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 :)

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.

For the last days I’ve rest and cleaned my appartment and i’m still working on making it a better place to live and work. I’ve been working on my CV too and will soon be able to hunt for a new position.

This time of transition is perfect to get back to NetRush more efficiently and maybe some other (webcomics) projects (for left brain fun). As soon as my home workspace is cleaned – and it’s not an easy task to clean it, I’ve neglected it a lot lately – I’ll work on NetRush as much as I can until I  find a new job.

I’m really missing my laptop – that died last year -, it would have been better to go work in a park all day, enjoy the beautiful weather and nature. I really need some (long and far) vacations. Unfortunately I am not able to take some now, for money reasons. I’ll take some time to walk out, but I’m more interested in finishing NetRush currently.

Those last months I’ve been busy with a lot of things but I’ve managed to advance a bit with NetRush. Among other minor works, I’ve decided to try Falcon as scripting language of the project. For some reasons I think it might be a better solution than Lua for NetRush. I’ve been working on intergrating Falcon code in the project but didn’t have a big enough time window to finish that.

I’ve also started to integrate Google Protobuf to generate and manage the game state data format. That will be ideal as most ot those data need to be sent to network and serialized on disk. It’s not a perfect solution for every project, but for some NetRush game state data I think it will be of great help.

I’ve started – finally! – to setup the code for the “real” game session. I’m plugging systems togethers, adding some other systems to fill missing parts, to get a playground as soon as I can. There is still a lot of work until I get to something playable but now it’s the priority because I really want to have the editor of the game usable as soon as I can. The editor will be in the game so the code of the game is in great part shared with the editor – that will be available to the player too. I’m trying to get this level design tool quickly as it will be of great help fo debugging, balancing and starting the real game level design.

I also made some technical decisions that will allow me to easily extend the game base in some awesome ways later. But it’s still too soon to talk about this. :)

Last night I’ve read the news about the IGF submissions already open until the 1st November. That fills me with motivation and challenge but I don’t think I’ll be able to achieve enough work to send something in time. I hope that this unemploymed transition will be a great boost on the project, but will it be enough?

I’ll make it possible. Stay tuned.

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!

It’s not up to date compared to my private page but I’ll fix this later today if I find some time.

It’s really more interesting when moving and interracting with it but I’ll not make a video of it right now, I want to setup the real game environnement first. You’ll have to wait some more weeks :)

NetRush have now the potential of being one of the sexier geek-targeted-interface game of the world, ouh Yeah! :D

For those who don’t know what is a ColErase, it’s some kind of colored pencils that are easy to erase and are heavily used in animation drawing – and less often in comics drawing.

I think I was waiting for those pencils like some kind of will power trigger to seriously get back to drawing some comics. It have been a vary long time since I did a full comics. And it’s always too short. I miss telling stories.

By the way, last time I draw some comics I did a big page for an Halloween webcomic.

Time to get back to comics.

I think I’ll start by finishing the first episode of Three Storms.  (that have been waiting for…a very long time…).

At the beginning of the year I wanted to create a “graphic blog” with only drawings (on http://webcomics.fr). But now I think I’m not good at this kind of thing. I’m better working directly with a project and keeping working only for it. It gives a sense to the effort.

I don’t think I’ll work a lot on comics because of NetRush. But I think I’ll still need to do something on this side. Maybe to make my work the oposite way, like some kind of game programmer vacation :)