Slegg.net - Game Development, Rapid prototyping, Mobile Android and iOS, ShiVa » Thesis

Level Master 2000 is live@google code!

Christian — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 21:21:52 +0000

Level Master 2000: screenshot0001

Today I prepared the initial launch of Level Master 2000 at google code: http://code.google.com/p/levelmaster2000/. There are still a lot of features missing, as the project page states:

August 24th, 2010. Commited as is. Consider this more a preview/announcement rather than a real release. A major restructuring will occur within the next months, but anyway – here it is!

Nevertheless, it’s a good feeling finally having it on air and getting some feedback!

Level Master 2000: OSX test succeeded!

Christian — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 12:15:09 +0000

Since I use Qt and Qt Creator, I thought: “why not try a OS X build?”. I didn’t plan to invest much time in it, as time is rare, but I was simply too curious to resist. So I installed Qt SDK and Qt Creator on a Mac, opened up the Level Master 2000-project and…. CRASH =)
Qt Creator reported, that some files couldn’t be found, but when clicking on the include statement in code, the path seemed to be correct, as I could open the header file with F2.
So here’s what fixed it:

Clean all targets
Regenerate the qMake file via Qt Creator
Rebuild the project
Install the latest Flashplayer and add the app/AS3/bin directory to Flash Player’s local trusted

That was it! See for yourself:

Level Master 2000: running on OS X

The GUI needs a bit work though (e.g. the “delete entity” button), but all in all I’m really impressed how easy this was.

ShiVa: one awesome game engine

Christian — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 19:42:41 +0000

I recently stumbled over ShiVa, a 3d game engine. In fact, I am so impressed, that I’ll also include it in the rapid prototyping tool part of my thesis, although I actually have finished that chapter. For only around 200€, you get the full package: webplayer publishing, mobile devices (iphone and Android) and of course cross-platform PCs (Win,Linux,OSX).

I’ve ported a small 2D game we did for Android in about three days. Since I also had to get the hang of ShiVa, I think that is quite a small amount of time. I am going to wrap up the experience I made the next few weeks (hopefully more frequently than the last two months), so stay tuned!

Level Master 2000: Template Editor

Christian — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 19:05:46 +0000

Time flies. I know I promised some more info about the trigger class used in the Racing Demo. The bad new is: I haven’t written this down yet. The good news is: I made a user interface prototype for the template editor:

Level Master 2000: Template Editor Preview

It’s thought that one works himself through from left to right: first pick you components (left), name them (middle) and finally, set default properties and check those which should be visible in the editor when creating an entity from a template. Of course there’ll be a “professional mode”, which shows all the properties if one wants.
Improvement/thoughts are always welcome! I won’t start implementing it until around mid of August anyway.

Level Master 2000: Video of Racing Demo

Christian — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 09:41:28 +0000

As some people requested a video of the racing demo, here it is! The main purpose is to show off the custom event trigger with arbitrary event arguments, and how it integrates with Level Master 2000. I now a simple line edit for all event arguments is not very user friendly, but currently, time didn’t allow me to create a custom property grid type for it. Anyway, here’s the video:

I’ll post some more detailed info about this trigger class soon (hopefully this week)!

Level Master 2000: Racing Demo

Christian — Wed, 26 May 2010 19:23:11 +0000

The last two days I’ve been refactoring the Adventure Island Jump n Run Demo code, in order to be able to use parts of it for a Racing Demo. For this, I’ve written a generic Box2D trigger, which can fire any type of event, with any type of arguments (even PBE notation like #Player.Spatial.position)! If a player skips a marker/trigger, he gets respawned to the last legal one. I’ll post more about the trigger class soon, for now, here’s a pic of the scene in the Editor:

Level Master 2000 Racing Demo

The weeks before, I was mostly busy with writing the introductional / theoretical background chapters of my thesis. Turned out to be more work than expected…

Milestone 1: accomplished!

Christian — Mon, 03 May 2010 09:34:21 +0000

And that on time For Level Master 2000, this means:

Support groups in entity explorer
Project management (new, save, load)
Undo/Redo create and deleting entities/components (video to come)

All implemented. For my thesis this means: written a first version of chapter 3: overview of rapid prototyping tools. As posted recently, it’s in German, but I’ll port it over to English as soon as possible!

CryEngine3 For Free?

Christian — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 21:28:32 +0000

According to an article on www.develop-online.net, Crytek wants to join Epic Games with the Unreal Development Kit and Unity with it’s free edition, and also plans on releasing a “free to use” version of it’s upcoming CryEngine3! It is not yet clear, how the enduser license terms will be, but I bet they’ll be something like the ones Epic offers. Which again is very generous in my opinion.

This could also get interesting for my thesis, if it arrives soon enough. As stated in Rapid Prototyping Tool Investigation, I already cover Unreal Development Kit and Unity. The CryEngine would perfectly fit into that structure. But I guess it won’t be released within the next fex months…

Rapid Prototyping: Tool Investigation

Christian — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 19:14:34 +0000

For my thesis, I’ve started to investigate some tools, and how suitable they are for rapid prototyping 2d games. My list currently covers:

2D Boy’s Rapid Prototyping Framework
Cogaen / ACES
Game Editor
Game Maker
PushButton Engine
Torque Game Builder (Torque2d)
3D Packages, used for 2D prototyping (Unreal Development Kit, Unity, Virtools, Quest3D)

Although I’m writing my thesis in German, I guess I’ll find the time and post my resumes here. The good thing is, I don’t have to be that objective on my blog…so stay tuned

Starting with thesis…

Christian — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 08:19:02 +0000

No joke! I have started to setup my Latex project and have successfully ported my Word table of contents to it. I did have some trouble though, as we got our own style template here at the University, and at the first time compiling it*, I got an error like “GUI framework cannot be initialized”. First I thought this might be, because some package is missing, or rather “WTF”? Googleing a bit, the answer was “This happens when a missing package needs to be installed and the pop-up window cannot be displayed.”
The solution to the problem was, that I had to reconfigure TeXnicCenter, to automatically install missing packages, without ever asking me…somehow sounds “dangerous”, but on the other hand, what can happen?

*: Isn’t that the one and only dream of every programmer: compile your text document in order to be able to see it with all the formatting?