Like a lot of people around I got a Twitter account : MJKlaim .

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. :)

Here is a first little video of the current test environement (inside NetRush) I use to test technologies. You can see it in better resolution on Vimeo or Youtube.

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 :)

My sittuation have changed a lot those last weeks.

I’m currently unemployed and looking for a new job. Technically I’m still employed but on leave until the end of this month, that is the end of my contract.

Read the rest of this entry »

The last weeks I’ve not been very productive on NetRush. I spent a lot of time trying to solve some real life problems and have not been able to be at full speed on the developement.

Sorry for the lack of news! Some things have been done and I’ll publish some news  in the coming days.

I’ll be able to totally get back on NetRush in few days so stay connected!