I stumbled across this video, really enjoyed it:
Tomorrow I’ll talk about my trip to the Jimmy Kimmel show.
Monthly Archive for June, 2009
2 random hilarious images!~
First, the saddest picture ever (but also has Megan Fox in it, so it sorta cancels it out… sorta) Be sure to click to enlarge:
Next, the kind of Transformer you hope you don’t find:
New splash screen, the sunbursts are actually animated so they spin around… quite a trippy effect in full screen:
We made that for S & G’s. And now for a something completely different:
Chad started some clientside interpolation for our prediction. Our goal is to have a smooth and enjoyable multiplayer experience. Basically what happens is the client (you) doesn’t rely on the server 100% for exact values of visual things like, for instance, the position of a ball. If your screen rendered exactly what the server told you and the game happen to have a little bit of lag, you’d see the ball warp across the screen. Instead using prediction and interpolation, it smooths out the movement to look more realistic even though the lag is still there.
Additionally, Chad just barely started implementing the physics, BulletX. Really looking forward to see what he’s going to manage.
Me? I’ve been doing crappy shit like advancing our GUI library to include tools for building a settings menu and shit. It’s really boring and I can’t wait till its done. Even though I hate it so much, I know its really needed. Such a simple tool yet so necessary for any decent game. Some games missed out on this feature and it really shows the lack of attention to detail. Although Infiniminer is a wicked fun game, it really blows ass to have to exit the game and edit a text file to change settings… oh well.
I’ve also been reworking the audio system thus far. Mainly improving performance and moving away from the MediaPlayer library. That thing sucks all sorts of donkey anus and I won’t go into how laggy it can be (you play a song and it waits 3 seconds while it blocks the rest of the application before you can actually hear anything).
I also emailed Steam, which you can keep up-to-date with here.
I don’t know if anyone needs this, but I sure as hell did:
http://www.foszor.com/blog/xna-color-chart/
Basically I made an app to generate the HTML code. Enjoy.
I had to give up my PS2 this evening… why? It’s all about growing up.
No no no… you got it all wrong… I’m not growing up, silly goose. My son Aidan is growing up. Seeing as I have an Xbox 360, Dreamcast and 2 laptops in my garage, I figured I could spare the hardware (well not really, but I’ll find a way to cope with my loss). He’s 3 1/2 now and we’re trying to find ways for him to become more independent.
First thing first is getting him out of our bed. I totally blame my wife and she takes full responsibility, but he’s used to sleeping in our bed. It all started when he was really young and I worked shitty hours. My wife didn’t like sleeping alone so she brought him in bed with her. Now that’s all changed and its becoming really annoying waking up in the middle of the night with a sharp pain in your back because his elbow or knee is digging in. So how do we solve this dilemma? Bribery. I told him I would give him the PS2 (along with the Guitar Hero controller) if he started sleeping in his bed… then after a solid week of doing so he’ll get a new game.
I’ll report back in a week and we’ll see how it went. By the way, while searching for the PS2 logo I came across this image. Holy fuck.
Video unrelated…
I was falling asleep driving home the other day, couldn’t keep myself awake! I started doing random weird shit and just happen to record it:
On another random note: A few days ago the most wonderful thing occurred. I played Garry’s Mod WITH my son. As most of you know Aidan loves the game. Maybe its because there’s no objective he can fail at, or maybe its because he can spawn as many Mossmans as he likes and shoot them in their face… I’m not entirely sure. But he loves the game!
About a week or so ago I custom built a laptop for my wife. I even threw in a nVidia card, the 9800 series or whatever… not exactly sure right now. Well anyways, it runs games great, even the Source Engine games. I figured… instead of Aidan taking over my computer and playing games he could play games on her laptop. So I created him a Steam account, gifted him my extra Half Life 2, then bought him Garry’s Mod. As if my son having his own Steam account wasn’t cool enough… this meant we could play games together!
It was awesome! I put him in a Ventrilo room with the transmit set to voice sensitivity and we played through a couple HL2 single player maps together. He was able to comprehend that it was his dad with him in game, he would ask me to follow him and watch him as he shot Combine and random citizens. Everything was going great until he decided to shoot me. I asked him to stop so he killed me with the crowbar. Being the tough guy I am, I respawned and took him out with an alt fire of the shotgun. BAD FUCKING IDEA!
Maybe he’s smart enough to figure out 3D games and coordination with keyboard+mouse controls, but the trauma of having his dad shoot him was too much. He broke down in tears, screaming and crying. Ask Chad he was there… it was pretty sad. Oh well, live and learn I guess.
And by learn I mean he learned not to fuck with his dad.
Edit:
By the way Aidan is 3, and Chad’s comment below was a true moment:
Aidan, put down the car and come over here… AIDAN PUT IT DOWN
Arcadium Software is well on its way into the Zinger! game developed in XNA.
Chad and I have had our struggles trying to create a game… mainly because we go “too big”. For two guys programming a game in their spare time, its a bit overwhelming to try and write a fully networked game engine from scratch… and then create a game for it. We gave it a shot but it was just a bigger undertaking than we had expected.
Seems like we couldn’t get our footing when it came to developing a stand alone game. We went back and forth on a “company” name (I use that term loosely, as its just a branding we’ve put on the software we develop), then it was the game engine itself, which we kept redoing and redoing from the ground up… ugh! What a mess!
We finally found the sweet spot. Not only do we have a name we love, but a game we love too! We said the hell with doing it all from scratch and use what tools are available to us out there. XNA has been a godsend! Sure its managed code and adds some prerequisites for the end user; like .NET Framwork 3.5 and XNA 3.0 Runtime, but it speeds up development time exponentially!
So far we have a working GUI, console and basic commands. Plus we’ve been able to connect to the server and transmit data back and forth (including syncing entities). We’re super excited!
One thing that’s really helped is we’ve set milestones for ourselves. Stuff like “compiling a level by tomorrow”, “connecting to the server in the next 6 hours”, “syncing the entity list by yesterday”. These are what keeps us driven and going in the right direction. We don’t always code the cleanest, but once its working we go back and sort it all out. SEEING our OWN progress has helped so much too, keeps us motivated.
If you want to see what we’ve got so far you can download it here. There’s no server to connect to right now, but enjoy anyways. Make sure you download the stuff I mentioned above.