Jump to content
XCOMUFO & Xenocide

Mamutas' Updates


mamutas

Recommended Posts

Year 2005
====================================================
[b]January 7th, 2005[/b]
I have been in touch with Xenocide all those days, even if I have not contributed any code yet.
What I have been doing is the studying of the current Planetview code (mostly the changes since my departure) and, especially, the shaders written for the globe. I would like to do that since I want to understand better what is OGRE support for shader languages (how are they setup in the materials, etc.) and how to write a shader in general.
Yesterday, I wrote my own fragment shader for the globe, which achieved almost the same results as one from rincewind. Not bad for the first serious shader! *pats himself on the back* I hope to see a different results on the poles (no black spots while running on GL), but it did not happen. :(
I am going to look some more into the vertex shaders and after that I hope to finally write some code. I has not finalized on the task I will pick up, yet.

[b]January 1st, 2005[/b]
Happy New Year everyone!
As you may have noticed I am making my appearence on the board here again. You can almost call it back from the dead. :P
So, what happened, you may ask? Well, a lot!
During the recent months besides all the usual and routine occasions (car accidents, illneses, money troubles, etc.) I had a couple of fairly unregular events.

In the timely order, first I have changed my job. I stayed in the same company but I moved to a different project, where I am now in the very lead position in a extremely complex and important project. In two words: our company bought another company, which had a market leading software, that was in development for 10 (or so) years. Now our goal to take this project and make it even more perfect. In 9 months. The circumstances almost like with the Xenocide: team is made from people from over the world, the project is a mix of many languages and techniques, and the customer loves and wants that project. So, I hope I will be all right. :)

The second event is a born of my second son. The man is one month old now and he surely knows how to demand the things he wants. And one of the first thing he wants is his attention. And so does my first son. So daddy is trying to be everywhere and do everything at the same time. ^_^

Ok, enough about me. Lets talk about you.
I got on the boards yesterday and I swear I did my best trying not to miss anything important amongst all those 21 pages of unread topics. Then, of course, I got the code and, WOW! It compiled and run from the first attempt! Great job, guys! =b However, I would not be able to achieve anything without the Quick Start doc and The Updater app. :master: before people who did those!
I have spent some time looking at the bug database, but I was sure eager to see the code. Nice siurprise - I still find the lines I wrote. That sort of make me proud of myself, as it very often happened in the past, that the new release is got written from the scratch. I guess, that is a good sign - old code stays in, the new code is added, the progress made. Again, great job guys! =b Thanks to all the people who contributed to that release.

Anyway, thank you very much for reading this. I am sorry, but I did not mean it to be that long.
And as I wrote earlier, the life is not going to keep me idle, however I will try to find a place for Xenocide in it. See you on the boards! :wave:
==================================================== Edited by mamutas
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 5 months later...
Year 2004
=====================================================
[b]September 16th, 2004[/b]
I am back.
Not a full time, but as much as I can.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[b]April 27th, 2004[/b]
Quite of few interesting events happened since my last update.
One of the most interesting is the chat between me, RK and two lead Yake developers. Yake is a framework for game development, which goal is to integrate all nice open source libraries into one useful package. Those libraries would include graphics (from OGRE), physics (from ODE), sound, XML and much more.
Me and RK are currently in discussion on how it will affect our work.
[b]April 15th, 2004[/b]
Few more days worth of work and it is getting really close...
I need to check it over again and hopefully within a week I will have Xenocide/UITest application out. You may start looking at OGRE UI scripts now already.
[b]April 9th, 2004[/b]
I have commited the code to CVS today. I tried to make it flawless as much as I can, but I will do it one more run later. Then I will make an internal package, so members can install it on their machines. Expect no support on that! You are welcome to grab it, but do it on your own risk for now.
The code features two screens: the start screen and the planet view without the planet. First one works fine so far, but the second has a bug (I swear it is not mine, but OGRE's!!!). I will beat on it more and post news here.
So, aren't you excited about that? And, yeah, don't dare to ask me how much I accomplished during my first year!!! :) J/K.
[b]April 5th, 2004[/b]
Chatted yesterday with RK about my recent code. The code was generally approved and cleaned up. RK has provided a convinient tools to move files around into one directory to easy the distribtion. Some more cleanup will be done and code will be committed to CVS. The wait is almost over!
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[b]March 25th, 2004[/b]
Ta-Da!!! <-- music playing here...
Yes, I finally finish some button action code and chased down all crashes. The result is an executable which displays you start screen and allow to switch from it to planet view and back. This executable is built on new OGRE-based UI framework which will be the foundation for all future UIs.
I have submit code to RK review and as soon as I will get feedback from him and clean it up, I will commit it into CVS for all developers pleasure.
Then, I will crank up a sample UI, write some manual how to make UIs and the ball will be in UI designers hands after that.
[b]March 22nd, 2004[/b]
Was working on action code for buttons. At the last moment, when I thought I got it working I started to get general exceptions... Some hours were spent, but the problem was not resolved...
Very late in the night, I realized that the general architecture approach was wrong: I don't need to destroy camera, viewport and event processor every time, I switch the UI.
Oh, well... Some code needs to be rewritten.
[b]March 19th, 2004[/b]
I made one more visit to frame listener I mentioned in previous news. I took what I used (stock OGRE's frame listener) and stripped all extra camera movement code from it. It become new, mean and lean, frame listener class, which I plan to use as basic for for all Xenocide frame listeners.
Now, I can peacefully add button actions processing. :)
[b]March 18th, 2004[/b]
Yesterday (and partially today) more code has been written. The prototype of Start Screen is almost finished: UI is displayed, all buttons are in place. I added OGRE's sample frame listener, so cursor could be displayed and buttons react to mouse clicks. But no actions are hooked to the buttons yet. That is the next thing to do.
[b]March 14th, 2004[/b]
Did you notice that my news refers to code written a day before? That is because I stop writing the code next day after I started. :)
Anyway, I work on expansion of the functionality of different UIs of Xenocide. The particular one I am working is the Start Screen UI. It won't be a full implementation, but it will server following purposes: it will lead to PlanetView or it will lead to TestUI view.
The TestUI view is the tool me and RK thought to make for our UI designers. It will allows non-programmers to create and test UIs without recompiling or anyhow else touching the game code. It all came with the power of OGRE. :) Basically, there will be a set of script files defining UIs, textures, fonts, etc., which will loaded and dinamically interpreted. You can start now by learning the script syntax [url="http://www.ogre3d.org/docs/manual/manual_15.html#SEC24"]here[/url]. I will post more details as soon as I have code finished.
[b]March 8th, 2004[/b]
More code was written. The framework is in place and refined. PlanetViewUI class got some code and now displays RK's UI mockup. MoviePlayer class has some temp code which displays a background image. UI could be created independently without any issues. None of them has interaction though. That is the next thing to do.
[b]March 1st, 2004[/b]
Continue work UI framework conversion. Finished main Xenocide application class, which now contains instantination of all common OGRE engine objects: Root, Window, SceneManager. Hooked Xenocide application class to the rest of the framework to the point of error-less compilation. The package names and directory structure were adjusted appropriately. [i]The conversion is over!!![/i]

Next thing to do is to put some meet inside PlanetViewUI class. Remember that framework is just a set of interfaces to facilitate state management and switching between different UI. The UI classes themselves still are empty. I will work on PlanetViewUI class to integrate the UI RK created as an OGRE sample and to work out details on creation of ligths, cameras and scenes. Later, I will implement stubs for some more UIs just to see the flow between them.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[b]February 11th, 2004[/b]
Finally, I can say I wrote code. All that reading and researching coming to the end and real coding is picking up the pace again.
So far I took RK Xenocide Geoscape UI mockup and finally build on my machine. It was done "the OGRE" way. That is the application was put inside the OGRE code tree just as all OGRE's examples are. But that is not what we needed. So, I took the code out and moved it to Xenocide code tree. Of course, OGRE did not like it, so there was a work to please it. But, finally after path adjustment and necessary resource copying, I did it and first official Xenocide Geoscape UI mockup is a part of Xenocide! Yay!
Next thing to do is to restore UI framework built on XenoEngine. And this requires some more researches... For example (for those who knows OGRE): is that possible to have more thant one Root object and swap them as needed? Huh?
Anyway, watch for some CVS commits soon.
[b]February 3rd, 2004[/b]
Yeah, the last month was (and is!!!) busy, but I have done some progress in recent 3-4 days. I am still studying OGRE (that is quite an engine, I must say!), but I hope that within next few days I will be able to mockup some Xenocide UI based on OGRE.
At the same time I am looking in Resource addition per RK request. That will be our enhancement for OGRE, which will allow us to use resources from PAQ file created by our own Exio!
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[b]January 21st, 2004[/b]
Well, it is almost a month since my last update, so I feel an urge to let you know what I am doing.
No, I did not die or went to college. Yes, I have finished my hardware upgrade and all pain is finally gone. Almost.
Besides my Real Life became really busy at the moment, so I am able to spend only few hours per week for Xenocide needs (which are mostly spent on chat sessions with RK :)).
I am in the process of studying and researching OGRE. I plan to provide some demo of Xenocide new UI architecture on new engine and that is what I have as my second priority task.
The task number one is to research addition of additional resources to OGRE.
Also, great discussions in SF mailing list keeps my attention too. If I have not answered yet, behold! I promise I will post answers to all your emails. Edited by mamutas
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 9 months later...
Year 2003

=====================================================
[b]December 22nd, 2003[/b]
It was a while since last my update. Lots of RL things interfered and I did not really had time to do a lot for Xenocide. But it will be over soon.
As I type, my home machine is getting cleaned up and ready for new OS and all development tools installed. It will be all new: new engine, new IDE, New Year. :)
[b]December 10th, 2003[/b]
Worked on UI framework some more. At the moment I have implemented placeholder classes for Movie Player and Planet View (aka Geoscape). It needs some finishing touches and I will post an announcement about it.
The next step is to develop framework further (create classes for other views and link them together). By the time I finish it, I hope we have engine integrated into the code. Then new Geoscape will be born!
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[b]November 30th, 2003[/b]
Last day of November... One month to go...
Was working on implementation of a place holder for the movie player. It just display a single picture, but it is already there and working. :)
Also, I chatted with RK about the new engine and other things. There are some significant changes, so keep your eyes for announcements.
[b]November 25th, 2003[/b]
So, I am back, ok?
First, I downloaded the code from CVS and made sure it is compalible. I have updated devpack with PAQ Explorer project as well. I noticed that some code which went into v0.0.4 is missing from CVS (for example, a new shader). Can anyone update me on that?
Second, I have zipped up all that code and put it on [url="https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=67048"]https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=67048[/url] for all your downloading pleasures without setting up CVS first.
Next, I plan to continue to work on Xenocide UI infrastructure tieing (??? is that how you spell it???) all different views together.
[b]November 21st, 2003[/b]
I am still traveling, so not much is here to say about my work on Xenocide. I should be able to continue it in a couple days.
[b]November 17th, 2003[/b]
Integrated RK's sample code of XNetDB preview into Alpha 4 code. Added set of beautiful images from Deimos and shipped it to Micah. DIDN'T play U:AM demo.
[b]November 4th, 2003[/b]
That week was a beginning of exciting new step in the game development: the discussion of data interfaces. Me and RK has exchanged few emails covering what kind of interfaces (that is a programming term, FYI) the data should have. Soon we will post it in SF mailing list.
Also, another topic of discussion was the directory structure of the Xenocide project as well as some initial implementation of client and server.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[b]October 23th, 2003[/b]
Few more files went into Xenocide applicatoin yesterday: added UIManager, IUIState and MoviePlayer classes.
Researched the issue with message in Engine Assertion Log.txt file, when it says that IDs deleted do not match the IDs created possibly leaking memory. [u]Unfortunately[/u], it is more than just to add virtual destructor to XeWorldObject class. More work is pending here.
[b]October 20th, 2003[/b]
Yay! The first step was made!
Yesterday, the Xenocide application, which includes files with new UI framework, has been started. It has few files so far, but it is compiling and running.
[b]October 19th, 2003[/b]
Well, those serious issues mentioned earlier were somehow resolved. I was able to bypass them by installing Update4 for compiler. However, with update or not, we are not able to use RogueWave STL implementation anymore. Not that we want it really...
Ok, now forward to new framework implementation. :)
[b]October 16th, 2003[/b]
While Red Knight was cranking the code, I was responsible to committing of it in CVS. That pretty much took all my time these days (RK promised me lots of beer of that, otherwise he would be doing it himself!).
On the positive side, a few serious issues were found, which prevented latest code to be committed. Guess who is fixing them? :)
[b]October 13th, 2003[/b]
Chatted for 2 hours with Red Knight.
Discussed general object framework and layers for the next release.
Designed the pattern of data transfer between the server and the client. Discussed usage of interfaces for data objects and support for XML read/write.
Talked about plans for next release. Edited by mamutas
Link to comment
Share on other sites

×
×
  • Create New...