When we ask the GPU to render a sprite or mesh to the screen, the biggest bottleneck isn’t the actual rendering of the pixels, but sending the data from the CPU to the GPU. And what this comes down to is how many draw calls we issue in each frame. (A draw call being in OpenGl glDrawElements). So instancing is an optimisation technique in which we bundle as many render objects (render object being a sprite or mesh in our game world) into the same draw call.
In a perfect world we would have a draw call for each ...
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In a perfect world we would have a draw call for each ...
Since starting this project for Handmade Network I think I've changed project five times, with different game ideas and a drawing app. None were being finished, so when One thing a Month challenge came up, I jumped on it eagerly. I made a tetris clone with a twist. From this I built it into a puzzle game, over the last couple of months.
I've made this project as simple as possible, with goal of finishing a complete game and releasing it.
Through the project so far, I realised a game doesn't have to take forever to finish ...
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I've made this project as simple as possible, with goal of finishing a complete game and releasing it.
Through the project so far, I realised a game doesn't have to take forever to finish ...
At the start of the year I switched to using my mac for programming instead of windows. With it came some changes. One was using the SDL library instead of Win32 for the platform layer. The other big change was using Xcode as the debugger instead of Visual Studio. My goal was to use it in a similar way to how Casey’s uses Visual Studio. Stepping through the code, setting breakpoints etc. but not actually using it as the text editor. Once I got used to using it, the flow process was pretty similar to how I was programming ...
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You hear the word designer a lot these days. Whether its a a ui designer, graphic designer or a level designer. In part of my mind I associate 'designer' with a more arty type like a graphics designer. But I like design and I'm not particularly an arty type. I like the idea of making something more functional. The engineer definition of design. But I have part of me that sees and believes every human activity is design. The chef designs food. A mechanic designs solutions to car problems. The physicist designs theories. If I think about it, the ...
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Since December I stopped working on Mind Man as I was lacking direction. In the mean time I started working on some other projects, most notably a text adventure engine. Originally my plan was to make a video series using C to make games . The first project was a text adventure game just on the command line. However I was enjoying it so much, I forgot about the video series, and started developing it past the initial plans. While I was making it I was programming with a modular approach in mind. I wanted to create some reusable header files ...
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Recently I decided to learn how to use the IMGUI library. However by the end, I had gone down a rabbit hole of learning about libraries.
At first I was compiling the IMGUI library as a unity build with my own code. It was taking upward of five seconds each compile. So I decided to pull it out into its own library image. There are two main kinds of libraries: static and dynamic. Static libraries are essentially archived ‘object’ files (.o). The library file will have an extension of .a on mac and linux and .lib on windows. When you ...
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At first I was compiling the IMGUI library as a unity build with my own code. It was taking upward of five seconds each compile. So I decided to pull it out into its own library image. There are two main kinds of libraries: static and dynamic. Static libraries are essentially archived ‘object’ files (.o). The library file will have an extension of .a on mac and linux and .lib on windows. When you ...
At the end of december I decided to port the game to SDL so I could use my mac computer. I knew I liked programming in the style of Handmade Hero but I didn't have the motivation to learn objective-C and the Cocoa framework for Mac. I had looked at implementations using NS classes a couple of times but never got very far. I had heard about SDL and decided to look into it a bit more. I also wanted to program using OpenGL and do most stuff myself, but not have to think too much about creating a ...
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I haven't been doing much on the game this month. I have rethought the puzzles an looking for the next steps to take in the game design. This will also inform where the programming will go from here: what needs to be developed, expanded upon and simplified.
In the mean time here is some stuff I wrote after watching the interview with Mike Acton and Casey at Handmade Con 2015
The Practice of Programming
In an interview by Mike Acton about programming and engine development, Mike said that practice was the thing he wished programmers did more of. That ...
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In the mean time here is some stuff I wrote after watching the interview with Mike Acton and Casey at Handmade Con 2015
The Practice of Programming
In an interview by Mike Acton about programming and engine development, Mike said that practice was the thing he wished programmers did more of. That ...
When approaching the game design, I had some ideas that I wanted to base the game around. One of these ideas was the decision to avoid having the game be solved by a bot. This inspiration comes from the January music toy (link posted in the projects description). A bot could easily play the game with the game only having three key inputs. But as there are no end goals or progression, it would miss the point of the game.
You just enjoy the sounds that are made.
As Mind Man uses discrete movement steps for entities on a discrete ...
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You just enjoy the sounds that are made.
As Mind Man uses discrete movement steps for entities on a discrete ...
As this game is based around puzzles, one of the requirements for the engine was a strong level editor. One in which I could easily iterate on puzzle designs without much overhead. I knew i wanted to be able to drag entities around, create entities, edit the board, and easily edit the path finding of the AI.
The first step was to create a simple UI system in which I could easily create UI menus in the code, and add actions to buttons. The api looks like the following:
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The first step was to create a simple UI system in which I could easily create UI menus in the code, and add actions to buttons. The api looks like the following:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 | PushUIElement ... |