I use my own engine because:

1) I am too lazy to learn a new API
2) I can get things done very quickly
3) Tools I have made are quite specific
4) Large codebase I can cannibalise (I dont want to start from scratch)

Unfortunately, I dont have the luxury of stopping and going in a different direction. I sometimes wish I could be a student again.

Wow, I am new here and just stumbled onto this thread.
I love this game. Laser squad is my favourite game of all time. No joke!
Can't wait to get my hands on this.
Yippee! 

I made a new video, showing the pathfinding for a group of agents. You can watch it

.



Again, sorry for the poor quality. If anyone has a decent system for making high quality videos and would volunteer to make a few videos for me, I would be most grateful.

I also added a menu screen. I hate doing UI stuff, but it has to be done.

Hi there. This is very nice. Such a simple idea and very well implemented. I have done a lot of work with dynamic meshes, but I'd never heard of monotone decomposition. Thanks!

oops, what an idiot I am! I forgot to add a line:

Code:

int quarter_revs = 0;
loop {
  float angle = float(quarter_revs)*(pi/2)
  drawbox(angle)
  quarter_revs++
}

The quarter revs specifies how many quarter turns you want to perform, it should increment each frame (I'm taking your video as a guide).
So, as you know pi/2 radians is the same as 90 degrees. But since we cant represent pi faithfully, the first snippet of code is accumulating the error. The second snippet is better because you are only using pi once to calculate the angle. It is used in a direct calculation, not in an iterative manner.

If you prefer to work in degrees, it would look like this (since at some point you have to convert to radians anyway):

Code:

float angle_degrees = 0.0;
loop {
  float angle_radians = angle_degrees*(pi/180)
  drawbox(angle_radians)
  angle_degrees += 90.0
}

Hope thats clearer. Sorry about the mistake.

It seems to me that your problem is not in the drift of the points, it's the drift of angle.

You are using radians (well done) but remember pi is a transcendental number so you can never be too exact.

I assume you do something like this:

Code:

float angle = 0.0;
loop {
  drawbox(angle)
  angle += pi/2
}

Instead, do this:

Code:

int quarter_revs = 0;
loop {
  float angle = float(quarter_revs)*(pi/2)
  drawbox(angle)
}

Then you wont get drift on the angle

Hi there
I've been working hard on the game and now I have pathfinding. You can see a video of it

.
It uses a modified A* algorithm, and works better than expected. Currently it is based on a uniform grid, but I am already ripping its guts out to change it to a circular navmesh system which will be better suited to this type of game.
Does anyone have experience with that kind of thing?

Lighting and shadows are done with OpenGL, they are calculated dynamically on the fly with the help of the library box2dlights. Internally, the tilemap is mirrored as box2d world for raycasting.
Explosions are made from particles and the moving rotating thingies as well as the bullets are "ordinary" animated sprites.

That's very interesting. I will have to look more into that library, thanks!
And congrats on the game. It's very cool.

If you have a bunch of points that all repel each other and put them in the middle one at a time this pattern will form naturally. There's nothing fancy in the sunflowers DNA. Sorry to ruin your dreams.

Yeah. There's a great book from Biran Goodwin called "how the leopard changed its spots" and a much earlier book by D'Arcy Thompson, "on growth and form" (one of my all time fave books).
They both discuss how physical constraints and environmental interaction dictate the shape of a growing organism just as much as DNA. Very interesting stuff.

Ver nice. I like the soft shadowing effect. Is that done with shaders, or is it a kind of hack? I only ask because I got a similar effect with warped sprites.
Cheers

 

Hey there, really great stuff mate.
I particularly love the SSAO. It is very smooth.
I wish I had the time to work on a voxel engine. Sigh.

Hi there
Here is a screenshot from my WIP game Neoglobin:



The green and white mess shows the agents that are selected and the red circles show the target positions for those agents after giving a move command.
The challenge was to find a nice distribution for the points in a circle, so they wouldn't all bunch up once they got there.

As you can see from the image, I found a nice solution and I thought it might be of interest to people.

It is based on the packing of sunflower seeds. It's quite interesting actually and relates to fibonacci series and the golden ratio.

More info here.

Anyway, so that's what I did and it worked out rather well. I also wrote a little program in processing to experiment with it:

Code:

size(512, 512);
background(0);
smooth();

for (int i=0; i<600; ++i)
{
  float ang = 1.61803399*2.0*PI*i;
  float r = sqrt(i+1)*10;
  float x = width/2 + sin(ang)*r;
  float y = height/2 + cos(ang)*r;
  ellipse(x, y, 10, 10);
}

Please let me know if you find it useful or if you have ever used it before. I'd be interested to see what other uses can be made for it.

Cheers

You know, I just realised this should have been posted under 'DevLogs'
Is there someone who can move it?
Cheers

Hi there
Got a new


This one shows a new unit type: a digger, for carving channels through the substrate
These will be very expensive, very slow and quite weak, but they will be one of the main part of gameplay. Once I make a 'fog of war', you wont be able to see the enemy tunnelling to your base with a huge army until it's too late. Mwuhaha!

Yeah, I just put in a bounding box selection mechanism, and tomorrow I am going to make a waypoint system, so I can order units to any other part of the map. That won't be easy so it may take a while.
After that, I will make some buttons to perform various actions, like building new units, upgrading, research, etc.
It will be a few more days before there is any kind of actual gameplay, but I am aiming to be at alpha at the end of this month.
Cheers

Hey ANtY
Thanks for the interest. Yeah, I love flow, it's just the kind of style I love.
Actually, there isn't any gameplay yet. Eventually it will be a fairly typical RTS game. Collect resources, grow, improve, build and then send units to fight the enemy.
But as of yet, I'm just working on the engine.

Added a lot more stuff today.

* There is now a cave system, loaded from an image for easy level design/modification.
* Agents collide/steer away from wall geometry
* Added clickable minimap for easy jumping to other areas
* Edge scrolling with acceleration
* Mousewheel zoom control
* Many other improvements to architecture and design

Here are a couple of other screenshots:





And a new (bad quality) video can be found

.

Calling Lua functions to perform tasks is certainly a lot slower than doing the equivalent directly in C++, but I really wouldn't worry about it at the moment for 2 reasons:

1) Computers are very fast and getting faster all the time.
2) If does turn out to be a real problem, you can first optimise and redesign.

There is really no point in worry about something that probably wont ever be a problem. Just get it all programmed, and worry about real problems as they come up.
Now, I'm not saying you shouldn't plan ahead, but this is a learning experience for you, and you learn most by doing. So just get it done already! 

Hi there
This is a double introduction, myself and my new game. 

Nice to meet you all. I'm a freelance programmer, and I've been developing games by myself for a while now, but I haven't really connected with the indie community. I'd like that to change. I'm eager to make friends with other developers and share knowledge and ideas. So please, feel free to contact me and I hope you will welcome me into your community.

Anyway, here is my new game. Imagine if flOw had a bastard child with starcraft.
I've only just started it but it's coming along nicely. Once I get the core gameplay done, I will upload a playable version.

Here is a screenshot:



And

is the latest video.

Thanks.

I rolled my own engine, and I spend more time maintaining it than anything else. I'm not saying it wasn't worthwhile, but if I'd just gone ahead and used a popular engine from the start, I'd have a lot more to show for it now.

I'm not trying to get you down. If your goal is to write a game engine as a learning experience, I would say go for it.

However, if ultimately you want to make a game and feel that you'd like to roll your own engine first, I say read this.