Yet, I managed to get involved in several new projects. I’m crazy. Or totally dumb.

Some of my friends already told me before that I like to cumulate several projects at the same time and that it’s a bad idea. Today I fully agree and really need to cut something to allow some projects to be released.

So today, as I’m finally in a fixed place and starting to have a more peaceful life, I’ll list the projects I started since September and will set a status on each one of them.

(I don’t count my dayjob projects but they often take me more time than I wished…)

Pow & Co

Between September and the beginning of January I’ve been working on my spare-time on a little Pac-man “clone” (if you can say that) for and with a friend for an advertisement company. It was a good first Flash game experience but it took way to much time for what it was worth. I had some rush at my new job in the same time so it was not a very good moment to work on a little side project. But, oh well, it’s finished (with some minor bugs–got to catch them all!) and playable online for free!  If you want to try but don’t want to put your email in the form, just put something that look like an email.

So this one is finished.

NetRush

This one is my special baby project. It’s long and hard to grow, I’ve been working on it for a long time now,  but I cannot stop it. I know it’s a good project (for instance nobody else did try something similar — I often take time to search, just to be sure) and will keep it going until I finish at least the first public version.

However, I didn’t work a lot on this when I first moved on Paris and still didn’t work a lot since Februray. In fact, I’m pausing this project for some time. It will be my only project once I’ve finished the first version of…

Art Of Sequence

This one is a project I’ve been thinking about since February 2009, when I first discovered Balak’s experience with digital comics. I had a tool project idea since then but I was aware that it was a too big project to work on with NetRush in the way. So I didn’t started it. Then I got some discussions with Balak and other people involved in digital comics and I was (and still am) convinced that it’s a project that is necessary for the online comics community.

So, to be short it’s a tool to help make digital comics. More about that … soon (certainly when the website will be online, in few months).

This project is my main focus currently. I’ve been hampered until now by some problems and moving so I didn’t get far for instance but I’m making enough progress to hope I’ll be able to release the first version in the summer. Then, as it’s a free open-source project (my first!), I’ll certainly let the community work with it and will then almost totally focus on NetRush. (will only supervise the AOS project).

That said, sometimes I need to get back to NetRush just to “breath some (personal) game code”. I just start Visual Studio, fix some code, add a minor feature and feel better after that.

Now, I don’t have only software projects. In fact I really need to make my other brain parts works, most of the time by drawing some comics…

Three Storms

This one is a wecomic project I started some years ago but still didn’t manage to get the first page out.

In fact, several pages are ready but I never finished “really” the first episode and really wanted to publish it in one time. I guess it’s a project that was also something like a “wall” in my mind for some reason. A project I’ve been delaying for so much time that it seems ridiculous. I was bothered by the quality of the pages, by the way I wanted to make the colours etc.

In the end, I’ve found a “simple” coloring style that really works. It’s not a big project but a “long” one so there is no other problem with it than the perseverance problem.

I’m still thinking for this one. Should I kill it? I don’t feel like it because it’s an important project. Maybe I’ll let it sleep some months before getting back to it. It’s more likely that I’ll just finish the first episode, publish it and get back to it once I’ve finished…

Mekta Shtae (The Way of The Theorician)

This one was a paper comics I’ve been planning to finish at the end of 2007. At the start of 2007 I had 70% of the story-board ready. Today, I just have some more artwork pages, but no comics pages yet.

However, it’s a really important project for me, a special challenge. So this one is my main focus on the drawing-comics side today. It’s a one shot around 60 pages novel and I’ve planned to finish it by the end of the year. So far, I’m not yet at a good speed to achieve this goal but I’m still trying hard.

The Inner Singularity

This one is a little webcomics “label” I wanted to create. The idea was to gather some webcomics talking about the “robot condition”, very Asimov-style.

For instance I consider this project to be dead. It’s a very good idea but I’ll never have time to manage it while making another comics (Mekta Shtae). Maybe I’ll reconsider it when I get back to Three Storms, if I find that I can get a reasonable publishing rhythm. So maybe next year.

Summing up

So I’ve got:

• Art Of Sequence : going on
• Mekta Shtae: going on
• NetRush : paused (until the v1.0 of AOS is out)
• Three Storms: maybe will soon publish the first episode but then will pause it until Mekta Shtae is done
• The Inner Singularity  : abandoned for instance
• Pow&Co: done

Yes that’s still a lot. Still working on it.

I’ve done a lot since my last post. I’m currently thinking a lot to find a way to release my current projects. I’ll have to kill some I think.

But more on that later. I’m preparing a big summary of my different projects state, including NetRush, that will be published before the next week end I hope — my work and other problems don’t help but I really need to do this anyway.

If you want to have some mico news about my projects, you can follow my twitter account (http://twitter.com/MJKlaim). I’ll certainly add the twitter flow on this blog anyway.

I’m currently sleeping at a friend’s appartement and he don’t have any PC, only macs, so I don’t have any other Windows available than my work computer (i’m programming on windows only at the moment – don’t have experience in unix based dev yet). That don’t allow me to work often on my projects like NetRush but I try to do some things when I can. It allows me to think more about some things in NetRush and now I have several pages of notes and ideas I need to inject in the game!

It’s a bit hard to find a good appartement in Paris or in the immediate surrounding but I think I’ll find something nice soon.

Before I came to Paris I started to write a series of article about some game mechanics ideas. I didn’t finish them because of my new job but I’ll be back on it soon.

Wait & see :)

It’s a bit hard to use…

In fact it looks like the kind of behaviours that will be available in the game when you send some kind of Virus on the ennemy.

But here it’s just a bug …

…

I suspect that the debugging stage will be hard, with people asking if some strange behavior is wanted or just a bug… I’ll have to answer very often “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature…”

I’m now trying to write something there while working on my projects. So if you feel the need to know more about the advancement of the NetRush game programming, just register my Twitter.

I passed most of the last week coding on NetRush, a bit of comics drawing and preparing my résumé. Since yesterday I worked fully on my job search and since this afternoon I’m working back on NetRush while managing some new job search contacts.

I’m still trying to get the working game mechanics as soon as possible and I think I’m on the good track to get it in the coming weeks.

By the way, I’m happy to see that I manage to have full days working on NetRush without having to push myself. As people who might have work with me know,  I don’t write code very fast because I really test a lot and make sure all work fine together before considering a system ready to be used, so sometimes it takes a lot of time to get a simple feature because it needs to be “really clean”. Having full days working on the project really help for this. When you’re getting back home after a day of work, if you still have the motivation to work on your game project, it’s hard to have a clear mindset and long enough to design things just right. Or at least it’s easier to make mistakes. Working on mornings is a pleasure at the moment.

So I hope I’ll be rewarded one day for my hard work on this project.

We’ll see that. :)

NetRush – Dev Test box – Consoles & Scripts from Klaim on Vimeo.

This is a simple test environement in the NetRush game. This video demonstrate the combination of several technologies :

• Ogre ( ogre3d.org ) as graphic engine – thanks Sinbad! ;
• Navi/Awesomium ( princeofcode.com ) to generate the textures of the 3D consoles: the display code is HTML/Javascript/CSS rendered in the texture via Chromium/Webkit – thanks Adam! ;
• Falcon (falconpl.org ) as scipt language/engine – thanks Jonnymind! ;

[programming stuff]

Last weeks, at night, I’ve been fighting with the Falcon source code to get it run in NetRush. With Jonnymind’s help (he is the creator of the language) we managed to spot and fix some bugs that blocked me. Some of these were from non-obvious usage of Falcon C++ objects that I missed. The documentation is not complete enough for the moment (it’s still a pretty young language) and the code was not obvious about some subtil things but once you got it right it runs really well.

After two weeks trying to set Falcon in NetRush I’ve been a bit angry that I lost so much time for something that some other people did right quicker. One of the reason is that I wanted to have the source code in the NetRush SVN to quiclky spot Falcon problems and provide fixes if I can. I had to use CMake to generate a project file for my project but in NetRush all the paths are relative to the root project directory and CMake only generate full paths. So I managed to create a custom Visual Studio project file that references the right sources and got it built. This makes it a bit “ninja” to update the source code, but I don’t think I’ll need to update very often – and I’ll only update for bugfix for the moment.
Another week have been lost in trying to run a simple test : execute “1+2″ in the console and get the result.
Some of the problems I got were some UNICODE conversion stuff that will be soon fixed in Falcon (easy to fix once spoted) but other were from my way to use the Falcon objects. There were some concepts subtilities I wasn’t aware of and as I followed the “simple” example of the provided Falcon console source code, I had to provide a lot of code and debug feedback to Jonnymind to make him spot where I did something wrong.
We agreed that some work would have to be done to ease understanding and using some objects of the language and some changes are currently work in progress.

The Navi integration was made months ago. I replaced the  raw rendering of text on texture by getting the texture from a Navi. That Navi is fed with HTML/Javascript/CSS files and renders the result in the texture using Awesomium (Chromium/Webkit wrapper).  That way, all the consoles (and almost all GUI) you see in NetRush is just plain HTML/Javascript/CSS code, sometime communicating with the core C++ code.
That way, it’s really easy to have the main behaviour of the game in C++, exposes it to Navi Javascript  environement and let a graphic-skilled guy manipulate the rendering with HTML/CSS (and maybe javascript). Without any compilation.

The consoles and “applications” you see in the video are just tests I wrote quickly, that  shows the power of those technologies together with some of my glue-code. I’m using that system in NetRush for gameplay (yes, you’ll understand later why) and eye candy.

The performance of all this is very promising. For the moment.

I think the next dev video i’ll post here will be more related to gameplay. Stay wired :)