Level editor updates and such

So here is a look at the changes and updates I’ve made to the level editor.

So as you can see (actually I realize its quite hard to see but I don’t know how to add the click here and zoom the picture feature.)I have added teleporter support to the editor. When you hit the button it changes the selected face to a teleporter then pops up a box telling you to choose the connector. I have also added a spike timer ability. We want the spikes in the game to move on variable times to create sort of a wave of spikes thing. I’ve also added a way to clear the cube of objects rather than just deleting the cube. The editor is almost finished tech wise. I’ve got a few bugs to work out then it will get an over all on the UI for usability so if we choose to release it with the game its simple and easy to use.

So over the weekend I was informed that some of my old projects over on my website were not working. I attempted to make some fixes to them but realized that Mixed-Up Mario was never able to build in release mode so I can’t create an installer for it. The same goes for my Return of the Living Homeless. The other projects are not really for use just more code samples of mine for people to use. The good news is that if anyone has Visual Studio installed and tries to download and play my older games they will work. I plan on fixing them to run in release in a few months after final project is over. Also I’ve put up my editor but the Visual Studio requirement is still in effect at this time. The final release of it will allow all pc lovers to enjoy it. You can download it here.

Controls for the editor:
Left, Right – Moves the Placement Cube on the X Axis
Up, Down- Moves the Placement Cube on the Y Axis
P, L – Moves the Placement Cube on the Z Axis

Shift + Left, Shift + Right – Moves the Camera on the X Axis
Shift + Up, Shift + Down- Moves the Camera on the Y Axis
P + Left, L + Right – Moves the Camera on the Z Axis

Alpha!

So last week Pengkwik had their alpha turn-in and I can say it went very very well. First off you can officially track our progress on our studio website. Here you can get a hold of our alpha build and try out the game. Please do and give us some feedback on where we stand. Basically the reason we feel so good about alpha is that the week before we tested our game on the machine we would be presenting on and our EP (External Producer) Was concerned about the progress of the game and where it would be by alpha. We took this and used it as inspiration. We created a list of about 17 items that we knew had to be in the build by alpha. We worked hard all weekend and pushed out a great alpha build. Here is a perspective on a weeks work.

Here you can see a picture of our Feature Fragment 2 turn-in. Rather than a description just look at this.

So this is a weeks worth of work. You can see we’ve gotten a skybox in and a lot of new textures and visual items. Pengcasso is here and looking beautiful and we also have some sweet keys and spikes. The timing system to the game has been implemented so theres a challenge and a goal to the game now. So I suggest you go right now and download the game and the newest DirectX if you don’t have it and play the game and give us some feedback.

Adventures through XAudio2

So with our Feature Fragment 2 yesterday and Alpha turnin looming in less than a week the group is on high alert to get things into the game before Tuesday. The last 2 weeks for me have been devoted to using the brand spanking new XAudio2 API from Microsoft. A quick overview of what XA2 is, basically everyone on Windows who didn’t use FMOD, used DirectSound for their sound. This is a DirectX API and was fairly easy to use. On the XBox 360 XAudio was used by some. XA2’s reason is to replace both Direct Sound and XAudio and use one API to develop sound on both Windows and the XBox 360.

So the official release of XAudio2 was in the March 2008 SDK of DirectX. That being said it is a fairly new system with very little help and documentation on the internet, which has been a huge problem of mine finding people to help me with my bugs. Basically I have had to rely on my ability to read and understand the examples that XA2 shipped with and find ways to adapt it to what I needed in my game. So lets begin the tale of my XA2 experience.

So at GDC this year I sat in on Brian Schmidt’s presentation on XA2 and I immediately decided that I wanted to use it in my game. Not only because I became interested in audio programming but because I wanted the challenge of learning a brand new API on my own. So my journey began 2 weeks ago when I opened up the documentation for XA2 and began to develop a prototype engine for XA2. Getting XA2 initialized is actually simpler than I thought it was going to be. You create your IXAudio2 instance and your mastering voice. Basically the mastering voice serves as the final stage in creating sounds. Voices in XA2 are what your submit your sound buffers to and how you do mixing of sounds. The next step was coming up with a way to open and read .wav files. I first decided to get files loading straight into memory rather than streaming. The code examples for XA2 made this simple as they included a  CWaveFile object that both opens and reads the wav.  All you have to do is create a  WAVEFORMATEX and get a hold of the information from the wav to fill this struct out. Once you have the data you can create a source voice and submit the buffer of sound to it. This was where I found my first problem. I thought that for every sound you loaded that you needed 1 source buffer. The problem that arose was when I would play a sound and then try to play another it would queue them up and not overlap like I intended. This was solved by me figuring out that its not every sound that you load that needs a source voice but every sound you want to play needs a source voice. Solving this problem allowed my soundFX to overlap and work correctly.

The next step to creating my engine was to get streaming audio to work. Basically streaming audio is when rather than loading the entire sound file into memory you read a smaller chunk into memory then when that is finished playing you read in another small chunk and continue until there are no more chunks to read. This seemed simple enough until I realized that in order to keep reading these chunks I was going to be stuck in a while loop, keeping me from doing anything else but reading sounds. This was very bad, but solvable by using multithreading. Now I had only had a small taste of multithreading before so this was a whole new challenge. Doing some researching on the web I was able to find a simple thread class that handled all of the initializing of the thread and all I had to do was overwrite the run function of the thread and pass the argument that I needed to it. Once this was accomplished I had my engine. I was ready to port it to my game….Or so I thought.

During the early stages of creating my prototype I read in one of the .h files I was inspecting that it required a Unicode build to work, essentially meaning that for XA2 to work it had to be in a Unicode build. I changed my build to Unicode and didn’t think twice about it. That was until I put it into our game which was a Multibyte build. I was at a loss for words. I thought there was going to be no way to use XA2. I asked around school and work and none of the teachers seemed to know of a way to get around this. Then the magic man him self Naveen told me that it was absolutely possible. By including my prototype project in our games project and having the XA2 engine build as a static library, I was able to build the XA2 engine in its own project with a Unicode build, then link in the functions to my game which was a Multibyte build. This turned out to be successful and as of right now we have streaming audio and working overlapping SFX in our build.

With Alpha coming up my XA2 engine will take a backseat for a week, but there is still work to be done. I need to figure out how to load XWMA’s. Right now we are using uncompressed .wav files which are HUGE!. Our installer alone right now is 112 MB because of the large sound files. A XWMA can turn a 30MB file into a 19k file so getting these into my game is important. I also want to attempt to get 3-D sound into our game as well as some sweet fade and other sound effects. Updates will come as I progress and expect to see more of the game next week after Alpha.

Level Editor Updats and First Look at Pengcasso’s Puzzle Painting

So its been about 2 weeks and I must say that the game is coming along quite well. And your all in for a treat. Here are the first ever world release pictures of our game. These are from between our feature fragment 1 and 2. Which means that in 3 weeks we will have our alpha build and hopefully it will be ready for some of you to play and test for us.

So heres the first thing you will see in the game. It is Jon Sica’s amazing menu system. These menus are turning out to be really cool. Hes got all kinds of sweet scrolling and resizing and its really going to be sweet in the final build.

So here is the first ever screenshot from our game. As you can see we are using a placeholder model right now with a bounding volume that will fit our penguin model. You can see the blocks being loaded in and the way the world will look once polish it. The door there is one of my wonderful creations that shows my amazing 3DMax skills. When I first created the door it was off center, I moved the door but forgot to move the door knob. The world rotates and has a sweet interpolation effect. What we are working on now is getting the rotation to be solid and keep the bounding volumes that all of our objects have in place. My level editor reads in all the locations of the player spawning and the door and all that fun stuff so you can see it in action.

So as you can see above I’ve made some changes to my level editor. You can now see what you have placed on each face. I plan on loading in the actual meshes that we are using in the game into the editor for some better looking options. I also added the painting block functionality. Basically these are the cubes that you cannot walk on until you pick up the corresponding paint bucket. Other than that right now I am working on the brand new XAudio2 API and boy is it giving me a hard time. I’ve got work to do on it today and it might just be in the build by the end of the day so expect an update here once I get it working…or don’t.

A lot to start with but it will get easier.

So this will be my first post documenting my progress through my final project. The problem is that I am going into my 3rd month so I have a lot of work done already. First let me give you a rundown on what Pengcassio’s Puzzle Painting is. Pengcassio’s Puzzle Painting or PPP for short is a 3-D puzzle game that challenges players to think quick and collect keys to exit the level. The world is made up of cubes that Pengcassio can travel on. If you need to move to avoid an obstacle or enemy, you simply walk to the edge and rotate the world to move onto a new face. Throughout the world there are keys scattered and you must collect them before you can exit the level. Several traps and enemies will get in the way of doing this. Your time The first and second month classes have consisted of doc work. Our team Pengkwik, has finished our design and technical doc. We put a lot of work and thought into it but I really don’t enjoy the doc work so I started coding early. I am the tech lead so I developed the system architecture outline. As a team we developed the whole system. I am also responsible for maintaining the main game loop, sound engine, and developing a 3-D level editor. The level editor is what I looked forward to most because I love C# and making tools. I began a month ago and have made great progress.

So this is the main interface for my editor. As you can see the white cube is a cube that has been placed into the world. The green cube represents where the next cube is to be placed. You can place a cube along any axis by using keyboard input. This allows for complex levels to be built rather quickly.

So here you can see a “Level” that I built quickly. The red square indicates that a face has been picked. You can then see to the right that you can change attributes to the face. Picking works in full 3-D and was proved to be not as much of a challenge that I thought it was going to be. This is the current state that my editor is in. You can save and load levels into the editor, and also load levels into our game. I decided to use XML for simple bug finding with a very user friendly format. So theres what I’ve accomplished in the last month. It might not look like much but under the hood its really neat. If you want to play around with it and possibly give me some feedback (Besides the camera I know it blows I’m working on it) you can download it here. Other than that in the game right now I am maintaining the main game loop and starting to do sound. I plan on using XAudio2 which will be fun

The Wonderful World of Blogging

So hi. My names Matt and I’m a video game programmer. I’m currently working on a 3-D casual puzzle game for my final project at Full Sail University. I started this blog to document and update my progress and adventures through my 5 month Dev cycle. You can find all of my works at my website www.mattbrenner.com