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[Schrompf]

I'm quite happy because I did a GameJam, using C++ and my framework, and actually got a little Settlers clone going in just 4 days. It's the first time I felt really productive again after what felt like years. I got a wife and a child, so my personal projects were stalling. And at work it's like "hunt ticket owner, parse logs, find responsible person, review code changes, progress ticket until allowed for release"... and no real coding anymore.

These few hours every day I was happily hacking stuff together, made great use of Visual Studios Edit&Continue, created all the assets directly in code, and still had suprisingly few crashes. This felt great.

[oahda]

Yesss, looking forward a lot to Ludum Dare 41—you doing it?

That's really impressive for a jam game in C++! Must be a useful engine!

[Schrompf]

The "engine" was written from scratch using DX9. I wrote it for a previous jam, so add another few hours of fiddling with signs until the shadow mapping worked cleanly. But I fear I exhausted my wife's courtesy with that, so no more jams in the foreseeable future. Especially not Ludum Dare, in which Me and my lifestyle would run up against student teams not sleeping a single minute in 48hs. I'm nearing 40, I can't do allnighters anymore without paying a price and neglecting many social ties.

[oahda]

Haha, well, even at ~25 I've already lost that teenage ability (and desire) to pull all-nighters, so I make sure to sleep properly when I jam.

[JWki]

I've been taking a break from rasterized triangles for a while



"Ray Tracing in One Weekend" has been pretty viral recently in the graphics community so I had to give it a go. It's a very very good book, I can only recommend it and am looking forward to working through the other two parts of the series when I have the time.
The screenshot is a very simple, but nifty pathtracer, supporting dielectric, metallic and lambertian materials, a simple aperture based camera model and I think the screenshot was 4x64 rays/pixel, rendered in 4k originally. Takes about 50 seconds to render one image using 4 samples, so the final frame shown here took about an hour or so.

[gimymblert]

Do you good free tuts? I'm going through old renderer (done comanche and wolfeinstein already, though need a bit of polish phase) as a way to wind off from the all nighter I do for my project (being a lousy programmer and all), and I'm almost 40, but I have no life of any sort

[pelle]

Yesterday I was idly browsing old files and found issue 4 of Game Developers Magazine from ca 1995. Not the more well known printed GDM but a free Australian electronic magazine shipped as an MSDOS executable through BBSes and FTP sites. You can get it on archive.org.

Anyway it contained an article describing how to make a 3D dungeon renderer and editor in the style of Goldbox and Unlimited Adventures AD&D games. Also came with a simple map editor. Would be fun and not too hard to implement. Even more primitive than Wolfenstein (although you can edit individual walls, even with different textures on each side, not just tiles).

[CodeLobe]

Code:

...
OK  	Discover a new sea
OK  	Kind of slips is mesg blocks (3)
OK  	Load chunk on in side
OK  	Get raw data from in side
OK  	Reload chunk on in side
OK  	Unload chunks from in side
OK  	Unload remaining chunks from in side
TEST	25 / 25 ( 100% )

PASS	49 / 49 ( 100% )
DONE	3 / 3 ( 100% )

Yay!  3 more units now pass all tests.

Unit tests for a game?  I feel so dirty, and that's the best kind of Happy.

[InfiniteStateMachine]

I'm quite happy because I did a GameJam, using C++ and my framework, and actually got a little Settlers clone going in just 4 days. It's the first time I felt really productive again after what felt like years. I got a wife and a child, so my personal projects were stalling. And at work it's like "hunt ticket owner, parse logs, find responsible person, review code changes, progress ticket until allowed for release"... and no real coding anymore.

These few hours every day I was happily hacking stuff together, made great use of Visual Studios Edit&Continue, created all the assets directly in code, and still had suprisingly few crashes. This felt great.

That is amazing and inspiring.

Is the framework something publicly visible?

Regardless that looks awesome. Also kudos for banging out the artwork in code. Sounds like you went straight for your goal of making the game you wanted. Too often I find myself making some kind of importer and losing focus on the game I'm working on.

Haha, well, even at ~25 I've already lost that teenage ability (and desire) to pull all-nighters, so I make sure to sleep properly when I jam.

Similar boat. I already wrote off this ludum dare but I miss game jamming so much I'm considering just taking a vacation for the recovery day

[InfiniteStateMachine]

So I'm making a very low res game and found my onscreen debugger was taking up like 50% of the game and I couldn't play.

In the span of 2 hours I managed to make a small bunch of logic to create a server from my game to emit tracked game variables and log entries. Also managed to make 2 clients. A console client and a WPF client. Finally, I figured out how to launch 2 programs in VS when I press F5 so the game launches and my debugging program also launches and automatically connects to my game.

Felt like a possible distraction from working on my game when I started working on this but 2 hour for a profoundly improved debugging system is a trade I think is worth the time.

[CodeLobe]

In the span of 2 hours I managed to make a small bunch of logic to create a server from my game to emit tracked game variables and log entries.

Damn that's awesome man!  Most big games (and consoles, and mobiles) have remote debugging capabilities so it's becoming the go-to solution more indies should embrace IMO.

If your debug system allows input to the game via network, just make absolutely sure you remove it from production builds or else I'll expect you in the grumpy programmer's thread. 

------

I Just opened a complex network routing source I haven't worked on in 2 years, dreading that I'd have to re-learn what everything did.  Fortunately, past me foresaw this eventuality and there was a note:

Code:

// If you're reading this beyond 2016, you probably just need a brief refresher to figure out what to tweak, so here goes:
// [brief bullet point explanation & terminology reference]

Aww, I cared so much about myself back then.  I wish I could go back in time and give that dude a hug. (really should go back and add more comments to the last few things I was working on...)

[qMopey]

Wrote this all in one go without testing: https://github.com/RandyGaul/tinyheaders/blob/master/tinyfilewatch.h

And it worked first try without bugs! At least, no bugs found yet  

It's a directory watcher that wraps assetsys.h by Mattias Gustavsson. The cool thing is assetsys.h supports virtual mounts on directories or on zip files. So while developing a game, tinyfilewatch can be used to hotload assets. Then when ready to ship, simply zip the asset archive up, and the game still runs without any code changes! Almost like magic.

[Schrompf]

That is amazing and inspiring. Is the framework something publicly visible?

Wow, thanks for the nice words. The framework itsself is not publically available. It grew with me for nearly 20 years now, and was used in Splatter, for example. The code is in German, though, so it will never see the light of day :-)

I'm using a lot of open source libraries: TinyXML, Freetype, Squish DXT, AngelScript, boost. I'm using FModEx for audio, but I consider moving away from it. I have been using PhysX back in the days of Splitterwelten, but the current spare time project uses Bullet instead. Because it's OpenSource with a sensible Non-GPL license.

And I also gave back a bit to OpenSource projects, via my own SNIIS input library or the Open Asset Import Library which some pals and I founded a long time ago.

[oahda]

Wrote this all in one go without testing: https://github.com/RandyGaul/tinyheaders/blob/master/tinyfilewatch.h

And it worked first try without bugs! At least, no bugs found yet  

It's a directory watcher that wraps assetsys.h by Mattias Gustavsson. The cool thing is assetsys.h supports virtual mounts on directories or on zip files. So while developing a game, tinyfilewatch can be used to hotload assets. Then when ready to ship, simply zip the asset archive up, and the game still runs without any code changes! Almost like magic.

Since I've already integrated a different file watcher I've decided to just use PhysFS for my interchangeable directories/zips (especially since it's confirmed to work on all of my many target platforms), but this looks really cool and I'd definitely recommend it to others!

[J-Snake]

I've been taking a break from rasterized triangles for a while...

Looks like RT is "overhyped" as of recent.

[JWki]

I've been taking a break from rasterized triangles for a while...

Looks like RT is "overhyped" as of recent.

Well yeah this has been triggered by my feed being full of people giving Raytracer in One Weekend a go so I felt obliged to try it too.

[J-Snake]

RT is also pushed by Nvidia and Microsoft in realtime as of recent. I think it is still too early for RT to stand on its own there. But there can be added value by mixing it with the traditional rasterized rendering. We will see.

[gimymblert]

Finnally got to have the edge and corner check for the planet tiling, :D

Which open to new headaches, as the coordinate basis is not guarantee to be the same, so I need a way to represent neighbor face such as the tile get at the correct place on the neighbor face to ensure continuity. Which mean it will also allow for arbitrary shapes made of quad.

[oahda]

Yay and not yay, Gimmy! Wish I could help, but I'm not familiar with the maths. ;;

---

Getting somewhere on my aquarelle shader after two days of nonstop coding (and modelling and texture work to have something to shade in the first place)… Suddenly the vision I had for this game is starting to seem quite possible!

[Crimsontide]

RT is also pushed by Nvidia and Microsoft in realtime as of recent. I think it is still too early for RT to stand on its own there. But there can be added value by mixing it with the traditional rasterized rendering. We will see.

Just this morning I came up with an idea for a modified BSP tree that might actually make real-time ray tracing practical for some situations.  I had a feeling it was possible, but hadn't worked it all out.  So I'm kinda happy and if I get some free time I'm anxious to throw something together.  Don't know if its a completely new idea but nothing I've seen so far in literature.

edit: NM, doesn't work, seems I overlooked a small problem   Back to the drawing board.