OK... Did You Accomplish Something Today...

... programming wise that is.

are you ending the day with a sense of accomplishment... problems solved... a goal achieved...

i'm dead tired, but i got that lil OO thing moving along, and managed to squeak in an ocean class...

i got a lil done in 3DRAD and DBPro as well...

so i feel pretty good to go for tonight...

--Mike

Here's a cookie.

Yes.

I finished adding multitexturing, .PAK, and mod (i.e., an expansion pack) support, among other things -- but those are the most notable developments.

My little zombie game is taking shape. players can actually kill each other now. Lots of bugs from last night was found and killed. New ones created.
Ugly graphics replaced with less ugly graphics.

Caught up on writing my docs! Boring but glad i don't have to do it again for a while

Finished the online high score system for my upcoming puzzle game

www.eiksoft.com/proto

I have.
Today I added speech to my tank game, improved the sound effects a little, added a few more optimizations, fixed a slight problem with the Abrams tank where it's tracks would roll backward, misc. tweaks, etc., etc. No major progress has been made; I'm mainly getting the game ready for the final release.

I certainly did! I'm working on getting my game running in TSE ... as it's already running in TGE on the Mac and PC ... working through more of it right now.

Rendered some animations for my next 2d game, tested some very basic code to draw the animations using 'images cropped to minimum size with minimum wasted space' rather than just using an animstrip which for what I am doing means I can have 4x the number of different 'creatures' in video memory than what I can have if I use an animstrip.

Just rewrote my PAK format to support variable-width unicode strings and compression (only compresses a packed file if the compressed version is smaller, otherwise it's packed normally). Yay.

I atually got my teeth into writing a tutorial for making a game in C++.

I found out a lad at work used to like programming (Two programmers on the same building site... whatever next!), and hasnt touched it for ages, he bought a PC, and being a aged C programmer, ended up downloading Dev-C++.... And he's lost!!! :)

So, I promised I'd knock something up to make c++ more interesting... And writing a tutorial on making a game in C++ should keep his head battered enough for a while! :)

When I'm done, I'll post a link if anyone wants it?

Dabz

P.S. The tutorial will use GDI, I'm not fully up to speed with DirectX, but GDI works pretty well for 2D!

thx for the replies guys... setting a goal for the day, or week, and then making progress towards that goal seems to be one of the elements of success...

ok... new day... lets see what we can get accomplished today :)


--Mike

I missed this last night but yesterday I accomplished :-

- Rewrote the compression and decompression library for igArchive and igLoader - Now supports File Spanning to remain compatible with small browser caches.

- Implemented Resumable spanned file downloads, any missing file(s) will be downloaded. (igLoader)

- Implemented a test version of the embedding library. Can embed flash, shockwave and movies into igLoader to view when files are downloading. No more boring loading screens.

- Ported embedding lib to a dll. Now Blitz products can embed pretty much any media file.

- Started to plan advertising module (igLoader) and made a small annoucement on this forum...

- Began process of signing 3 new games.

- Found first saleable title for 360shooters.com

- Began work on a toolbar for Firefox...

Released qoob last night - that's 17 months since the last release - this is a biggie!

http://www.boiledsweets.com/qoob

congrats on those accomplishments IndieP and BoiledSweets... i soon hope to be up there with the completed and selling crowd :)

ok, my plan for this weekend is as follows...

i plan to implement enough of the OO engine to make it capable of supporting the sub game... finish up the Actor subclass and the bouancyobject subclass... then build a crewman subclass and extend the bouyancyobject class to make a boat, then a submarine subclass...

a modest plan, but this is all i think i can get accomplished in the next 2 days... by monday i'll know if this OO thing is viable or not, and will continue with it, or drop it...

--Mike

I updated my website and erm ate some bacon sandwiches. Puki would be pleased.

Eeep! Reading some of these posts just reminds me how unproductive I am. :(

I'm lucky to get ANYTHING done, alot of the time. I don't know if it's age-related, but most days I just sit staring at the screen with glazed eyes - or waste time trawling these forums. :P

I have days when I'm on a roll (i.e. my brain is actually working) and get loads done (for me) but those days seem to be very few and far between. I think I'm just not motivated enough, most times. :/

Maybe it's because you're living in the past, I suggest you upgrade to the new small10p.

NEVER!!!

I quite agree. This past week I was only on schedule for three out of five days, and not fully for two of those. But I did manage to put in 14 hours in actual game creation - most of it programming - which was pleasing progress.

Indiepath: - Began process of signing 3 new games. ooooh, sounds cool. Good luck with them.

Well today (Saturday) I stay in bed late cos I felt I'll, took a bath, ate lunch, then played Gradius III and FINALLY beat level 5/6? the one with the heads that fire donuts, by god it was hard! Couldn't beat the next level though, it was a bitch. Then I got to the same head level on Gradius IV and felt so peeved at how hard it was I vowed never to play it again. I'm gonna try Gradius V next which arrived yesterday from ebay.

Work has started on the next version of qoob

And the arcade cabinet version of RetroSphere is VERY close!

I tend to plan a few days ahead, like I already know what I've got to do next week and how that's all scheduled (not that i'll stick to it).

Here are my tips to productivity.

1) Plan stuff, just don't sit down and try to think of ideas - it ain't gonna happen.
2) Plan when your gonna do the stuff you planned.
3) Get a Whiteboard and write down some structure to your plans. (Don't put it behind you like I have 'cause you'll never look at it!).
4) Get a desk diary and structure your day around the plans.
5) Attempt to keep away from forums. Some people have smoking breaks, I have forum breaks (yeah right!).
6) Don't spend too long trying to sort out a programming issue or spend too long on one task. If something does your head in then move on to the next thing - chances are your brain will figure it all out whilst you're having a @#!* or something.
7) Always try and achieve something positive, you'll feel much better.
8) Never try and do too much, if you can't find the time to do something don't be afraid to say so.
9) Drink beer, dream more plans and forget them by the morning.
10) Tweak plans and never forget to tell you bank manager how it's all going! Return to Step 1

Yeah try to only use the forums for research purposes or marketing. I've failed at that one for sure.

Very important to constantly review your plans as things change as your progress and priorities change.

I keep my plans in a Word Doc. It has different sections e.g. Graphics, Sounds, Gameplay, Screens, Release, Website, Bugs etc then each one is slit into high, med, and low.

Getting net access on my dev machine has been a bit of a nightmare, productivity wise. I simply CAN NOT resist the temptation to 'quickly' nip online... an hour later and I'm still there. If I was doing this for a living, I'd fire myself! :P

Yeah with an always on router I just have to press the Internet button on my MS keyboard and I'm there. It's bad isn't it. I might go back to dial up ...

I spent the day suffering with the PluginHostCtrl source code, in a hopeless seeming attempt to get my plugin system's new functions working with IE. I managed to locate where the crash is not occuring, which is progress...
I will do the same today.
:(


I also learned that the Mozilla.org email groups are useless, and IRC is full of users who probably leave their IRC client open all year.

Yeah that stuff is a pig, I had to totally rewrite sections of it and ensure it was properly interfacing. I'm pretty happy with it now, my version anyway. Quick note, it's probably something in the Firefox plugin causing the problem and not the host control. IE is not as forgiving as Firefox.

Got quite a bit done today :-) Up until about six months ago the way i worked on this project was very unorganised.

I have a BIG list for all work that needs doing...
Not just coding work, artwork, sound effects that need creating/replacing, music etc etc.

As i complete one job, it gets a tick on the list, more jobs get added daily (such as bugs or a feature i might want to add.) I also add commments to the list often, such as a question mark and detailed description for a possible feature that might improve the game etc, that kind of thing.

Managed to get about five things on the list finished off today.

* Final animations (not including cutscene, just default player animations.) over 2 minutes of default animation.

* Player character didn't always get positioned properly on it's cutscene markers...fixed that today.

* Replaced the player "Hurt" and "Death" sounds for better ones...basiclly a case of spending a while going through different sounds, still takes a while.

* Npc's sometimes got stuck in a certain place in scene03, got that squashed.

* Zombie, hurt and death sounds finalised.

* Added gamepad/joystick control options.

The longest job was finishing off the player animations.

But as Red says, it gives you a good feeling every day to get stuff off of the project completed :)

bye,
Lee.

I love reviewing my accomplishments at the end of the day and thinking about what comes next. This means you have a continual flow of progress and your game actually gets finished.

Missed this as I've been busy, modelled 85% of a brand new Mid-Continent Instruments MD200-202/203/206/207 Series Course Deviation Indicator instrument, and it's looking quite nice so far.

So that's 10 dials down, and only 3 left to go! Then I'll have built an entire 3D Cessna C172 panel in about 10-14 days. And I had visitors for the first half of the day, so I reckon that's not bad going really. I'll probably get the last 15% bashed out before sleep too.

I'm happy! ;O)

use FlySpray!

http://dev.boiledsweets.com/flyspray

or Buzilla. Someone I knew questioned how many bugs bugzilla had in it that it needed to use itself. Kinda which came first bugzilla or the bugs in bugzilla?

I accomplished this,

A Mario 3 clone, done in my spare time to keep me ticking over while future projects are decided.

http://danjeruz.servegame.com/bbmario3.zip

What did i complete today?

Player energy, Mushrooms, Breakable blocks (Particle system) and tube/door access was repaired in the level editor- which isn't included in this tiny 7 level, 140kb download :)

got my bouyant boxes class done and the ocean class finished... amazing, the OO engine is holding up :)

i thought i saw a lil stuttering in the water movement, a possible indication that all the loops i have the code running around might be overwhelming it a bit.. i found that i had to scale everything down a bit... seems that i had everything about 10 times larger than is needed to be... that helped a bit...

anyways, i'm gonna whip up a lil demo tommorrow, something of a cross between the floating barrels demo from the unigine folks... and the floating boxes in HL2 (you rememberm you had to get the jetboat over it)...

anyways... that and a lil more added to the actor class... didn't get started on my crewmen class yet... looks like a sub game might come outta this...

ok... nite all... new week is gonna be a challenge for me...

--Mike

no

Finished my 'animation sequence editor' for a fairly simple in concept 2d game I am working on. As always with my editors though they are pretty cheap 'n' nasty so they usually require modifying the output data files in notepad from time to time.

If I accomplish something today it'll be a miracle.

I forgot to factor some time into my schedule for food poisening!

Oh dear Tim, its going around! We were I'll on fri/saturday too! Bad chicken, NAUGHTY chicken!

I achieved so much this weekend I barely slept, then when I finished Sunday night I couldn't sleep because my mind kept spinning ... usually when this happens I'll write down whatever technical thought is keeping me up, so I can forget about it and sleep.

Last night however it wasn't a technical thought that was keeping me awake, it was unadulterated enthusiasm for my project !

I woke up early, having barely slept, and squeezed another hour coding in before work.

I can't help it, I gotta post some piccies... It's still a little early for this as the interface is a little slapped on at the moment, and you cant really see what the game is about yet, but anyway:

Fellowship of the Bling #1
Fellowship of the Bling #2

Them screenies look pretty cool Banshee! :)

Dabz

nice terrain Becks... but it took forever for my lil 2.5 mHz clunker here to generate the world... then the grasses... then the bushes (they actually wen kinda fast)...

then walking through the world, it seemed to pause continuously at what i imagine is every tick of the main loop...

finally, when i exited the demo, it seemed as if hydra had hydrated all my computer's memory... it took longer than DOOM3 to get all my resources back...

--Mike

I'm working on this:



Yes ... I'm pimping this screen a lot I know

wow... coooooool... TSE?

--Mike

Yes ... yes it is ;)

That pillar is mal-textured :P

But it is bump mapped ... does anything else really matter ;P

mal-textured lol. So as my mashed potatoe the other day.

Anyway, I haven't achieved too much today, odds and ends, but the evening isn't over yet!

Nice picky Jeremy

Red, i've resolved the pauses and the grasses are a little faster starting up now - but i'm now loading a load of interface graphics and particle textures so i've given in one area, and taken huge amounts of RAM from another ! What can I say? I'm a resource hog.

:) it was just to let you know what was going on Becks... seeing as you didn't get any other replies, i thought that you might be interested...

i kinda realized this was a work in progress sorta thing.. good luck...

--Mike

Thanks Becky ... I mean to comment on yours as well. Very nice looking. Was there a demo I missed or something ...

oooh I wanna post a piccy but it's still underwraps hehe. So finally I plugged in all the recent art and it rocks! It looks sool cool and bright and fun and cute that everyone (who isn't a gothic teenager or FPS obsessed young man) is gonna lurve it.

Yeah, get something done every day (if humanely possible). Went out last night but still put in a couple of hours between 12 and 2am.

Added 6 pick-up points to level 7 last night.

Tweaked it so that a tank can be targeted if it's only nearby a 'passable' array square. This fixed an exploit whereby the player could 'camp' on a hillside and be safe from aerial bombing, but also means the player's respawn point is safe.

I add a little bit to my space invaders game every day, it's almost finished. Here is a screenshot:

http://home.planet.nl/~foppygames/Temp/invaders.png

It has several types of invaders, such as aliens who try to eat those little humans.

haha, I love the style Foppy :)

@Jeremy, well not really it's all a bit early still, here's some screeny-ettes showing some new spell effects, although on a low quality terrain because of compilation times:

Some basic spell effects

Showing invis (well, sorta showing it)

Early engine: http://www.bansheestudios.com/ftp/HydraTest3.zip

I wrote a 3dCaps type for the engine. But it was gay so I deleted it.

Arrghhh, sorry to hear that. Btw Tim (sorry off-topic), something that both me and my wife have been wondering since i read your "Night out" post(would have like to have made that, maybe next time), is, do you have a brother(probably a little bit younger than you) called Paul?

or is Paul Fisher (used to live in creakmoor, then later in parkstone and poole) any relation to you? Just curious :)

Nice screenshots becky and Jeremy :)



Hahaha, that made me laugh :-)

Cheers,
Lee.

where'd you live Opcode? Keep an eye out for another get together in the summer.

About half of a mile up the road from Indie<i think> :-)
I remember having an e-mail conversation with Tim about Geom when he released it...Just wondering if Paul(one of my best mates at school) is his brother or not.

bah you shoulda come on the meal!

Todays accomplishment:







Yesterday I did my game's intro assets and the rest (all the code has been done for a long time and I am doing graphics). This character will feature in my game. I have a couple of more months work on graphics then the game ships.

You either work or you haunt forums... it's your choice everyone.

Be lame or make the game :)

I'm lame.

Sniffage.

Things I did on Indigo today:

Added a great deal of stuff to streamline writing engine code.

Rewrote a large portion of the texture manager so it would be easier to manage resources.

Rewrote the model class.

Added EachIn support to the hash table class.

Added a hook for when a resource is indexed. Materials and textures are now set up such that calling LoadTexture simply grabs a previously indexed texture and buffers it. Same applies to materials (similar to shaders in Q3).

Thatd be all the pork.

From the 2D skeleton animator :
The last 3 days I finished the core stracture

Today I finished the first vertion of the skeleton creator.

To do :
The Animation Editor
The method/function to save and load the animation
Before the game : FC Bayern München - AC Milan
or at least before : Chelsea - FC Barcelona

And I just added the option of applying multiple materials to a surface with the option of only applying them to a specific range of triangles.

@Opcode, not me. I've only lived down here for 12 months.

Things I achieved last night: Finished all 10 magic spells available at the start of the game including cast animations, particle system, statistic modification, buff icons, timers & random buff dropping, special spell effects such as mesmerisation and area of effect damage etc...

Tonight I start work on adding monsters.

I meant to get a number of things done this past weekend, but I accomplished none of it. An old friend visited from out-of-town, and after he left I spend the rest of the day reading a book.

So, my game dev/programming todo list is unchanged. I am so annoyed that I'm not done with Flamewar! yet. All of the programming and graphics are done, and all that's left is music, but I can't get off my ass to attend to that last part.

yeah... real life activities always seem to get in the way of game development...

i almost forgot... great looking model up there One Eyed... verrrry life like...

hey, this thread is really turning out to be a refreshing lil place to see what everyone is getting done... and maybe even garner a lil inspiration from :)

--Mike

yeah I've had this stinking cold/sore throat/headache and bitchin cough keeping me awake at night and I'm so tired in the day I don't feel like complicated programming, only the easy stuff.

Yeah I'm still @#!*ting for england. I'm now dehydrated, sick as a pig and can not eat or drink anything. Best get some beers in then!!!

Me too. *sneezes*.

Lets cheer everyone up- Showem da looop!

you want me to host it?
OK will do in a bit...

OK here's Cygnus's Spring loop, the one he thought up at work for my game. It may well be used as Level Complete music subject to tweaks and an agreement, right Cyg?

http://www.jbcomputersolutions.com/misc/spring.ogg

Yet another good reason not to connect your development machine to the internet. I use my laptop for web-surfing/email and I have a desktop for coding.

I'm on IRC 24/7 and have the fora open nearly all day and I manage to work just fine. Wierd peoples.

Lucy loved it, she's 6! Not sure it's going to fit with the old 35-50 year olds.

I managed to get the level I was building in 3DWS in to TSE. I'm well pleased.

Thanks for the feedback Tim, it won';t be played for long and it's quite funny so it could be OK. It's true that 6 year olds don't buy games but parents do, but you are right it has to work with 35-50 year old ladies.

Anyway all watch this to cheer you up:

http://www.flowgo.com/index.cfm?action=view&id=12606&scid=0

Right indeedy. I didn't expect you to host it- I had it online, just a crap connection. I'm going to set up my ISP space today :)

The music will be changed, I'm just not too happy with some of the instruments.

I could also make it less of a loop and more of n End-level fanfare? :D

I'm going to make a loopable one for you now.

thanks dude, you didn't send the link though. Did you watch that video in the post above yours, it must have taken AGES to make.

Whoops, Missed that link! Will take a look later.

Didnt send the loop eh? Bugger, Did i copy something else in instead? ^.^

You email said "Here's a link to a modified, loopable version of the track" then some more text, no links. It's a classic mistake, I often do it too.

Today I discovered Cron Jobs and am I happy or what!

I also managed to get a nice deal with one of the largest ad-networks going.. Watch this space...

Today I finished my games menu system graphics which took a while adn was tedious but it's done now. Demo nearly ready wooo.

Thanks to Gfk tonight I have put together my first fully installable application... Inno Setup is a very easy to use installer application. Now I've just to knock the rough edges off before considering making a 'trial' version available for use....