You can use Qt for both out of game GUI (for map editor and such) and in game GUI (NPC talking, inventory and such).

In both cases what you need to do is create your own derivation of QWidget that displays your SFML window (no need for Qt OpenGL area and the like, a simple QWidget will do).

You can then embed this widget into a Qt window to create any out of game GUI you like.

You can also overlap this widget with another QWidget of the same size which won't display anything but will be used as parent for regular widgets and use that to create your in game GUI (Qt widgets are highly customizable with style sheet so you can make them match the look and feel of your game).

Mint. It just works, that's what's cool about it.

Programming a game prototype is a very long and difficult work. Even when reusing an existing code base (opensource or older project) it's still a very long and difficult work.

Assuming you find a programmer to help you, this guy (assuming he has a full time job or is a student) will have to sacrifice his evenings, his weekends and his vacations to push the project forward. What will you be doing while he's working? Order him around? Relax until he's done? Try to think of some even greater feature idea that will require even more work from him? I doubt you will find anybody who accept that.

Programming is difficult. Sure it's fun but it's still difficult. Learning programming is difficult as well. It's a long process that takes time, trials and errors. Programmers value their skills, and they value other people for their skills. The reason people here can hardly resist the temptation of bashing you is because you represent everything programmers hate : an unskilled person who's too lazy to learn but still have the pretension to manage others.

Most professional programmers are, unfortunately, already working under incompetent morons at their day job. They won't accept to do the same for their free time project.

Good luck.

I was a little disappointed to think that the enemies would just be basic "patrol here" guys, but then he reacted pretty impressively. Nice work.

Thank you.

These little guys stand still or patrol until the player comes into their field of view, then they start chasing him. I've made it so they can't see through the blocks which it why this one didn't come at me until I jumped above the wall.

The video doesn't show it, but when there are several of them and one see you he screams to warn his friends and then they all come at you.

More scripting is needed but I plan to make them tougher enemies than they look.

Would you be willing to explain how your animation system works/what the hold up is a little more? I'm working on my own system and I'm curious how other people do it.

The problem is that we want the player to pick up better weapons as the game goes. Of course each weapon must have its own look, it would be frustrating if the ultimate evil chaotic sword of doom looked just like the plain sword you start the game with. To do that we must use two separated sprites, one for the character and one for the sword, and make the sword one follow the hand of the character. So we did just that and... it didn't look good at all. It felt like the character was just waving his sword in the air, not cutting through something.

To make it look better we must not only move and rotate the sword sprite to follow the character hand, we must also scale it to give it a pseudo 3D move effect. Then it looks cool.

To do that we need an animation editor that will allow the artist to link, move and scale the sprites the way he wants to, and save the result into our custom asset format. Coding such an editor is a big work so I'm not expecting to finish it anytime soon. Once it will be done it will be very useful to us though, not only for the characters but for enemies, boss and background elements as well. So I believe the investment is worth it.

grammaire plz

Sorry our monsters can't even conjugate French verbs properly. One more reason to kill them all.

video is set to private

Oops my bad. Fixed.

Here is what the project looks like right now




Things aren't going very well. Many unforeseen problems are coming in our way and I also have real life issues to attend to that are eating much of my free time.

I'm currently working on an animation editor to allow our characters to carry customized weapons. This is quiet difficult to achieve with sprites but it's absolutely necessary for our gameplay.

Another big problem I'm facing it batch count. Turning these pretty mockups into reality requires rendering hundreds of sprites per frame, but this makes the frame rate goes all the way down to hell. I'm working on a sprite batching system in order to fix it.

I hope to be able to show you guys some more pretty things when I will have fixed these two issues.

Thank you all again for your encouragements.

What kind of project are you looking for ?

Paid ? Profit share ? Fun cooperation ?

Which language/engine/platform are you familiar with ?

Any preferred game genre ?

Regards

I recently moved away from Ubuntu as well. It used to be very good but with recent releases nothing seems to work properly.

I switched to Mint. It's Ubuntu based but it works so much better. I never had any problem with it. As for desktop environment, Mate and Cinnamon (both developed by Mint) are great.

Wait, there is also a way to convert any key pressed to it's textual (UTF8 if I remember correctly) value (as a string).

From my experience this has always worked perfectly. It always gives keymap dependent values on both Windows and Linux. However there are few pitfalls there too.

First you're never sure what string you will get if you press a non latin or accentuated character key.

Second, if you press a modifier key you won't get the string you expect (ie pressing the Z key gives you "z" string, but pressing Ctrl-Z gives you another string that isn't necessarily the same depending on your OS and keymap).

I'll have to check if it hasn't been fixed already.

To my knowledge it hasn't been fixed in OIS yet.
I've seen a patch proposal on the forum to fix the Linux behavior but it hasn't been integrated to the git repo. And from what I've seen of it it only fix half of the problem (because only half of keycodes values are standard amongst Windows and Linux).

I use OOIS as library abstracting all inputs, not sure how it works for gamepads but never heard complains about it.

OIS is great but I had quiet a lot of troubles with it. There are two things anyone intending to use it should know.

First, you must turn on the XINPUT option into OISConfig.h if you want proper Xbox 360 pad support on Windows (it works like a charm when this option is on, but it has problems with the triggers when it isn't).

Second, multi platform keyboard support kinda sucks. Keyboard behavior is different on Windows and Linux (don't know about Mac yet since I don't have a Mac yet). On Windows OIS will give you keymap independent key code, that is if you press A on an azerty keyboard OIS will send you KC_Q. But on Linux it will give you keymap dependent codes so pressing A on any kind of keyboard will always send you KC_A.

But for some games you need both keymap dependent and independent codes. The later is great for directions keys (so that your qwerty WASD automatically becomes ZQSD on azerty). The former is great for commands key (ie press Ctrl-Z to undo whatever you just did in the level editor).

I also noticed some special keys are just ignored. I have a bépo keyboard (a French ergonomic layout), meaning I have an É key where you Z key is (assuming you have a qwerty). But OIS doesn't recognize it at all (it doesn't sent any event when it's pressed) which is troublesome.

I've been working on a patch to fix all these problems. But I must test it on Mac too before I can submit it on the OIS forum.

"True" object models suck... Have you ever used Smalltalk? Absolute crap. It's only really usable for theoretical models of systems.

Why that ? (just curious)

Lua is more of a scripting language so there's no interfaces, class inheritence, etc.

Class, inheritance, multiple inheritance, polymorphism, list, set, arrays... if you can name it then lua can do it with tables. Lua does everything and anything with tables.
http://www.lua.org/pil/16.html

So now I'd need tips, advices. Where should I begin? How should I begin? Any past experiences to share?

Don't use C++. Unless you already have a lot of experience with it (which doesn't seems to be the case according to your post, but maybe I got it wrong) then you really shouldn't make your game with C++. Yes it's a very good and powerful language (and my favorite by far), yes it's very good to make games, but it's a monster. Game programming with C++ will make you run into problems you won't be able to solve if you don't have a strong experience of it already.

What is it that you need that Lua doesn't have ? What do you hope C++ will bring you ? Object oriented programming ? Lua can do that just fine.

Also, creating your own game engine from scratch is MUCH harder than it seems at first.

My advise is as follow : Choose.
You want to finish your game ? Then stick to Lua and Löve.
You want to learn about C++ and game engine architecture ? Then make you own game engine in C++ and be prepared to get your ass handed.

I've noticed that I'm compiling my executable as Multi-threaded with DLLs (which is an option in VS project properties), this means that the game links to dlls on the user's machine, rather than having everything compiled in the the exe. I suspect this could be the cause of it working differently on each platform (if it's pulling in slightly differently performing dlls).

Any thoughts on that? Sound credible?

I don't believe this could be the cause of your problem. Why not use OpenGL instead of DirectX ? Does OpenGL works that bad on Windows ?

As far as I know, the only difference between MD (dll) and MT (static) options is that with MD you get smaller executable but your player need to have the dll installed on his computer (this is the Visual Studio Redistributable Package, your player need to have the one matching the version of Visual Studio you're using).

The main problem with these options is that all the libraries you link to your program (graphic engine, physic engine...) must be compiled with the same option ! Otherwise you will get link error about some symbols being defined already.

is this game closed? hope not...

It isn't. It's being slowed down by unfortunate real life issue on my end and also by some technical difficulties. But it's still progressing at good pace.

Code:

void printSomething(int a)
{
    std::cout << a << endl;
}

int main()
{
    void (*myFunction)(int) myFunction;
    myFunction = &printSomething;
    (*myFunction)(42);
    return 0;
}

This doesn't seem to work.
Error is here (for me):

Code:

    void (*myFunction)(int) myFunction;

Editor shows me that ; is expected after (int).
Same for myFunction = &printSomething;
it won't assign that, for some reason.

My bad. I fix my code.

Code:

#include <boost/function.hpp>

void printSomething(int a)
{
    std::cout << a << endl;
}

int main()
{
    boost::function<void (int)> myFunction;
    myFunction = &printSomething;
    myFunction(42);
    return 0;
}

If you really don't want to use boost then google function pointer but it's not as flexible and easy to use.

Classical C way of doing this.

Code:

void printSomething(int a)
{
    std::cout << a << endl;
}

int main()
{
    void (*myFunction)(int);
    myFunction = &printSomething;
    (*myFunction)(42);
    return 0;
}

Not as good, you will run into trouble when you will want it to point at class methods.

My two cents:

It seems pretty easy to get music done for free, for a cheap price or for promises of profit share. I'm no longer counting the people who offered to make music for my projects without asking anything in return.

A developer wiling to pay a fair price wants more than just music, he wants expert support. Developers are very busy people, there are just so many stuff do to finish a game (plus the whole real life crap). If a developer pays you that's because he wants to be able to focus on the other aspects of his project while letting the audio in you care, knowing you will handle it properly.

IMHO, you should offer a complete service. Music, fx, vocals, whatever audio stuff needed. Most importantly, ensuring the whole thing is coherent and works well with the rest of the project. If you just produce a bunch of tracks and send them to the developer saying "here you go" then your work is not worth paying for.

Quad Tree or Sweep and Prune. I think you're looking for one of those.