Imagine you’re driving a new car, and you go to work one of the controls for the air conditioning. You look down and figure out how it all works (because fuck the user manual) and you manage to figure it out. But there’s just one knob placement or setting adjuster that is just… strange in your opinion. You can use it the way it is, but if you’d designed it, it would have been somewhere else. Now imagine if someone reminded you that YOU designed that controller… and yet you don’t like it. Pretty stupid huh?
So we’ve brought our engine to a good place as far as progress, but neither of us liked the architecture! We both knew how to work everything, but we didn’t enjoy doing it like that. So it came to mind… WHY THE FUCK DO WE LEAVE IT THAT WAY? We have all the time in the world to make this the way we want to make it, so why rush through and not fix it. Plus its easier to fix now than later. So we created an empty project and we’re slowly moving stuff into a new design of the engine. I sound like a broken record but we’ve learned so much so far, we’re already trying to use this knowledge in the layout of the engine. It will be for the better and probably only set us a half day behind.
Oh and we’ve dropped the name “Gadget”. We don’t want to brand the game engine as a product, because its not. Its just a tool for us to make games with. So now its just “game engine”, which makes a lot more sense in the code as well because we had a class like CGadget and other shit like that, but when you look at the Source SDK you never (I might be wrong with “never”) see the term “Source” reference to the engine itself.
OH! For those of you who don’t follow me on Twitter… our game engine play its first sound yesterday! I was sooo fucking excited when I heard it I about shit myself. I know it seems like a small feature, but its like seeing your child take a first step.
And for those who haven’t picked up on it; after a bit of discussion we wanted to have our name be a little more unique and stick out. Previously I mentioned we were working under the name Backburner Interactive, but we’ve since changed it to Bakburner/Etc. Yes its missing a “C”, yes its a slash and yes its “etc”. It makes total sense in our heads and if you need more of an explanation let me know.
Just a quick blog for today. We’re going with Oggs Vorbis as our primary sound format instead of MP3. Mainly because MP3 requires a license anytime you write a decoder… yea fuck that shit. Fuck that shit royally in the butt. Plus once you have the libraries included in your project the files are pretty damn easy to work with.
As Chad keeps chipping away at the renderer, I continue work on the audio portion. I can’t say this enough but if nothing else this project has been such a learning experience for me. Little by little I’m grasping concepts of C++ programming I never even knew existed… totally awesome.
Speaking of audio; Bakburner/Etc has grown a bit. I recently found out Brock aka Edward the Retarded Medic or DoctorMowinckel is an amateur sound editor. Fortunately for him we’re a couple of amateur game developers so he fits in perfectly. We’re still looking for 2D and 3D artists. Hit us up.
Yea so its finally starting to look like a fucking game engine, woohooo! No we’re not even into the 3D stuff yet but Chad has taken the renderer to the next level… its actually rendering stuff now! Plus he got the first implementation of materials working, which is a huge leap on its own. I’ve been working on the world manager and base entity, and learning a lot as I go.
About three weeks ago we were discussing different aspects of Gadget and I found an article on one of them. I immediately began reading it with full enthusiasm only to close it 45 seconds later due to complete fucking confusion and a total lack of understanding of what was going on. Just today I came across that VERY SAME article and was able to read it start to finish with a 90% understanding of what the author was trying to explain… I shit you not.
I’m very much a visual learner; rarely to do I bother to read anything other than the very minimal I need to get started. Directions to putting some Ikea furniture together? BLASPHEMY! Instructions for a new TV? Hobbosh! Installation steps for software?! ARE YOU KIDDING ME?? I just do it and figure it out as I go, ’nuff said.
The other half of Bakburner/Etc probably feels like an adult teaching a Jerry’s Kid to cross the street, but its finally starting to pay off. This is for you Chad:
I’ve been so fucking derailed from my normal tasks lately. The other day I was browsing an old website backup and I found the LuaBin folder.. which totally made me laugh. That thing worked well but was wrote like shit. Since it disappeared I’ve had a few (well more like several) people ask me what happened to it. I didn’t pay much attention to the subject until I found the code and realized how much better I could have made it. And so began my week long derail.
LuaBin has been revived. I rewrote it from scratch and restored the snippets I had in the backup. I went for a clean and easy interface and maximized the syntax highlighter. I still use Geshi but I’ve utilized it to its full potential and extended the keywords…
Oh…! I have to derail this blog about being derailed with a short derail: Is it just me or are some people complete fuck-faces and overuse the vote kicking in Left 4 Dead? I joined a verses server the other day on the infected team and spawned as a hunter at the start of No Mercy. The survivors ran down the stairs (of course) and I jumped down the glass sunroof. They encountered the other infected and killed them all. So this one douche is like:
WHAT ARE YOU DOING FOSZOR? ATTACK THEM! ATTACK THEM NOW!
So I’m trying to get to them but they’ve shut a few doors so I have to beat them down. What happens? I get vote kicked! They didn’t even give me time to explain the fact that they were stupid cunts… err… I mean that I was stuck behind some doors and wanted to maul their faces off like a pet chimp… err… was trying trying to get to the action. I could have explained myself quicker but my mic was broken…
Oh…! Time to derail this short derail with a different derail: So the other day my mic just randomly stopped working… I can’t figure out what happened. I tried messing with my system settings but I’m pretty sure its a problem with the mic itself because of the weird feedback I get and I tried my DJ mic and it worked fine. Fucking hell! So I went to order an identical headset (because I heart mine so much) only to realize the god damn things are still almost $100! WHRY!! They were $100 like four years ago. How can they still be that much? I mean I got these for free as a promo gift but still…
Oh…! This is a short derail to the previous derail: Speaking of free, have you guys tried the new Battlefield Heroes beta? They said they focused on the backend but its still pretty crappy at the moment. The game itself works decent. I mean I get a black screen when I join a game 50% of the time, and the matchmaking is worse than the Left 4 Dead system… but for a beta its cool. Seems like no one wants to be Royal Army and everyone is a National.
To sum it all up:
LuaBin == done
L4D players == idiots
mic == broke
BFH == cool + needs work
me == brack to wok on gadget
Hilarious video. I noticed I hadn’t updated in a few days so I’m throwing this up because I found it so funny. I’ll do a real update soon. Maybe even today. If you’re lucky. Maybe not. Who knows. Why so serious?
Edit: I just realized my last 3 blogs weren’t much, okay I’ll definitely update today.
I still have Windows XP running on my laptop that I keep in my garage. One thing I hate about Windows is how it FORCES you to do things you DO NOT WANT TO DO:
So… if you’re logged in and you visit the homepage for YouTube, there’s an area that has recommended movies for you. I suppose its based off previous visits and all sorts of informational statistics its collected (it is Google powered after all). This is what YouTube decided I should watch…
So… we’re pretty sure that’s the name we’re going to go with. We liked the name Modulus Software, but guess what… some people are already using it! No big deal. It didn’t quite roll off the tongue anyways.
Backburner Interactive’s first project is a game engine, dubbed Gadget. The name comes from thinking of something that does stuff. And what better than a widget or a… gadget. Makes sense? No? Well go fuck yourself. Its just a damn name you picky son of a bitch.
Our goal is simple: create a new platform on which to prototype/develop games. As of right now we’re just working on the fundamentals. So far..
We’ve designed the structure, layout and coding style
We have a launcher application (gadget.exe) that loads the interfaces (renderer, engine, console, filesystem, etc…)
Gadget can mount compressed ZIP files to access any file as if it was on the local disk
We’ve started some of the menial yet important stuff like logging, xml parsing, performance benchmarking and the like
It can do more stuff I can’t think of at the moment
What it can’t do:
Render anything other than a black screen, process any input, output any sound… pretty much it does nothing that appears to be a game of any sort
Why is this okay? Well our approach has been to start literally from the ground up. From simple stuff like reading/writing files, creating interfaces for each portion of the engine, monitoring performance and designing shit loads of classes and macro tools to help us down the road. The renderer will be started soon… well technically its already started there just isn’t much to see from it. Not much to see, but here’s a little peek at whats going on:
I was looking back at my introduction post to Gadget and its amazing to see how much the VC++ solution has grown and how much we’ve actually changed (the entire design of the engine has changed 100%). Since Chad is so lazy with his blog, I’ll keep you all updated.
Grr… the plugin I was using to display my recent tweets was getting annoying because it didn’t work half the time. I found Twitter does it for you and wondered why I hadn’t found that in the first place! If you’re going to use the HTML widget here is a little trick to help you customize it with CSS:
Of course you can change those to whatever, but keep in mind the selector names… I had to dig through Twitters CSS sheets to figure them out!
I was cleaning up stuff on my blog and I got to thinking about all the images I reference or link on here. I started browsing through my image gallery and it cracked me up seeing some of them. I thought other people might enjoy it so I found a plugin that allows you to browse through them all and see what post referenced them.
Also, took some pictures of the last 20 minutes of my drive home the other day. WHRY!? Shit I don’t know, bored I guess…
I found a holy Quran app for my phone and downloaded it so I could post in the comments "God bless u for this app" then uninstalled itabout 23 hours agofrom Ping.fm
