Air Hockey

This week I have been busy writing documentation for VB6 on our wiki. I have also started making a demo game for VB6 that is called Air Hockey. There is been a quite a few problems with this... as it is kind of 3D so the angle that the puck is traveling on and bouncing off the walls is quite hard to work out. Any way heres an image of what its looking like so far.

The Legend of the Tomato Quest!

Hi all,

This week, I've been working on the wiki documentation for the SwinGameSDK.NET, which is comming along. Also, I've made a tutorial for Mappy on how to make a valid map that will be compatible with the SDK.

I've also started on my SDK demo, The Legend of the Tomato Quest!, which is going to be an RPG game. Here's a screen shot of the progress so far.


So far, the map loads, and a player spawns in the correct position. The player can also be moved around the map, and collision with map is working also. Animations for the sprite are playing correctly, though this did require us to make some modifications to the SDK due to the nature of the bitmap we are loading.

I've also been fixing most of the exceptions inside the SDK, so that they are caught regardless of where the error actually occurred (either C# or Pascal).

With the game, I've been writing a How to guide to help those who want to make their own RPG's with the SDK.

I also did some work on the Demo Video that's on youtube (the voice over).

That's all for now.

Empty Your Mind

Hi. I have been working on the Empty Your Mind shooter game tutorial. I have got quite a few things working in the game. I have got the player's ship, the background, and the bullet firing using vectors in my game. The tutorial is up to date to have a look if you are interested.

I have also been working on the documentation for the SGSDK_Audio. It is done but we still need to add more stuff to them. The tutorial for the game can be found in here.

Merry Christmas

So this Year at Uni is practically over, Greetings to Everyone, have a nice Christmas and a happy new year!

SGSDK Exceptions

Hi. I've been working on the exception handling for the Pascal because developing a game without a proper exception is very difficult. The Pascal's exceptions and the CSharp's exceptions are done, so it should be much easier to kill a bug. Please email me or comment to this post if there are any unhandled exception within the SGSDK library.

Oops....

I'm going to be working on the online documentation and the game tutorial now. The EmptyYourMind 1.1 is not going to have everything I really want but it will still be fun to play.

Still fuzzing with 3D

Which 3d program is best to use for our case? This question is keeping me busy. It should be powerful, easy to use, lots of templates and of course it should be free! Is that too much to ask. I have found the Pacemaker, which allows to animate persons easily, but it is hard to find 3d modeled objects for that. Still looking.
The website is also making progress, I try to integrate the content of other websites like our blog or YouTube, but our server is saying no! Still looking and trying.

New Resource Management

Hi. I've been mainly working on the new resource management stuff because the old version was not flexible and we found it quite annoying when using it. The new system uses an array of strings to manage the names of data instead of enumeration. I've also been helping Stephen to get the collision side detection to work in MappyLoader. This took us about 2 days... I've also been making articles on the wiki. I was working on many small things last week. The showcase has been updated with new resource management support and camera showcase examples.

Me and Stephen are working on exception handling right now, so it will be much easier to debug.

VB 6, damn VB 6

This week i have been finshing off the COM Library for VB6 and also making the VB6 showcase. Just like last week this was full of problems. The default of Option Explicit being turned off got really annoying... one time i was trying to load a font and typed arial.ttf and i forgot to put the "" around it, with Option Explicit off VB6 tried to get the property of the variable arial... and it was giving me a strange error. It ended up taking me all most a whole day to work out what the cause of this error was. Then after this error... there was more.

I discovered that trying to pass an array from VB6 to C# COM library is very anoying... For some strange reason VB6 hates this. After a bit of searching on the net i came up with nothing... then Andrew said to search for "marshaling arrays with COM and VB" and the very first link was someone who had the exact problem as me and they had found an answer!! All i need was "[In] ref" in the front of the array in C#.

Work on the showcase was going fine until i came to the vector collision example. This would work for a short time then just crash with a error msg that gave no help. I couldnt track down the source of this error as all the VB6 code looked fine and so did the COM Library. Stephen discovered that for some reason the C# library was returning doubles instead of singles for most of the physics methods. This was causing errors for me in VB6 land. Once all the doubles were changed to singles it all worked fine.

My latest problem is our AddingVectors method... for some reason its not working at all :(. I hope to get this working soon so i can finally finish off this showcase.

After the showcase is finished ill start working of the VB6 documentation for VB6 on our Wiki on www.swingame.com

Say hello to Mappy

Greetings all,

This week, I've been fixing some bugs in SwinGameSGK.NET annd have also completed the MappyLoader module for the SDK.

Here is a screen shot of the MappyLoader in action:


For those that don't know, Mappy is a Tile based Map Editor which allows you to create levels for 2D Games with relative ease. It allows you to create both static and animated tiles ( the screen shot doesn't show it, but the waterfall is actually animating).

As for MappyLoader it has the following features:

-Loading Maps from Mappy using a custom made exporting tool.
-Drawing of the Maps
-Supports both static and animated Tiles.
-Highly Optimized Collisions functions, that can be used to check if your sprites are colliding with the map. The collision will even return which side of the sprite the collision occurred so the user can take appropriate actions after the collision depending on where it collided.
-An Event Layer, which is basically a special layer made in Mappy which allows you to literally 'Paint' Events/Triggers/Spawn Points etc. You could think of an event as a place for spawning your characters, enemies, items, but also places that can be used as triggers for special events in your game, such as falling off a cliff and dying when you hit an Event at the bottom of the cliff that is designated as a Death Event so to speak.

I'm currently working on Exceptions for the SwinGameSDK so that debugging our games and even the development of the SDK itself will become significantly less frustrating. Once this is done, the SDK should progress many times faster than it currently is, since we won't be wasting vast amounts of time trying to work out where an error has truly occurred.

Anyway that's all for this week,

See you next time.

Stephen Holdsworth

Rene's week summary...

A quick summary what I did this week: After being introduced to the project, I began layouting the project webpage in Adobe Photoshop. Everybody agreed on one design I proposed and I started programming the webpage. Integrating the wikimedia page and the forum page were the most difficult tasks. Uploading the page became very tricky because our internet access is limited in the labs. I still work on the website doing small amendments and optimizations, dynamic content via AJAX as well.
Besides that I introduced myself to 3d designing, the first question was on which program to settle. Google sketchup or wings 3d... Here my first try. The goal is to provide artwork for the games later on.

VB6 can it do SwinGame?

Hey
This week i have been working on a COM Library for VB6 from the .Net Wrapper . It is about a 1/3 complete. It has been so slow because there has been quite a number of problems with the testing i have done for this. The first problem was getting a copy of VB6... lol.
There was also the issue of registering the COM Library on another computer so it can be used. Like say if i made a program and sent it to someone else on another computer, they would not be able to run it as the COM Library was not installed on there computer.
Then i discovered that i couldnt import a C# struct into VB6 with out defining it in VB6... so i had to make a class for them which was very annoying. There has been a few other little bugs as well... most of them i cant remember now... lol.

I hope to get this COM Library finished by monday as most of the issues i have had are gone now. There is is bound to be 1 or 2 problems left though.

After this is finished i will be creating the showcase for VB6 to test that all of the SwinGame stuff will auctaly work in VB6

Introducing .NET to SwinGame

Gday,

This week has been pretty busy, I've been working on the .NET Wrapper for the SwinGame SDK and is virtually complete. Just some loose ends to tie up, such as matrices and error handling, after that I'll be looking to implement a loader I've been working on for a tile based map editor called Mappy.

With the .NET wrapper, I've also completed the showcase for it (at least, the parts we've decided to show so far), and it's all working great. It shows off some of the SwinGame SDK's features such as Drawing of primitives, bitmaps, sprites, moving of bitmaps and sprites, collision, physics, text and fonts, and lots more.

As I rewrite the Mappy loader for the SwinGame SDK, I'll be writing a tutorial on how to make, export and load a map from Mappy, which hopefully will help newcomers to the SwinGame SDK make some awesome maps for their games.

Once that is done, I'll be starting my individual game example, which will be an RPG. The title, style and theme are undecided for the time being.

ShowCase!

Hi. I've been working hard this week trying finish off the showcase for the SDK. It is now done and you can find it on the subversion. The showcase shows all features of the SDK. It looks very nice so you should get it :-) Stephen and me were working on this showcase simultaneously. Stephen was working on the .Net verson of showcase and I was working on the Pascal version. DotNet wrapper had so many problems such as marshaling problem. It was very painful because the data format of C# and Pascal are sometimes different. The worst problem was the multidimensional array. We could not get this working until we have decided to make C# to ask Pascal for a data in the specified array. We have finally got everything working today and I have started working on the tutorial to create a game using SwinGameSDK. The article is on here. It is not finished yet but it is getting there...

The screenshot of the current game:
It does not really look like a game for now but it will have sick bullet patterns and enemies soon. :-P I will be working on this tutorial on next week.

Design for swingame.com is online!

The new Layout for our Website www.swingame.com is now online, containing a Documentation on www.swingame.com/wiki and a Forum www.swingame.com/forum. As our project continues the content will get populated and changed, so watch out!

The Progress so far...

Hi.
I forgot to introduce the team member on the last post so here it goes...
The project members of SwinGameSDK are:

• Akihiro Noguchi (me)
• Stephen Holdsworth
• James McNamara
• Rene Tessmer
  

We have been working hard on this project and we have got basic features working.
Working features are...

• Pascal library and game compiler script for Mac and Windows
• Partial .Net support (written in C#)

The core library is functional but we are planning add more features onto it such as better Sprite features.
We do not have any documentation at the moment.
.Net is almost done but it has a major bug with PChar which is being fixed as I type this entry.