Ok,…actually I should already be in bed as I will leave quite early in the morning via Frankfurt/Hahn to Berlin. There is the Bigjam a meeting of independend gamedevelopers (and me). I’m quite curious about it and actually I don’t know what to expect.

I setup something like a skeleton-project that I can use for starting game-developing as they do 3h-game-compos I don’t finish in 48h, so why not in 3!? Nevertheless here is a last screenshot of the “Meteor Romance” a project I started some days ago. Actually you can do much right now. You can steer the girl(orange) or the boy(max) and swithc different movement-types:waling,running,sneaking. I want the game to be something like a two player jump&run riddle ala goonies (c64 version). We’ll see. Have a look here:

http://thomas.trocha.com/games/meteor/meteor_romance.html

Out of a strange reason I decided to use the one-week-extension of the tigsource-competition “a game to its cover” to start with coding…actually I did try to use jBullet….Actually that does not work as I wanted and now I’m back with my own framework using the build in jME-collision-detection. Here are Max and Orange I modelled for the game:

Last weekend it was miniLD-Time again. Although I didn’t had the complete weekend time I decided to take part. The theme was greed (or fishing) with the restriction that every gameobject might be used only once. This means you can’t just use e.g. two fishes that looks the same in the game. They somehow have to be different.

As normal I kicked my first approach after seeing no progress after 4-5 hours and decided to make something like a blackjack-game in a fishing-scenario. You are a fisher and have to decided wheter to go on fishing or not. The goal is to get more fish (in weight) than you opponent without exceeding your boat’s maximum weight… It is a one-click game without real goal beside to win 5 points to win the game.

The game took be about 18h. (6h saturday and 12h sunday)

Have a look here:

I just created a post-compo-version (additional 48h):

http://thomas.trocha.com/wp/?page_id=579

Official Compo-Version:

http://thomas.trocha.com/games/ludumdare/greedy_fishing.html

Ok, I finally made a version for jME2. To achieve that I also created a userfriendly way to create MeshAnimations programmatically and not only as import from ogre-files. Now you can create MeshAnimation keyframe-based on time,pose and weight like this:

MeshAnimationWrapper manualAnimationWrapper = new MeshAnimationWrapper(face);   
manualAnimationWrapper.addPoseKeyFrame("MouthOpen", 2f,0);
manualAnimationWrapper.addPoseKeyFrame("MouthOpen", 4f,1);
manualAnimationWrapper.addPoseKeyFrame("MouthOpen", 4.5f,1);
manualAnimationWrapper.addPoseKeyFrame("MouthOpen", 5f,0);
// once we created all keyframes we can create an the meshAnimation with the
// specidifed name and register it to meshAnim (which means that you can use it by name
// e.g.: meshAnimController.setAnimation("animation");
MeshAnimation meshAnimation = manualAnimationWrapper.createMeshAnimation("animation",animContr);

This animation can be added to the attached MeshAnimationController….the sample combines Mesh- and skeletal-animation and looks like this:

I commited all relevant files and the demo can be found in the jME2-repository:

http://code.google.com/p/jmonkeyengine/source/browse/trunk/src/jmetest/ogrexml/TestFacialAnimation.java

Long time I didn’t post about what’s going on with me. Actually as always I’m doing all and nothing. Started a bunch of different projects (one I hope to finish the weekend) and looked a bit in ogre c++ and ogre4j the java-binding.

Just for fun I ported the FacialAnimation-Sample and Terrain-Tutorial(basic tutorial 3) from the ogre-sample to ogre4j. Here is a download-link (you still will have a working installation of ogre4j, what is not done in one second ).

Whoever thinks I will switch from jME is wrong. But knowing how other engines work will be a great benefit for improving the jMonkeyEngine as well.  I just started to make a similar FacialAnimation-Demo for jME2. So stay tuned!!!

Here are some screenshots:

Terrain-Creation

Facial Animation: playback animation and manual changing of poses

Ok,…just a quick post. It was again a desaster. The theme was islands and I decided to create a RTS. After about 15h I realized that it might be too complex (also I had quite a lot done on the model/logic-side) and switched to a so easy third person shooter project…!? Totally irrational…well! I’m not satisfied with the result, but it is better than nothing. Have a look here:

http://thomas.trocha.com/games/ld17/ld17.html

PS: The screenshot looks much better than the game finally happens to be

A couple of days left until the next ludum dare gamedev-competition will be started. As always I’m so optimistic to finish a game but even I think to avoid my common mistakes I have to face the fact that the chance is quite high to suck again,… We’ll see.

At the moment I’m quite lost about the decission how to go on with my work. Stay with jME2, swtich to jME3 with its android-support, switch to Panda3d or even UNITY3D. Well, I stay for a while with jME2 and until then I will get crazy about other sollutions…

First let’s rock LD! This time….first time…

Usually I’m not posting this kind of topics here but this two problems kept me on fire at work for some hours.

Scenario: jBoss 4.2.2GA + MessageDrivenBeans

Problem 1:

Out of nowhere came the problem that when starting jBoss the MDB couldn’t start with the error:

jboss.mq:service=DestinationManager is not registered.

This might have multiple reasons but in my case the problem was that when more jBoss exists in the same network they connect to a cluster (at least in our configuration). That means that the destination-manager is only created on the first computer of the cluster. To prevent this you can specify a partition when starting jBoss and you have only a one computer cluster (as long noone uses the same partition)

So here is the magic line:

run.bat -c all -g yourPartitionName

The -g parameter is for specifing the partition to use. -c specifies the jBoss-configuration

Problem 2:

Once the MDB is started and registered to a queue it starts to process the queue if there are still messages in it. (Maybe jBoss crashed for some reason before finishing the queue). That can be a problem if the behaviour of the message depends on an EJB that is not loaded yet. For that you can use the @Depends annotation in your MDB.

e.g.

@Depends(value=”jboss.j2ee:ear=YourEJB.ear,jar=YourEJB.ejb3,name=YourFacadeBean,service=EJB3″)

or for multiple dependencies (didn’t test that yet):

@Depends({
“jboss.j2ee:ear=myEar.ear,jar=myJarFile.jar,name=MySessionBean1,service=EJB3″,
“jboss.j2ee:ear=myEar.ear,jar=myJarFile.jar,name=MySessionBean2,service=EJB3″
})

(found this here)

After adding this the service is only created if the specified MBean is already registered. You can find the corresponding name for you MBean on startup (or server.log). Just keep looking for “[org.jboss.ejb3.JmxKernelAbstraction] installing MBean: ……”

Well,…seems like two easy issues not worth mentioning. But nevertheless you have to know it Hope I could help someone with that.

PS: Sry for the formatting terror!

Ok…the global game jam is history and it’s time to move on and get away from all that competition stuff. Actually it just prevents me from doing a more or less long term project. It’s time to do somethling like a status quo-project to have use the few abilities I learned yet.

Nevertheless here is a link to the result:

Ok one day to go until the Global Game Jam 2010 will be started. To be honest I’m a bit anxious as I’m not as far with my game dev knowledge as I would like to be. Actually I would like to develope something in jME. I’m quite sure, if I once only once keep in mind to try a very very simple game-design I could succeed. The last miniLD where the cool Theme “Clone” was picked I didn’t think enough and took a game desgin with much differnt states but without real worth….so that was a good example how not to do it… I’m still developing it, but I’m not sure if I go on after the Global Game Jam. Now I have a running Train Schedule with a Map that shows all possible connections and the cities if you scroll over. You can go in the train but that’s it right now. From now on, I will concentrate on the GGJ in Cologne….