar scripting languages, but they are too slow for advanced games.

    Josh

    Posted

    I think flowgraphs alone don't make non-programmers programmers, although they might take about 30% of the handicap to write code away. It might be still needed to have some code prefabs, which bring the expertise of programmers to the hands of artists, and they can access those prefabs via flowgraph entities.

     

    Even if people know a language, they don't necessarily know logic. Logic has has nothing to do with any language, but it must be learned seperately. Often the lack of understanding logic is seen with younger people, as it comes with life experience also, so for older people understanding and developing logic is almost trivial.

     

    Code prefabs can bring also the logic to the non-programmers, as they still would understand abstract high level logic, just not in-detail logic with all their if-then, flags, timers, and states.

    Canardia

    Posted

    The LEBuilder templates will help with those things too.

     

    It will be much easier to write a tutorial, and it's much easier to follow, when using a LEBuilder template, because you can focus on the actual tutorial, and don't have to write 10 pages of how to setup a C++ compiler first.

     

    And once I have this first template ready, it will be minimal code change to make a RTS, Platform, Car, and other game templates from it, because 90% of the template is identical.

    Josh

    Posted

    Must...consume...LE3...news.

     

    It's great that you keep daily updates of the LE3 progress, the forums are else so dead because everyone is focussing on writing games or waiting for others to write something productive and interesting.

     

    You could write even more, nothing beats the joy of reading a longer article with the first cup of coffee in the morning, let the information flow! :D

     

    So how does LE3 Editor save the CSG models? Are they saved as seperate mdl files? Or like in 3DWS as a complete 3dw scene?

     

    LE 1.0 allowed even procedural animations of CSG models, like MoveBrush(), can LE3 do that too?

    Josh

    Posted

    It's still Intel's fault that Mac chose Intel, because if they would have let Motorola to finish their 68060 series, they wouldn't have needed to switch. At that time Motorola had been quiet on new CPUs for some years and people thought it was dead, and it became dead because people thought so, and acted in panic.

     

    The Motorola was so much better than the Intel, because it could address the whole 32-bit memory range with a single command, while on Intel you needed those bloody segment and offset pointers, which are just ridiculous and completely useless, and it was only 16-bit even then.

     

    That's the same panic reaction what happens when stocks go down, or when the media says there is a global depression, then everyone acts accordingly and actually causes it.

     

    I think my next CPU will be AMD too, as the last one was already a tough decision, and I ended up with Intel, but afterwards I thought AMD would actually have been a better choice, because it has more cores, and the programs which can utilize them, run then much faster than on an Intel.

    Josh

    Posted

    Intel would be a much better company, if they wouldn't always make so ridiculosly easy to detect crimes:

    1) Making the Intel C++ compiler deliberately produce slower code for AMD CPUs with some useless NOPs

    2) Claiming that a single multicore CPU can ever achieve the speed of 128 or more GPU cores

    3) Killing Project Offset

    4) Killing the Motorola based MacIntosh, Amiga and Atari by supporting the PC

    Canardia

    Posted

    Controlled chaos is my Senf. I let brainstorms, ideas and inspirations come and catch them, write them down, realize them as time allows.

     

    Then again, it's only controlled chaos for the observers, as for me it's all very structured and logical. It's the lack of information and background explanations which makes a bit more complex things look like a chaos to observers.

     

    But I have to use the terms which the observers do, else it would be not connected at all.

    And no, I'm not phychic, I'm gnostic. It's a delicate difference, the other one is for real ;)

    Canardia

    Posted

    You didn't vote for Space Invaders, but for RTS.

     

    Anyway, one has to follow the majority, and not be turned down by some random individual opinions, that's the way it works. Unless you are an avantgarde artist, then you do just the opposite, which works also. So, in the end, you can do anything you want, and always find someone who likes it. As a hint: usually the rich people are avantgardists and want to pay a lot for exclusive items. They don't want to buy anything which is cheap, as they feel it's not worth enough then.

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