The Scope Resolution

You want the good news or the bad news?

2009-12-13T11:56:00.002+02:00

I got the following error while using Google Docs. As usual, amazingly creative error messages in my opinion! (click the image for a readable version).

Thousander Club Update (5/10/2009)

2009-05-10T12:00:00.000+03:00

This week's Thousander Club update:

Game Development Hours: 0 / 1000 (this week), 50 / 1000 (overall)
Novels finished: 0 / 12
Books finished: 0 / 12
Games finished: 6 / 12

This space intentionally left blank...

Thousander Club Update (5/3/2009)

2009-05-03T17:41:00.000+03:00

This week's Thousander Club update:

Game Development Hours: 0 / 1000 (this week), 50 / 1000 (overall)
Novels finished: 0 / 12
Books finished: 0 / 12
Games finished: 6 / 12

Nothing new much this week, got extremely swamped with work cuz of a deadline at work, and spent most of the weekend outside.

I really miss working on my game!

Thousander Club Update (4/26/2009)

2009-04-26T09:00:00.001+03:00

This week's Thousander Club update:

Game Development Hours: 3 / 1000 (this week), 50 / 1000 (overall)
Novels finished: 0 / 12
Books finished: 0 / 12
Games finished: 6 / 12

I have finally managed to get some work done this week, although not as much as I had hoped. The weirdest stuff kept coming up, it's like the whole world got together and decided they shouldn't let me work on my game development! Still, I got back to working on my Rubik Cube game, and hopefully I will continue working on it this time until it gets released.

I also managed to finish Sam & Max: Season 2. One heck of a fun game! I just can't help but smile when I remember the crazy dialog and the even crazier stuff they do. It's living proof that a game doesn't have to have fancy graphics or a complicated physics or gameplay system to be fun, it's all about creativity. So, that makes it the 6th game I've finished this year, and I'm currently also playing Need for Speed: Undercover and Tomb Raider: Underworld, though I'm not enjoying either one that much. But, more on that later...

Thousander Club Update (4/19/2009)

2009-04-19T16:53:00.000+02:00

This week's Thousander Club update:

Game Development Hours: 0 / 1000 (this week), 47 / 1000 (overall)
Novels read: 0 / 12
Books read: 0 / 12
Games finished: 5 / 12

So far, things were hectic at work this past week cuz I was trying to get as much work done as possible before the end of the week. That's because I took this week off, so I'm free for a while to try and get everything back on track. I have an exam on Wednesday that I'm studying for, but after that I'll have 4 more days to work on my game development.

Should be interesting...

Thousander Club Update (4/12/2009)

2009-04-12T14:08:00.000+02:00

This week's Thousander Club update:

Game Development Hours: 0 / 1000 (this week), 47 / 1000 (overall)
Novels read: 0 / 12
Books read: 0 / 12
Games finished: 5 / 12

Still not much progress, but life has been pretty hectic recently. I'm looking forward to a busy couple of weeks too, but after that I'm hoping things would slow down a little (a lot would be great too!!) and I would get some time to catch up on everything.

Thousander Club Update (4/5/2009)

2009-04-05T09:34:00.000+02:00

This week's Thousander Club update:

Game Development Hours: 1 / 1000 (this week), 47 / 1000 (overall)
Novels read: 0 / 12
Books read: 0 / 12
Games finished: 5 / 12

I actually did get the chance to do some game development this week! I worked a little on the Rubik Cube game, and I finally figured out what was preventing the CEGUI system from starting up properly. I didn't keep working on it that much, though, I got busy with the weekly stuff and the weekend went into finishing yet another game!

So, Game Development Hours +1 and Games finished +1.

Thousander Club Update (3/29/2009)

2009-03-29T13:31:00.002+02:00

This week's Thousander Club update:

Game Development Hours: 0 / 1000 (this week), 46 / 1000 (overall)
Novels read: 0 / 12
Books read: 0 / 12
Games finished: 4 / 12

Well, I haven't had any time for game development, but I've been working on a few other fronts. I picked and already started reading a couple of technical books, simultaneously nonetheless! I'm nowhere near finishing any of them, but I am using my free time to read a bit from each book, until I get bored, then I switch to a different one. So far, there's one about Perl, one about C# 3.5, one about TFS, and one about web usability. I won't disclose the book titles now, but I promise I will write a separate post about each of them when I finish it.

I am also playing 2 games simultaneously, and I've actually got my eye on a 3rd one that I'm gonna get soon. Again, titles will be disclosed in later individual posts, along with the 4 games I have already finished.

Too many simultaneous stuff, right? What can I say, I like to keep myself occupied ;-).

Thousander Club Update (3/22/2009)

2009-03-22T18:59:00.002+02:00

This week's Thousander Club update:

Game Development Hours: 0 / 1000 (this week), 46 / 1000 (overall)
Novels read: 0 / 12
Books read: 0 / 12
Games finished: 4 / 12

So, yeah, I'm ahead in my games objective, which obviously means I'm just playing games in all my free time and doing nothing productive with my life.

Well, what can I say? That's the way it is! As soon as you lose momentum, it becomes that much harder to get started with something again.

I'm trying, though... Honestly!

Thousander Club Update (3/15/2009)

2009-03-15T20:09:00.004+02:00

This week's Thousander Club update:

Game Development Hours: 0 / 1000 (this week), 46 / 1000 (overall)
Novels read: 0 / 12
Books read: 0 / 12
Games finished: 2 / 12

I know, I know.. I missed the updates for the past two weeks! In a row! Well, what can I say, I've been busy...

With what, you ask?

Well, first of all, right after posting the last update, I actually went out and got a new PC! Yeah, starting to guess the reasons more clearly now?

So, having a brand new PC that can run all the brand new games; pretty exciting if you ask me! Pretty bad for everything else, though; I got into gaming at full throttle! Now the weekend consists of gaming, sleeping, and more gaming! The good news, though, is that at least I'm making progress in that area! I finished 2 out of my 12 games for this year! I'm actually thinking of putting a restriction for myself to only play 1 game each month, from now on, so I can focus on other things as well.

Anyway, other than that, work has been pretty hectic! But, more on all that later; I hate making one blog post too long, so I'm gonna break it down into smaller, single-topic posts. So, that was the Thousander Club update post!

Thousander Club Update (2/22/2009)

2009-02-26T20:40:00.003+02:00

This week's Thousander Club update:

Game Development Hours: 3 / 1000 (this week), 46 / 1000 (overall)
Novels read: 0 / 12
Books read: 0 / 12
Games finished: 0 / 12

I know this update is a couple of days overdue, but it was a rather hectic week and my home PC has been acting up a lot lately, so I just couldn't get around to it earlier.

I got to work on finalizing the Rubik Cube game last weekend, but unfortunately I was hit by some strange error mid-way and I stopped and said I'll go back to it later on, and I haven't yet!

I also made some progress in the novel I'm currently reading, but barely.

I hope I can get some progress done this coming weekend, in all aspects. I also have other stuff that needs my attention, so I need this to be a very busy weekend. Should be exciting though.

Thousander Club Update (2/15/2009)

2009-02-15T09:00:00.000+02:00

This week's Thousander Club update:

Game Development Hours: 0 / 1000 (this week), 43 / 1000 (overall)
Novels read: 0 / 12
Books read: 0 / 12
Games finished: 0 / 12

Unfortunately, still no progress this week. I've been kinda low on game development spirit lately, and I'm busy with other stuff that kinda have more priority.

I'm also starting to think the reason might be that I have reached a stale kind of state in the Rubik Cube project, since I almost figured out everything I need to do and what remains is to get things in order and make it ready for release! I still need to put in a GUI, of course, but I don't think that should be too hard. I'll try to work on that soon, and get everything else done so I can focus on getting at least the Rubik Cube project finalized.

Thousander Club Update (2/8/2009)

2009-02-08T09:00:00.003+02:00

This week's Thousander Club update:

Game Development Hours: 0 / 1000 (this week), 43 / 1000 (overall)
Novels read: 0 / 12
Books read: 0 / 12
Games finished: 0 / 12

Yeah, those are some big fat zeros! I had a lot going on in my personal life this week, so I didn't really get a chance to do anything worth mentioning. It should get better soon though, I'm trying hard to get things under control.

Stay tuned!

Changing response status code in ASP.NET web applications

2009-02-02T20:06:00.013+02:00

For a little change in flavor, here's a bit of technical talk about web development!

There's this interesting problem I came across at work that I wanna share my experience about. The problem was the following: for an ASP.NET web application, when someone tries to access a directory under the site while that directory doesn't have any directly viewable pages (for example, the "/images" or "/CSS" directory), I don't want this person to get a "403 - Forbidden" error, but a "404 - Not Found" error instead. The idea behind this requirement is for security reasons, since, using this 403 response, someone could learn the directory structure of the website simply by trying different directory names, and he might stumble across a directory that he doesn't have access to, such as "/administrator" which would give him a better target to aim future attacks at.

So, the first attempt to fix this problem was through making an HttpModule and add it to the web.config "httpModules" section. To make an HttpModule, all you need to do is have a class in your application that inherits the System.Web.IHttpModule interface, and handles its methods. And in the Init method of your class, you would add and register an event handler for the HttpApplication.PreSendRequestHeaders event. The HttpApplication object is passed as a parameter to this Init method. In this event handler, I did something like this:


HttpResponse response = httpApplication.Context.Response;
if (response.StatusCode == 403)
{
response.StatusCode = 404;
}

What this does is check whether the response status code is 403, and replaces it with a 404 status code.

After creating this class, all I had to do to activate this HttpModule was to add it in the web.config file in the <httpmodules> section in <system.web>.

This didn't work, however! The reason this didn't work became obvious quickly after a few breakpoints and some debugging. Since directory listing was denied in my IIS website, when someone tries accessing a directory name they get the 403 response code directly from IIS, and the ASP.NET runtime doesn't know anything about that request in the first place!

This lead to the natural conclusion that, if ASP.NET doesn't know anything about it, this obviously needs to be handled from IIS itself through an ISAPI module! Of course, further investigation made it very clear how messy and dangerous ISAPI modules are, and since this isn't really that much of a must-do, the whole thing was about to get abandoned. That is, until I had another idea!

Instead of relying on IIS denying directory listing, I put an empty Default.aspx page in the directory I wanted to hide. In this Default.aspx, all I needed to do was run a single line of code that changes the response code from 200 (OK) to 403. When this happens, then the httpModule is invoked and finds this response code in the response header, the above code will work its magic and make it a 404 instead! Of course, I could have avoided adding an HttpModule and simply set the 404 response code in the page itself, but since I have many folders that I need to hide and I might need to handle this situation differently one day, I chose to keep the HttpModule and issue the 404 error from there instead.

So far what would happen is that the Default.aspx would get rendered to the output but the returned status code would be 404. If you need this to change, you can clear the response in the HttpModule code and change the response to, say, the common IIS 404 error page.

Also, if you have some directory permissions setup in web.config files inside those hidden folders and you want other (unauthorized) users to get the same 404 error for these (restricted) files too, all you would need to do is handle 401 (Unauthorized) status codes in your HttpModule as well. But, be careful, if you are using the ASP.NET built-in authentication, and you deny anonymous users, you should know that ASP.NET returns a 401 the first time an anonymous user tries to access the site, so that the browser would know that this site needs authentication and either sends this authentication directly or asks the user for it (depending on settings). So, if you simply handle all 401 responses, you will interfere with this process and EVERYONE will get 404 errors! So, what you need to do is, if you're using ASP.NET build-in authentication (ex. via web.config's "authentication" and "authorization" sections), you need to let the 401 pass if the HttpApplication.User.Identity.IsAuthenticated property is false, so the user could get the chance to authenticate.

Well, that's it. I hope this was informative! If you read this and find it useful, please drop me a comment. Also, I would be really interested in any comments about how good or bad this method of hiding the directory structure is. If you can bypass it, you should definitely let me know ;-).

Thousander Club Update (2/1/2009)

2009-02-01T09:00:00.000+02:00

This week's Thousander Club update:

Game Development Hours: 14 / 1000 (this week), 43 / 1000 (overall)
Novels read: 0 / 12
Books read: 0 / 12
Games finished: 0 / 12

This week was a little slow for some reason. I still managed to do some work over the weekend, but unfortunately not all the work I needed to finish to get done with my Rubik's Cube game. I did, however, finish this much:

Successfully implemented face rotation, both absolute and relative to the current cube's rotation.
Got the arcball rotation working (although not quite perfectly yet, as it clashed with the face rotation code for some yet-to-be-determined reason!).

This last issue where the arcball rotation clashed with the face rotation consumed a lot of time trying to reason with, and eventually took up more time than it was supposed to. I think I know where the problem is, though, but I'm not sure I'll take the time and effort needed to fix it, since it's partially a bit of clashing functionality as well. You can rotate the cube in 90-degree animated rotations, and you can rotate each face clockwise and counter-clockwise. Also you can choose to either rotate the "current" top/bottom/left/right face (relative to the current rotation) or the "absolute" face (as if you were still looking at the cube in its original orientation). I'm starting to think an arcball isn't really needed. I do wanna get it right though, especially that I already did manage to get rotation working perfectly with face rotation in a previous DirectX variant of the Rubik Cube game.

Anyway, I know I said I'll try to get an initial version ready by now, but it looks like it's gonna have to wait just a little bit. I still need to "classify" my code, so to speak, and I need to see if I can make it into a redistributable package so you wouldn't need to have Ogre3D installed before you can run it.

On a different note, I havn't been doing any progress with either of the other objectives! Here we are, starting February, so I really should try to finish my first Book, Novel, and Game. My choices are: Learning Perl, LoTR: The Two Towers, and Doom 3, respectively. I will try to update on my progress for these objectives as well.

Thousander Club Update (1/25/2009)

2009-01-25T00:00:00.000+02:00

This week's Thousander Club update:

Game Development Hours: 24 / 1000 (this week), 29 / 1000 (overall)
Novels read: 0 / 12
Books read: 0 / 12
Games finished: 0 / 12

Now that's what I call progress! I decided I really need to focus on my game development this week, and so I did. Since my last week's decision of pausing work on my main game project and instead starting a 3D Rubik Cube project, I've done a great deal of work on that and I've learned a great many things about Ogre that I didn't know before. Here's what I've reached so far:

So far, I've managed to:

Get one of my old DirectX cube meshes that I had made myself on Maya back in the day, and use Blender to convert it to an Ogre mesh.
Load up that mesh and use 26 copies of it to compose the big cube.
Create a rotation animation using Quaternions and triggered by the keyboard WASD keys.
Add some debugging information display, in the form of the on-screen overlays displaying some useful values, and the red/green/blue axes to the left showing the current rotation of the cube in terms of X/Y/Z axes.
Add mouse ray picking and use it to select the cube currently under the mouse when the left mouse button is clicked. I tried highlighting the selected cube by showing its bounding box, then alternately went for exchanging the base "black" material for the cube body to a red material to indicate the currently selected cube.

I still need to figure out how to:

Get the cubes of a certain face of the big cube, both absolutely and relative to the current rotation, and rotate that face just like a normal Rubik Cube face rotates.
Implement this face rotation so that it would be triggered by the mouse in a click-drag motion, and allow for rotating the entire cube using the mouse in an ArcBall style.
Show "mirror" copies of the cube to display the back of the cube, but without using multiple viewports. I've already tried it using multiple cameras/viewports, and it killed the frame rate!

Hopefully I'll continue working on it with the same energy throughout next week, and if by next week's update I'm done with these objectives and I find time to encapsulate things into classes (I'm currently working out of one class since I keep changing everything every so often) and make it into a distributable package, I might release it here for everyone to download it and try it out for themselves...

Thousander Club Update (1/18/2009)

2009-01-18T21:00:00.002+02:00

This week's Thousander Club update:

Game Development Hours: 2 / 1000 (this week), 5 / 1000 (overall)
Novels read: 0 / 12
Books read: 0 / 12
Games finished: 0 / 12

Busy, busy week! I had lots of free development time, but I spent it learning Perl instead (fascinating language, by the way!). In the short time I did spend on game development, though, I discovered that I know a lot less about Ogre than I would like to. So I might actually start working on reaching smaller objectives with the code just so I can learn to handle Ogre more aptly. I was even thinking of making the Rubik's Cube game using Ogre; since it's kinda been my Hello World of 3d platforms.

I'll try to dedicate more time to game development this week, though, regardless of what I'm working on.

Thousander Club Update (1/11/2009)

2009-01-11T21:00:00.002+02:00

This week's Thousander Club update:

Game Development Hours: 3 / 1000
Novels read: 0 / 12
Books read: 0 / 12
Games finished: 0 / 12

I actually managed to do some game programming this weekend, which kicked off this year with the first 3 hours. I am pretty fired up about the game, an I will try my best to take full advantage of that for as long as I can. If all goes well, I will be posting some serious updates soon, and maybe if I managed to get that control system working like I have in mind, I would also post a small demo for that!

As for the other activities; I haven't decided on a game to play or a book to read yet, but I already have my choice of novel set; Lord of the Rings 2: The Two Towers. I simply can't wait to get back into that mystic and marvelous world again. I just need to do some time management so I would get to do all that I wanna do.

I am also open for suggestions for a good video game to play and a useful technical book to read. I was thinking since I never really got to finish Doom 3, I might re-install that and give it one more try. I was also thinking of reading The Art of Assembly or some other book about assembly language; cuz I've been getting kinda curious about the deep and greasy details of assembly languages recently (I know someone who would be pretty excited to know this! If you're reading this, I'll be expecting a comment from you with a few book suggestions about that ;-) ). So, if you have any recommendations, please share!

The Thousander Club, re-re-visited

2009-01-10T02:26:00.005+02:00

So, I've had some previous attempts with The Thousander Club, which didn't go quite as hoped for at all. First year, I kinda reached a point where I stopped blogging altogether, and of course The Thousander Club stopped consequently. Then the second year, I made a set of different goals and the result wasn't exactly what I hoped for either.

Well, I wasn't completely sure whether I would set any goals for this year, but after reading Gianfranco's post about joining The Thousander Club in 2009, I guess just because I didn't reach what I wanted to doesn't mean I shouldn't keep trying. And, as Scott puts it (in the comments): "We’re going to make it this year, I tell ya!". I do feel the same way, I feel that for me, 3rd time will be the charm.

As for this year's Thousander Club, my goals are:

1000 Game Development Hours recorded
12 Novels read
12 "Technical" books read
12 Video Games played

I will start counting the hours I work on my new game idea and game development in general, and I will always have a monthly selection in each of the other categories, pledging never to let a month pass without making progress in each of them.

My weeks will be from Sunday to next Saturday, and I will post weekly updates on Sunday of each week.

Until next update...

Don't try this at home

2009-01-06T02:12:00.003+02:00

Let me just say that I think operating on an electronic device, say a PC, while it's powered and running, is a bad idea. It is also a bad idea to, say, try to screw a fan off of the motherboard while that PC is running and already has windows up. It would be a further worse idea to do all that while instead of looking at what you're doing, you are in fact looking at a movie running on the screen of that very same PC! It's a bad idea because if, perchance, that fan would slip out of your hand while unhooking the last screw, it might end up falling on the display card, which would in turn cause the entire system to issue all sorts of weird noises and freeze up instantly, only pure luck standing between it and total meltdown!!

I'm just saying, I really wouldn't do any of that if I were you.

I'm not you, though...

Just a passing thought!

Still Alive...

2009-01-01T17:46:00.002+02:00

So yeah, I am still alive an kicking! Well, alive anyway; I'm not really crazy about kicking... Anyway, I know it's been a while so here's a long overdue update of my life since the last blog post...

First and foremost, I am finally done with my obligatory year of service in the armed forces! Since the start of December 2008, I officially became free of my ties to the army and all the crap that involved. Of course I'm still in the "reserve" forces until like 2017, but that usually (hopefully) doesn't mean anything other than having to do some extra paperwork whenever I need to travel or something. It was a long and tiresome year, and although I did learn a lot from the experience; I am deeply glad it's over!

The past couple of months got a little hectic, with the army service nearing its end and then going back to full-time web development work afterwards. I've been trying to get things into order and I think I'm almost there... I still haven't managed to get that much free time after my day job to do anything else, but hopefully that would change starting next week. I have lots of projects that I wanna work on -- both technical and otherwise -- and of course since there's only one of me and only 24 hours in the day (unfortunately!), I will need to get things organized and prioritized. I'm still in that phase right now, but I'm actually starting to realize it's taking too long so I promised myself to get things in order pretty soon.

As for my objectives list, it's nowhere near done! I wanted to read 12 novels, finish 12 games, finish my first game project, and earn an MCPD certificate. Here's how bad I did:

Novels Finished: 2/12 (The Hobbit & The Fellowship of the Ring)
Games Finished: 6/12 (Starcraft 1, Max Payne 1, Max Payne 2, The New Super Mario Bros., XIII, and Second Sight)
Game project: Barely even started!
MCPD: Almost finished the first book, then stopped around the beginning of September and never resumed.

So the moral of the story is: it didn't work out quite as I expected. I need to be more organized in 2009 and work on time management so I can establish all my goals.

The last bit of news is about an online game: World of Warcraft. I finally got down to playing it, and I am happy to report that it is as legend tells and much, Much more! I won't start talking about it now, but enough to say that it is an impossibly rich and detailed world, excellent gameplay, and an amazing online gaming experience. I only played the 10-day trial, but I actually had to fight the urge to get a paid subscription. The only reason I haven't so far is because it's very engaging and I know it has a very good potential of being the center of my life for a really long time (which is a nice way of saying "addiction"), and I have more important things to do with my free time at this phase. That said, I am certainly looking forward to the day I actually do get a subscription and get immersed in that wonderful world.

Well, that is certainly a lot of typing. I still have a few more blog posts in mind, so keep those RSS readers tuned...

Google Browser (Chrome) -- I'm Lovin' It!

2008-09-02T22:25:00.004+02:00

And finally, it's here! Google's own browser; Chrome. I was actually surpirsed to see a buzz all over the internet yesterday about Google's anticipated release of their new browser today. I couldn't wait to put my hands on it, and I did; I'm actually using it right now to write this post.

Simply put, it's at least as good as Firefox 3, which for me is saying something! I've been using firefox for quite sometime now, and I really liked Firefox 3, and to think that Chrome felt pretty much like home from the very first minute really counts for a lot. Of course, this is literally my first hour of using it; but I already love it! The interface is simple and light-weight, the speed with which it loads up is stunning, and there are some very nice integrated features that replace many of the plugins I use for Firefox.

There are also some very nice technical details about it, but these will reveal their true potential as time goes by; such as their multi-process architecture, which I think will greately improve the stability and usability of everyday use. There's a nice comic book that says it all; and the features page has a lot of other details about how it works and the concept behind it.

Of course, I'll be using it as much as I can from now on and we'll see how it'll hold up on daily basis. I already know the answer, though; after all, it's Made In Google ;-).

XIII Game Finished

2008-08-31T20:33:00.004+02:00

Remember when I was saying I was looking for the next game to play? Well, I asked one of my friends for a recommendation and he recommended XIII. So, I got it and sat down to it over this past weekend.

Honestly, it was nice. The game is cel-shaded, which adds a nice feel to it. Also, the comic-book style "Arrrg"s and "NoooOOO"s, not to mention how they utilized this in actual game play when far away and around the corners you would see soldiers' footstep sounds being written out, and you actually use it to know where the soldier is and where it's headed. Aside from that, the weapon recoil effect was also nice; far more realistic than many other games I played. As for the story, it's based on an old comic series with the same name; but they did a nice work with it and I actually enjoyed it.

One thing that did annoy me a little bit was how they handled saving. The game works in checkpoints; but since I rely on quicksave/quickload quite often; I expected that when I quickload after passing a checkpoint, the game would go back to that checkpoint, not to the quicksave point which was usually at least one checkpoint back! I guess it's my mistake, cuz I kept forgetting to quicksave after each new checkpoint, but it would've been much nicer if the game did that for me.

Overall, it was a nice game and it made for an enjoyable weekend.

I also found some free time to make some progress on The Fellowship of the Ring; so now I'm almost two-thirds of the way through it. I can't wait to get done with it and go into the next one! One thing to note, however, is how different the book is from the movie!! The first part of the book, the part where frodo went with the ring from the Shire to Rivendell; made for an entire part of the book, full of events and people and stuff. It got a little boring at certain points, though, so I'm guessing the people who did the movie knew what they were doing. It wouldn't have all fit into one movie anyway, that I can be sure of.

Game Project Update: August 2008

2008-08-28T22:00:00.002+03:00

Exactly two weeks ago, I came up with my new game project idea. Since then, I have managed to do a few small steps towards getting an initial 10,000 feet overview of things. Since I kinda reached that today, and we're at the end of August; I decided to make a post about how far things have gone. Also, since it's almost the end of the month, I had the idea to make this into a monthly update thing. So, if all goes well, I should be posting an update like this one detailing how far I've reached by the end of each month. That said, and without further ado; let's get on with the status update!

As I was saying, the first step I needed to accomplish was to get a wide overview of what I would need to do and how I would design my classes. I actually managed to put some time aside for this, and I started looking into the different components I would need, and how they would fit together. I also found myself compelled to start thinking of a good object-oriented design for a sorta-flexible game engine rather than just hard-wire everything. I'm aware of the time and effort this requires, but since I'm in no hurry; I think this is the best way to go.

For starters, I already know that I am going to use Ogre as the core graphics engine, so this was a good starting point since it would usually have a major influence on how everything else works. I started going around the Ogre Wiki to refresh my Ogre knowledge; and I came across a few articles that provided me with some nice pointers on my engine design. One such article gave me a few nice tips on the general organization and design of the game engine, and it opened my eyes to the aspect of game state management and how low-level input events should be abstracted by more high-level "actions", which would provide a certain level of flexibility if later on I decided to add network functionality. Another article also clarified the game state management concept a bit further; and so I finally have a fair idea of how I'm gonna design and build this functionality. But what the hell is game state management?

Simply put; the game works by transitioning from one state to another. For example, initially the game starts with an intro screen, followed by the game's main menu. After the player selects "New Game" for example, the game actually goes into action and starts responding to player actions, etc... In order for things to make sense, the game has to respond to user input differently in each of these situations: if a user presses the space key during the intro screen, for example, the intro is skipped; while if the same key is pressed during gameplay it might mean "jump" or "fire". In order for this distinction to happen, the game has to move between states, while each state does different things and handles input in different ways. That's a brief description as much as I could manage, but the original article explains it much better.

Anyway, after some reading and some thinking, I came up with the most-probable set of classes that would constitute the game engine. Of course, this will definitely undergo some refinements and a few additions when I try to design things with a little more detail, but here's the initial list:

Game: This is the main control unit that would control all the other classes/systems.
StateManager: Manages different states and switching between states.
State: Abstract base class for each of the different game states.
MenuManager: Manages menu display and navigation.
Menu: Abstract base class for each of the different menu screens.
LevelManager: Manages different game levels, including enumerating, loading, etc...
Level: Game level class; controls and runs a single level.
GameEntityManager: Manages a set of game entities.
GameEntity: Represents a single game entity and controls it.
InputManager: Manages low-level game input.
InputSource: Represents a single low-level input source.
EventManager: Manages and distributes game events to listeners.
Event: Represents a game event/action.
EventHandler: Base class for classes handling events.

I still need to work out some of the details of their interaction, but that's basically it. That's obviously quite a lot of code, and there's still some other "secondary" classes that would be needed, such as for loading levels, etc...

As for what's next, I would start working out the details of the class design, and start getting into the details of other subsystems such as input (OIS) and UI (CEGUI). I'm totally ignoring audio for now, but if the design is really as flexible as I hope; it should be as easy as adding a few more classes; possibly without even changing any of the other classes at all.

What do people think of Windows Vista when they don't know it's Windows Vista?

2008-08-21T20:56:00.002+03:00

While browsing some tech sites today, I came up on a Microsoft ad about Windows Vista. I don't know if it's new or has been around for a while, but I just saw it and couldn't help a big smile!

In the video commercial, they show a bunch of people saying why they don't use Windows Vista, and none of these people have actually tried it. Then, they're showing them a "new" Windows version called "Mojave", and they all seem to like it very much! Then, surprise surprise; that's actually been Windows Vista all along! Then, the commercial concludes with their new campaign's slogan: "What do people think of Windows Vista when they don't know it's Windows Vista?" followed by the link to the campaign's website; http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/.

Obviously, they're admitting that Windows Vista had so much negative publicity that the majority of people don't even wanna consider trying it! Why this happened I'm not sure; but I myself happen to fall in that category; I haven't used it and I'm not looking forward to! Although, I admit, in the very few and limited occasions in which I saw it or used it on someone else's computer, I didn't quite hate it. I just heard so many bad things about it, and I'm pretty comfortable on my current OS anyway; that I'm not really in a hurry to go upgrade. Besides, this whole gazillion editions of the same system thing is annoying; I don't wanna be stuck with the decision of which one to get.

I just find it kinda comical, for Microsoft to be openly admitting this about their own product, and actually using it as a proud slogan for a brand new campaign that I'm guessing would be expected to raise Windows Vista's sales!

There is some irony there; I just can't quite put my finger on it...