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.

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:

Also, media related:

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
• We’ve implemented Doxygen commenting which we compile and upload frequently
• 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.

So it’s been a process but I’ve finally got my OS upgraded. I went with Windows 7… yea yea I know its only a beta, but I didn’t feel like sticking with XP, and didn’t feel like buying Vista because Windows 7 is around the corner. So far so good.

As you can kinda see above, Gadget has been upgraded too. Chad did some slick stuff restructuring the layout and design of the engine, and this time we’re working on a lot of the low level utilities before we get ahead of ourselves. After a bit of debate, we moved to Multibyte Character Sets so that (if needed) we can support international languages. You can see our silly “TODO” list off to the side… which is piss poor but it works for now. We need a real project management system… any ideas?

Also added some new headers to the top of my blog, they are all pictures I’ve personally taken. Last time I kept the normal WordPress blog title text… which forced me to filter rape my images so it would show up against all the backgrounds. This time I just added the text to the header myself and avoided that problem all together.

Fortunately enough, we both have experience with the Source SDK (Chad more than I) and learned some great concepts from its example. We’re designing Gadget with a lot of Source Engine style ideas and organizing it similar to what Valve has done.

Back in the day I completely rewrote the Quake 2 engine… and made a couple of cool games out of it. But it’s been so long I don’t remember hardly anything anymore; I also blame Garry for making me lazy and scripting for the last few years… naw just kidding Garry But now I’ve realized something, and I quote from what I said to Chad:

“I never knew how much I didn’t know”

It totally sounds like double talk, but its true. I didn’t even know what a heap and a stack were, when to use references, pointers, structures… NOTHING! How’d I manage to make games? The fuck if I know… in retrospect it was like playing darts in the dark. I would randomly change stuff until it worked, not ever truly know why it worked.

We did a lot of work on it today, even made the logo (see above).

Media unrelated: