Angelus blog

Well time fly by and animation system starting take shape. Thanks to it I could do even some not bad looking animations in game (http://coffemonsters.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/lba-preview-15.html) but well this is just another milestone in road to finished game.  Because of this thoughts I already moved to next issue: recovering of movie system. So far its going fine I added new movie resource, movie editor module. No I starting adding basic functionality: adding keys. This operation require list of selected objects in level. This part was designed great :D Because I can have N levels loaded in memory in the same time I created new level component which exist only in editor. It contain some editor specific data i.e. selection. It's added on loading from editor and it's not saved with level. When you want list of selected objects just pick component from level and I have access to selection. Great idea right ?  I thought this way when I was writing it. Right now I...

This story started long ago while I was still student at University of Technology in Wrocław. It was probably year 2006 but I'm not sure right now. With time passing by all previous years slowly starting blending together but well I'm already at this age where this is pardonable. On one of C++ courses we got exercise to do program of our choice to show that we learned language. I decided that isometric game in SDL software mode will be great idea. And so I started working on it. What a great joy I had when everything finally started working together and I was able to send it to person conducting classes. I got passing marks and this was end of story.  Well at least for a lot of project this would be truth but in this cases there is a lot more. Some time passed and with friend we decided to make casual game. Code from course project was really useful but software rendering were too slow so I switched whole stuff on OpenGL and some time later we finished  "Pir...

When two months ago I created generator for RTTI code I didn't realize how this one script will change so much in my programming style. Right now I have already four of generators in my code base: RTTI - Generate part of my RTTI code. SID - Generate CStringID with already calculated hash Pimpl - Generate interface class. Enum - Generate toStringID, fromStringID functions. So what changed for me after writing this one generator that make difference ? I try not to do monkey job . To show you how this improve my workflow let's look on generator I wrote today: Generator of Enumerator functions: toStringID, fromStringID. This is simple problem where for some enumerators we want to have conversion from value to some verbose type. Some people may claim that this is not issue. You write functions once and they work. Later you just need to modify them when you do some changes in enum. This take like about half minute work  ... if we don't do mistake there. Then thi...

After weeks of work (probably I could even say months) and hundred resolved tasks and bugs new animation system finally start working ;] Check final effect: If you think that it is look no different from my old animations then you are almost right :D Currently this new system have even less functionality than old one. Because of that I needed to disable big part of gameplay. Was it worth it ?  Short version : I think that: YES. 

As some of you may know White Rabbit Engine use it's own R un T ime T ype I nformation  system. And well like with everything else sometimes come time when you need to upgrade stuff. Recently I had another occasion to do iteration over this system. In this post I will try to give you a little bit insight how m  RTTI  look is engine, what changed and what are plans for future. But well let's start from begin.

Funny thing about doing your own tech is that you sometimes need to do some funny stuff. This week I needed done  Short Term Memory Manager. My comment in code describe it like this: Short Term Memory Manager (STM Manager). STM is memory which you want to use for short one-shot tasks:             Create->Execute->[GetResult]->Destroy It is limited by capacity so you never can use more than you pre-allocated for it. Right now it's use to transfer resource data CPU->GPU and in  animations tasks. For me this is temporary memory which I use for example to load texture data and then passing it to GPU upload (which will remove it). There are also other usage where I think using normal allocation...

This is the story of memory corruption hunting and what I learned thanks to it. So the story started when after one of many big changes in component system I needed to re-save all maps and objects templates :] Because I'm lazy bastard some time ago I created processes which loading each of it and re-save. All this after pressing one "magic" button. Great idea and in the same real stress test how object system works. Sadly after all this time I didn't use it, whole process failed. And in worst possible way: memory corruption. Everybody who have occasion to deal with at leas one not trivial one know that this are not nice bug. Especially in multi-threaded environment:/ In my case normal corruption wasn't enough and sometimes even my callstack was corrupted. Fun :| So well my hunt begin because I couldn't left this issue without fix. 1st approach: Debugger The first approach was the most trivial one check what happening when app crashed. Simple a...

I like to experiments and have fun doing that. Right now I work on another crazy idea. You know because developing of game and technology behind is not enough. Don't worry this is just another side project connected with this one.  Project generator. I know that I could use some existing solutions (i.e CMake) but this wouldn't be so fun as doing it myself in python :] Well I started doing ... some time ago and returning to it whenever I had some time. Right now I'm at the level where Linux make support is better than previous generator I use. Sadly Microsoft Visual Studio support not exist there right now :D Well I fix this in future. But lets move to some details about new project generator which is wrote in python.

Singleton pattern ... People love it or hate it. There are also group of people who don't mind them. I'm still try figure out which I'm :] I'm for sure not the one who love them. I'm also cannot say that I rally hate them because I still use them in code (It is like with my Facebook account. After I created one I try not complain about fb. ). So probably I'm best fit to don't mind group. But my past experience showing me that I have bigger tendency to removing them from code than adding new one. And probably some colleagues from work will be happy about this because we spend a lot of time discussing about problem. I remove them because I put even more effort in good design of systems. In a lot of cases thanks to changes I just don't need global objects. Which is good. It allow me to better utilize multithreading thanks to encapsulation. Today sadly I had problem where I still don't know cleaner solution than global state: ////////...

It's funny that only with time and experience you start to understanding how hard UI code is. I remember a lot of situations when UI freeze in meantime of doing something. Whole window is locked and you just prying that its still alive. First version of my tools were similar: everything happening in one thread which was block when I was doing some longer operation. Because there was not too much to process it was not so painful. With time this changed, amount of data grow. To fix the issue I started adding progress bars to some operations and was happy. Sadly I was still wrong. This solution is still messy. I block whole UI and just update progress bar when some operations may be processed in background. Recent change of threading taught me beaut of asynchronous operations. Right now all my communication Engine UI is happening by events which cleaning my design of whole tools. All code where I mix UI with mechanics changing in creation of event and processing of it later. Be...