DevBlog

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Ghoulsblade 01:27, 18 September 2007 (CEST) : threads are working now, and the keepalive message for online games that is sent via http to our masterserver (a php script which just keeps track of running games) is now sent using the threaded http netmessage util, so the game doesn't hang anymore while the connection is established =)

Ghoulsblade 03:08, 17 September 2007 (CEST) : starded playing with boost threads, made 2 threaded utils :

sending a simple network request and waiting for the answer
- e.g. for loading a php page via http, like for our online-game keep-alive message.
loading a big file to memory

Both are i/o operations, so making them threaded prevents the game from hanging. I haven't finished the lua bindings for them and haven't tested them yet, but making them threaded was very easy with boost. I made it so that our code can be compiled without boost and without thread support, in that case they still work, but are blocking operations.

hagish 03:11, 16 September 2007 (CEST) : worked on the mission system and improved the ui (mission display, waypoint) a bit. first little kill mission added. you can create the test mission using the F9 key.

Ghoulsblade 12:09, 15 September 2007 (CEST) : we worked a bit on sfz last night, we had to kick the boost::timer as it was very unreliable, (varying second length, depending on wether i move the window partly outside the screeen...) and hagish convinced me to finally look up the SDL code and extract the essential bits for timing and it was easier and shorter (win:1 line, linux:3 lines) than i though, and now we have a good timer that needs no extra lib. hagish started redesigning and extending the mission system, things might currently be a bit broken though. I improved the file-browser-dialog code a bit, and now you can navigate directories. It's still rather ugly as it is not easy to make scrolling support in our current gui, but it's better than before. Also i cleaned some rather old code in lib.timer.lua, that is now easier with the listener system.

hagish 16:25, 9 September 2007 (CEST) : Last night i implemented basic rocket support and started enemy groups handling code for kill missions.

Ghoulsblade 00:07, 6 September 2007 (CEST) : i tried adding the stuff from the ogre cellshading demo to sfz, it worked, but looks bad, and does not support textures, only plain color materials. so this won't do, we'll need something completely different if we decide to use a slight celshading effect.

Ghoulsblade 03:18, 4 September 2007 (CEST): just added some new models from kaelis and classic_traveller_diehard :

Ghoulsblade 02:30, 4 September 2007 (CEST) : we've now got an ingame bug reporting system : when an error occurs for the first time, you are asked if you want to send in a bug report, you can do so with one click on the SEND button, no copy-pasting needed, and you can see the info that will be sent.

hagish made an irc lib and i just built it in, now when you start sfz you can chat in our irc channel. the username used for irc is auto-detected from your system user, should work on win and linux, and a 3 digit random number is appended just to be sure.

i also made a new win binary updated the downloads on the mainpage =)

Ghoulsblade 01:03, 3 September 2007 (CEST) : we now have a master/gamelist-server. when you click "host game" the game is announced on that server, and other players can connect to it, if your firewall/router allows incoming tcp connections on port 6666. The currently open games are listed on the start menu screen. you can customize the game name by adding a line like this to data/config.lua :

 gGameName = "YOURNAME's game"

hagish 21:09, 2 September 2007 (CEST) : I experimented a bit with ode. Ode itself works quite well and the basics are very easy. I tried to implement a good ode-based ship movement but i experienced problems with the correct roll/pitch of the ships. They did nothing or circled around like crazy. I'll look inti this another time. Lugre got a basic IRC implementation (very basic, you can login, join and chat :) ) for our lobby.

Merlin 03:56, 2 September 2007 (CEST) : If your energy consumption is higher then your production and your energy equals zero one of the energy consuming entities is unequiped

Merlin 21:49, 1 September 2007 (CEST) : I just started helping with sfz and implemented my first feature. If you press "left alt" the names of all objects will be shown and there are some modificators (press and hold "left alt" and in addition)

"a" shows only asteroids
"s" shows only ships
"b" shows only planets and space stations (b stands for base)
"e" shows only enemies

2007 august

Ghoulsblade 02:45, 31 August 2007 (CEST) : not much new code in the past few days, just a few small fixes (just now : hud-target-line should work on all systems) i've been busy finishing something for iris. but a few nice models and interesting discussions in irc and in the forum have happened in the meantime.

Ghoulsblade 15:21, 25 August 2007 (CEST) : another coding night with hagish and many news to report :

new ship-model for pirates
shipeditor : ctrl-click for mass placement (hard to explain, just try and see)
shipeditor : quicksave button
shipeditor : improved lightning
shipeditor : shift-click : line tool
equipment system starts to work, various equipment parts added
- shield-battery : shieldmax+100
- big shield-battery : shieldmax+200
- shield-charger : shieldrechargerate+50, energyrechargerate-5
- fusion-reactor : energyrechargerate+50
- nickel-cadmium-accumulator : energymax+100
- titanium-armor : hullmax+200 (has to be repaired first)
ship-engine-exhaust particle/trail can now be placed, and there can be more than one per ship
ship orientation during flight improved
pirates now get angry and attack you when you come too close
pirates now call their friends when you shoot them
pirates : dead pirates spawn new little ones
interior : you can save/load the interior layout you created by f5/f6
a new, huge shiptype is available

Ghoulsblade 22:35, 24 August 2007 (CEST) : mesh editor starts working.

Ghoulsblade 00:33, 24 August 2007 (CEST) : i started working on a simple ingame mesh editor, this will be useful for importing new models, so the rescaling,rotating and repositioning of them can be done with a grid in game coordinates and other ingame models like the space-man for size comparison blended in.

Ghoulsblade 16:53, 23 August 2007 (CEST) : now i also added the models from classic_traveller_diehard ingame. scaling and position still has to be adjusted, but i plan to make a seperate tool for that.

Ghoulsblade 16:33, 23 August 2007 (CEST) : i extended the blender-ogre-exporter script to be more comfortable, see http://ghoulsblade.schattenkind.net/ogre/ and i adjusted our blender export howto : HowToExportFromBlender , it's now much more comfortable to get a .mesh file. Kaelis already tried the guide successfully, and improved his biotube model to work better ingame :

hagish 01:23, 23 August 2007 (CEST) : First ode binding working. In the lab you can see 2 bouncy fridges :) (start sfz with commandline parameter -lab)

Ghoulsblade 00:26, 23 August 2007 (CEST): a few more screenshots with better engine trails, and my first try to import blender models (hagish imported the other models so far). I found exporting/importing is currently very troublesome because i had to rename many things and change filepaths, so i'm thinking about looking into the exporter sourcecode and trying to add an option to automate this in order to make exporting easier. Also the models still have to be rescaled, repositioned and rotated before the can be used correctly ingame, and i think i'll try to make an ingame editor for that, so they can be compared directly to existing ingame models like the spacesuit for a better size-impression, and i can blend in a grid in ingame coordinates this way. It'll be quite a bit of work, but i think it will be well worth it in the long run.

Ghoulsblade 02:49, 20 August 2007 (CEST) : hud stuff : edgemarkers and name display for objects

Ghoulsblade 23:12, 19 August 2007 (CEST) hagish and i met this weekend and coded like crazy =)

we've replaced the billboard-planets by 3d-ones with textures from the freeorion orion project that were available under cc-by-sa (see README for credits)
hagish added a spaceport menu listing planets and stations
mousepicking is now more accurate and when there are multiple objects under the mouse you can cycle between them by clicking repeatedly
we tested multiplayer networking and solved a few bugs and issues, it works fine in a LAN
we accidentally "discovered" a feature, when you exit a ship while it's autopilot is activated, the autopilot does not switch off, and it continues to not only approach, but to actually FOLLOW the target if it is a moving ship. by repeatedly undocking fighters from the mothership, setting them to follow leaving via spacesuit and re-entering the mothership, we built a little fleet of fighters following us and made a few screenshots
hagish improved a few things in the gui system
you can now "call"/mark targets by pressing strg-t for the rest of the team, they have a red hud-border and can be selected by pressing t
a line marker now helps finding the direction to selected targets that are offscreen
we experimented with engine trails
we built in the gui graphics that ray made for sfz
a few changes in how cargo is handled internally in preparation for a generic container/equipment system
we now have a little cursor
we made a lot of screenshots

earth is under attack
first planet experiment, not quite round enough, but kinda funny
new gui skin

Ghoulsblade 18:27, 15 August 2007 (CEST) : simple delivery missions are now working, e.g. you can earn some extra iron by bringing supplies from earth to mars. still far from actual gameplay fun, but it's a good start.

hagish 22:42, 14 August 2007 (CEST) : ok, openal should work ok with wav and ogg files in the current svn version. but it sounds a but sloppy (if i use openal with alsa). I also added a random name generator based on this article: http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article2016.asp

hagish 21:54, 7 August 2007 (CEST) : added some icons and keybindings to the shipeditor to make using it more comfortable.

Ghoulsblade 00:33, 6 August 2007 (CEST) we're back from dusmania, had a lot of fun, some interesting talks, and saw lots of spacegames this year, but mostly 2d. we also worked a bit on sfz and talked with a few people about it and got lots of positive feedback, which is very motivating =D hagish started experimenting with random generated structures that can be used for plants and lightning effects, and i just finished a geometry generation utility called loft (the green thing, not yet used with hagish data), that can be used later to generate geometry for plants with the data generated by hagishs lib.

Ghoulsblade 00:39, 4 August 2007 (CEST) : bought weapons can now be equipped from cargo dialog
hagish : solar system loaded from file, asteroids marking planet orbits

Ghoulsblade 17:34, 3 August 2007 (CEST) : a very simple trading starts to work, you can now buy and sell iron for other things, but so far they're useless, but that'll change soon. hagish and i will be on http://dusmania.de/ this weekend.

2007 July

Ghoulsblade 11:39, 29 July 2007 (CEST) : we extracted/capsuled all the code shared between sfz, iris2 and other projects and put it into an external lib so we have it in one central place and don't have to merge changes back and forth every time. As the main part of the lib is the lua binding for ogre we decided to call it lugre : http://lugre.schattenkind.net

Ghoulsblade 01:11, 28 July 2007 (CEST) : i've been busy with work (and with watching a cool animee) this week, so i didn't find the time to write here...

Thanks to rookie1 from the freegamer forums it might now be possible to compile and run sfz on a 64 bit linux, but i can't test... He sent in a patch, i added it to trunk, and also fixed a few other things that might be troublesome in 64 bit. see this thread for details : http://freegamer.schattenkind.net/index.php?t=msg&goto=111 I also squashed a few bugs, cleaned a few things along the way, and made a new win32 exe, so you might want to run the updater if you were having problems.

To clear up misunderstandings about the "as long as" in my last post : We will implement some form of spacefolding travelspeed and possibilities to interrupt it, but i think we need to focus on other things first, see this thread for an interesting discussion about the topic : http://freegamer.schattenkind.net/index.php?t=msg&th=11

There is a lot of code being shared between iris2 and sfz, and soon also by a third game-project by hagish and ray, so we will probably extract that code into a seperate lib to avoid having to merge new stuff back and forth every time. It's mainly a lua wrapper for the most important ogre parts as well as several utils for networking and similar things.

Ghoulsblade 02:01, 23 July 2007 (CEST) after thinking a while about space-folding travel and all the things to be considered when implementing it, i came to the conclusion that we don't really need it yet as long as the planets are so close together and not on a realistic scale, and other things like trading and missions are more important right now, and those usually involve traveling to other star systems, so i started a bit with the code for a list of star-systems

Ghoulsblade 00:33, 21 July 2007 (CEST) experiments with simple engine-particles

Ghoulsblade 20:00, 20 July 2007 (CEST) : screenshot of two new models by isha :

hagish 18:14, 16 July 2007 (CEST) : now laser and explosions have sound effects if you activate it in the config

Ghoulsblade 17:31, 16 July 2007 (CEST) : win compile was successful, so we now have a new binary released :

win32-binary (build 489, ca32 mb)

you might need to install this before it works: Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 SP1 Redistributable Package (x86) : http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=200B2FD9-AE1A-4A14-984D-389C36F85647&displaylang=en

in the initial setup dialog, choose directx instead of opengl otherwise it crashes for an unknown reason so far.

it includes an updater.exe to get the latest code changes, and as we are working mainly on the lua code which does not need to be compiled, you can get the latest changes this way even if we don't make a new release for a while. A new binary release will only be needed if there are changes to the c++ code, which are rather rare. Please note that sfz is still work in progress and there isn't any real gameplay yet, just a few things to try out =)

Ghoulsblade 02:46, 16 July 2007 (CEST): i successfully compiled and modified the iris updater for sfz, but it is useless until we have win binaries in the svn. i'll try to compile some using the project file by pascal in the next few days.

Ghoulsblade 20:11, 14 July 2007 (CEST) : we now have our own forum, thx to charlie aka FreeGamer for hosting us !

Ghoulsblade 05:48, 14 July 2007 (CEST) : another coding night with hagish and lots of stuff done. we can now walk around inside the ship and place several furniture items and stuff like doors, ladders, grates, engines, and it even works well over network =)

Ghoulsblade 00:14, 12 July 2007 (CEST) : i'm currently busy learning and writing tests for my studies, so i won't get to do much until the end of next week.

Ghoulsblade 19:04, 9 July 2007 (CEST) : hagish skinned the space-suit and the generator :

Ghoulsblade 19:41, 7 July 2007 (CEST) : enhanced the interior mesh generation a bit more, holes should be fixed now, some fine borderlines and a little tweaking of the ambient light vector greatly improve the spatial awareness, and i changed the firefly model to look better from the inside.

Ghoulsblade 03:41, 7 July 2007 (CEST) : experiments with walking around inside space-ships have begun, it's flying rather than walking and there is no collision detection so far, but we've got the inverted ship-mesh with inner walls removed. also hagish made a few nice 3d models : a space-suit to avoid billboard troubles, a couch : one of mankinds greatest achievements which should be aboard every starship, and a engine/generator like model that we'll use for various machinery, being able to hue/recolor meshes via lua code sure multiplies the uses for a new mesh :)

hagish 02:36, 7 July 2007 (CEST) : another coding night :)

Ghoulsblade 19:56, 6 July 2007 (CEST): we're currently working on a "location" system, that enables us to move objects to seperate "dimensions", for example to avoid destroying a fighter-object when it is docking, it is simply moved to a seperate "hangar-dimension". these things can later also be used for walking around inside spaceships (we're also working on generating experimental interior meshes for that) and for wormholes, etc... such a "dimension" has nothing todo with fancy graphics, it's just a logical grouping of objects so coordinate systems can overlap without objects interfering with each other. this isn't quite finished, the hudmarkers and other things still have to be adjusted. the current "hangar dimension" is nothing more than a gray empty space so far =)

Ghoulsblade 23:41, 4 July 2007 (CEST) : player now starts with a bigger ship and can launch from it in a little fighter and dock back on if they wish. meshes and gui for this are still very simple, but the code behind it works and can now be cleaned and extended.

Ghoulsblade 02:02, 4 July 2007 (CEST) : it is now possible to exit the current spaceship and float around in a space-suit, you can also enter ship. but there is a funny bug : i did put a check in to ensure that you couldn't enter pirate ships, but i forgot to check if the object to be entered is actually a ship, so now you can enter anything (except pirate-ships) and fly around as an asteroid, as a space-station or even as a wormhole :)