Farseer 3.0

Well, progress this weekend was hampered somewhat due to the fact that it took me a lot longer than I thought to get an understanding of how Farseer works. There is a very good tutorial on getting started with Farseer on Sgt. Conker, but unfortunately it was made for Farseer 2.1.3, and the latest version is 3.1.

On the face of it that shouldn't be a challenge, but alas, I'm finding more and more often in the world of game development that things are rarely as simple as they seem.

The biggest issue with applying the 2.1.3 tutorial to 3.0 is the units system. 2.1.3 uses screenspace pixel units, whereas 3.0 (based on Box2D) uses what it calls 'MKS' or meters, kilograms, seconds. This has the unfortunate side effect that a falling block of 50x50 pixels has the physics of a falling building if you just plug the pixel dimensions into the physics engine.

At first, after trying to convert the units manually, I thought this was a deal breaker, and decided to use 2.1.3 instead (when I discovered that it compiles directly under xna 4.0, but that's another story). However I was persuaded by Farseer's creator that 3.0 offered a number of benefits over 2.1.3, I decided to give it another try.

Then I came across the ConvertUnits helper class in one of the samples that ships with Farseer 3.0. This largely solved my unit problems, although I still had some issues with things like magnitudes of forces ir impulses.

So after a couple of hours of playing with the tutorial, including faking a anglular spring (which isn't included in 3.0) with a anglejoint, I finally got the tutorial working. Being the good community member that I am, I will be writing up my adventure later in the week and sending it off to Sgt. Conker as an update to the current tutorial.

Watch this space for a link! Then it'll be back to Alta for an abstraction layer around Farseer 3.0, which among other things, will attempt to convince the developer that they are working in pixel units!

Progress report

Things are picking up now at last. The AEAvatar class is tested and working, I've written a skeleton of the AECharacter class which will fill out as I write the physics and AI engines.

Next up is Farseer integration which means adding a nice wrapper over its API, and integrating its setup code into AEGame.

More soon I hope!

Avatar!

Nope, not blue aliens with plaits that let them talk to alien animals. Nope, not the cutsy Xbox version of Nintendo's Mii's.

I'm talking about the actual meaning of the word, a proxy visual token to represent another object or person in the virtual world.

This weekend I've been working on my animation engine for Alta. As well as various structs and helper classes, I wrote a class called AEAvatar. This is to be a class which will be a component of the upcoming AECharacter class, and manages the visual representations of characters, including playing and queuing animations.

It's finished but untested as yet. I'll be writing the wider character class this week, and putting together a quick sample that plays animations loaded from the editor.

Next up, physics (which will be a wrapper on Farseer), character art and putting animations to use, some tweaking of various systems,  and then finally gameplay.

I'm a long way behind schedule and Mario is taking longer then I'd hoped, but the engine is still progressing.

Once Mario is done I'll be migrating Alta to xna 4.0, and potting Mario to windows phone 7 to test the engine's performance on the phone. Then on to my first commercial game.

I *will* have my first game out by March. Maybe...

PS my wp7 device arrives today. Going to be awesome, can't wait! :)

Animation Editor - finished! (except for bugs...)

So I finally finished the animation editor. There's a few bugs to work out, but above is a quick video of it in action, loading a saved animation, and playing it back in the editor. Now on the animation component for Alta to be able to use them in game!

Something's coming....

Spring/Summer 2011...

Feature creep

Life has got in the way again, and slowed me down, but I'm still plugging away with this animation editor. I would like to find a way to seperate it out from the rest of Alta, so I can share it with the community, but haven't figured out how yet.

The title refers of this post refers to the extra bits I've added to the animation editor and the extra bits I'm planning to add.

I've already added an option to flip parts horizontally when creating frames, and a playback feature in the editor, and I'm planning on including an 'onion skin' effect to overlay frames on each other, and a feature which creates sprite sheets from the frames.

So I'm still hard at work, but it may be another week before I'm finished, we'll see.

Ooops!

Well, best laid plans and all that. Life has once again got in the way the past month or so, but I'm still making progress on Mario, or more precisely, the animation editor for Mario. I've almost finished it, and will stick up some screen shots in the next couple of days, plus maybe a video of the animation preview feature in action.

I've also grabbed the domain name http://www.rabidlion.com/, which now points to this blog. Soon I'll be putting together a propper website for Rabid Lion Games, and then I'll link this blog in from there.

I've realised in the course of making the various tools for Mario, that none of them are actually specific to Mario itself, or even to platformers. As such, once I've completed Mario, I will be integrating the Map and Animation editors into Alta. Mario will also involve me writing in an Animation engine to read the character files created by my animation editor, and a physics engine (which will most likely be a wrapper around Farseer).

So Alta is still growing, and I'm still hopeful that by Xmas I'll have made the first commercial game with Alta. However, it's looking more and more like that will be a Windows Phone 7 game rather than Xbox 360. The more I look at it, the more I believe Windows Phone 7 will take off in a big way, and getting in early on the platform could yield some serious rewards.

Arcade Mayhem (working title), my first xbox game has been shelved for the minute, and a new game (codenamed project Circlevania) is my target. However the temptation to 'cash-in' on a simpler, less imaginative game is very strong.

Anyway, that's it for now, been a bit of a ramble. Hopefully the next update will be more coherent!

And hopefully it will be significantly less than 6 weeks before I post here again!