…I postponed Carl Cube, because before global game jam started I wanted gamekit to be able to link blend-files or at least group-instances. That should make it possible for teams to work on different blender-file and link objects of the other one. That worked quite well on linux and actually also on windows, BUT during GGJ windows crashed all the time…

Great, just as I imagined… In the end it was just some stupid asserts that fired on windows but not on linux (where they seem to be ignored). Compiling windows in release-mode fixed it,…too bad that it took several hours to come to this simple conclusion (todo:still have to look at this asserts)

GGJ wasn’t perfect, and in the end it was like the last year. We were more or less ready to start creating some levels just before the deadline. Of course at this time we were already a bit stressed And therefore the actual game is a bit crappy.

The result is here(the title screen on the website is the best of the whole project :D):

Btw, the other two guys involved in this were Markus Oppermann and Burak Kahraman.

In the end I have to admit that I still wasn’t as confident with gamekit as I thought, so we actually ignored the physics-engine just because something wasn’t working right from the start. Keeping a cool head and first thinking before coding would have been a bit better for this…Not sure if that would have changed anything though

But in the end all about ggj was positive. Getting stuck with gamekit let me know better where and how to improve it… Btw the location in Mülheim(Ruhr) was great and well organized.

When I came back home I started thinking what went wrong and why, and since then I’m working hard to get gamekit more stable and to look more indepth to know what is really going on there. There is still much to discover

Works well, especially since I decided to not commit any new feature I built in the official gamekit-trunk (e.g. video-texture, gui-support in lua, linking of blend-files..), I can work much faster. No need to think about how to implement a feature so that it is bullet-proofed for gamekit-trunk or do it perfect before going on.(no that anything in gamekit would be bullet-proofed, except bullet-physics of course :P) Just do as you need,…great! Btw, I can’t point out the GIT is the best tool to work on such a project, keeping the own development branch with the official branch in synch,…GIT GIT GIT.

To finally get something done, I started (again ) a simple project and decided to go for a well known old game “SOKOBAN”. (Carl Cube have to wait…)

Game-View

The mechanic is simple but works excellent. I already created most of the framework. Things done so far:

• simple creation of bricks (for now static and moveable)
• player controlled by keyboard (but decoupled over message-system, so any other input-device sould be integrated quite easy
• goal-points (for now just sending an internal message, that all points are mounted ==>level won)
• editor that let you create and modify the levels at runtime
• save, load, delete via ui

Editor-View

I want to keep it simple and want to go on with deployment for the different mobile devices. Now I have to create a new gamekit-android-runtime from scratch. That will be a hard fight not to think about iOS.

We’ll see how far I will come.

Actually, I wanted to show a small video, but was too stupid to create a screencast…

Keep on rocking,ToM

Global Game Jam will be started in exactly one week and I decided to remake our first ggj-project Carl Cube and Bobby Ball to check if gamekit can do what I want to do.

Actually I spent some time in fixing gamekit and developing it to a point I would consider usable in a way I want to create games. I just decided to be more centric on developing games now and not that much maintaining the engine (not that I did this fulltime or such…). That means that I will still have an eye on contributing and fixing gamekit but only after I finished a game or if serious bugs occur. (Not sure if I will really do it like this, but I have to concentrate on finishing stuff… keep focused,man! :D)

So, this will be day onepointfive since I already started a bit yesterday:

Stuff I use:

• Ubuntu
• Blender
• Eclipse
• gamekit
• git

Ach, I really do like our gamekit-forum! It is like a desert where you see very very seldom users being online. And if, the chance is quite high that it is a spambot, or a search engine-bot or from time to time really a real person

Actually most of the times it looks like this:

EDIT: Yeah, after about 4-5(!) days on-off-work I finally got bone-parenting for groupinstances (which are something like unity-prefabs) in gamekit working. And as always the keys to the problem was just one line But I won’t complain, aren’t the problems and the hard way to solve them the best way to really learn?

Since developing for gamekit using git svn (god bless you, git!) I always wondered why there is no way to create also svn-patches with git svn. I finally stumpled over a small script that can do the job. Actually it has a bug that prevents new files/directories to be valid for svn-patches that I fixed here:
https://gist.github.com/3551647

Thx for the people that provided that piece of code.

…since I use blender for a while (not that I’m very capabale in it) and being always on the bleeding edge by compiling the latest version daily, I made my first patch (request) today.
It is about using the navmesh-generator which automatically creates a navmesh using the selected objects.
That works quite good as long as you don’t use group-instances. So today I took me some time to get into it and somehow fix it. And actually I made it. Code is not very elegant, but that is a matter of time. I struggled over a bug that keeps crashing blender which I considered related to my code change,…actually they seem to be not related

So let’s see what happens. Would be an honor to contributed code to the best project of the world

(Beside gamekit, of course )

http://projects.blender.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=32295&group_id=9&atid=127

From the 4.x-versions on it seems the tab-behaviour concerning open files has been changed. They seem to be just been set randomly and not sorted by recent use as before. That is a real …. Just found out how to come back to the old behaviour.

Window > Preferences > Appearance: Switch to Classic

And start smiling again

Btw: Found in here: http://coderedd.net/r/programming/comments/voovs/eclipse_juno_42_released/

EDIT:
Bookmarks (actually worth a post of its own)

Just found something very useful: Eclipse Bookmarks with which you can (how surprising :D) bookmark code and jump to this every time you want it.

Just go to the line you want to be bookmarked.

Edit > Add Bookmark

And to view all the bookmarks. Open the bookmark-view:

Window->Show View->Other... > General > Bookmarks

This one is integrated in Eclipse for a very long time, but I never saw it

Since today the Olympic Games started in London, I think it is a good moment to bring my ‘baby’ Wood Games 3D back to mind. Actually it should be the official game for London 2012,… strange no one talked to me yet

Actually I love to see that even though the game ,somewhere in the market and hardly to find, is still played by people! Not making money with it…but I’m nevertheless very proud of it.

Here is the QR to your android-luck:

Feel free to tell everyone you know about it

Ah, almost forgot the cool trailer I made:

The promotion of my favorite football team Fortuna Düsseldorf, actually paralyzed me for about a month Not kidding…after 15years, WE ARE FINALLY BACK! (At least for a year :D). One thing I created was this image:

And since just one image wasn’t enough, here the clip:

Yes, it is true. I really neglected the blog for a while. So what am I doing at the moment?

First of all, I working on gamekit to have it in shape for creating the kind of games I want to create.  For that I’m doing lots of bugfixes and working mainly on the runtime and it’s lua-layer. Actually I love this project. Finally I’m home in case of game-engine. Now it has to be stable enough for all platforms, which will still be a tough way,…

For people that don’t know gamekit (and I think that are 99,99%). It is a blender-based game-engine. This means you use blender as scene-graph, use (if you want) its bge-bricks for visual logic (most of them are implemented in gamekit) or use lua-scripting inside blender or use c++. Of course you can use all 3 methods altogether. The game can produce code for Linux(my main platform), win and osx plus android and iOS (but the mobile versions still need lots of optimizations).

Caution: Since this is a 100% community driven engine, there isn’t that much documentation People who are not willing to make their hands dirty and need everything on a silver plate to produce something should switch to the big good documented and more stable engines like unity3d or udk (btw: I like unity but I do like more to play in the dirt :p)

So let’s have a look at http://code.google.com/p/gamekit/

…and if I’m not working on gamekit I’m working on a game-project with a bunch of people that are located somewhere in Germany. So it is some kind of distributed working. At the moment we see if we can get a publisher of that master-piece of game software

…and if I’m not working on this one, I’m involved in a game-project at the University of Applied Sciences Trier…

…and if I’m not doing this I’m working on a super ambitious Software-Project that should/would/could change software-development, but actually that might only work in my head *lol*

…and if I’m not doing this I’m running or biking so that my head and soul get at least a bit to see from the world. Sports is one of the most important things of the day.

Biggest problem is the 24h-day constraint…there is just too less time for too much things to do

Ok, finally I find some time to write something about “droidcon-hackathon”.

It was a real nice event where about 40-50 people were full of energy to write some android apps. There were some proposals about the topics but in the end everyone could decide what kind of app he wants to create.

Of course I wanted to create a game giving gamekit-engine another chance. (Btw, gamekit is an opensource engine, that let you write applications for win/mac/linux and IPhone/Android using Blender as SceneEditor and Lua and/or C++ as programming language) Some days before the event I made some experiments in how to get some data from the android java-side of life into the c++ engine. I wrote a jni-mapper that lets you inject messages from java to gamekit’s message system and also the other way round.

HACKATHON