Last night I was invited to play some hoops Thai style, well actually it’s the same as any ole basketball game around the world. So it’s not like they play with their teeth or anything like that. Only difference is the weather is about as spicy as the food. (HOT) Thus working the ball around the court tends to produce copious amounts of sweat.

Our team lost the game, but anyways it’s not really about winning or loosing, just out to have some fun, and it’s been ages since I played hoops anyways. Best part is I made some good friends while I was at it. They want to learn more about computers and programming, so hopefully I can help them out. When you guys get here, I wish you all a warm welcome.

Well as with all projects, they can get in the way of real life. I’ve been busy working at Circuit City lately installing home networks and laptop computers, which has a real job satisfaction making people happy with their computing life. The down side is I haven’t had much time to work on the game engine, so the Todo list has only gotten bigger with little solutions. I know the other developer on the project was considering to re-deploy the Project Management and bug tracking system on his Linux server because of some SQL conflicts and integration issues.

So here is the new Todo list:

Create a LUA file containing a table of console commands

Code to check if the user has typed in a proper command in the console

Configuration Options for the console, fonts and colors, bold, italic and underline options.

Design an image for a splash screen (game startup, place holder for real graphic)

Tabbed Consoles?

Console management across multiple monitors

Project Management and bug tracking

Extensible Console Class so we can attach it to any window object with a hWnd.

Console Scrolling up

Graphics Options Dialog Box Design

Console Background graphic Design

Debug Graphics (Run Time): System Time & Date, Game play time, Frame Rate, (Eventually Collision Quad Trees, Debug Vectors)

Bind Keys from Configuration File

Bind Keys from Console

Save key binding configuration

Save Monitor-Graphics Bindings

Load-Save Alternative configuration files & Bindings for keys/graphics/monitors

List of commands:

Context Help: > Command -Help

List Commands

List Bindings

Rem Binding

Bind Key

Set Resolution -Monitor

Set WindMode -Monitor -Mode

Bind Monitor -MonitorNum

Bind MonMode

Well a couple nights ago my friend Charles and myself finally got our game project to integrate with CVS so we can share our stuff, but this brings a whole new layer of problems to the front, because we are collaborating we need to have a way to co-manage the project which means some project management software that we can both use. Something for doing version control and bug / feature tracking and a place where we can keep a list of feature requests or a to-do list. So I’m going to look into that today, I found this website today that looks promising:

http://matrix.squiz.net/

Well the game engine has been coming along nicely. I’ve been working with a guy named Charles and we’ve developed some really cool core engine components so far. Up to this point it’s been nothing but the core windows components and basic support for the DirectX SDK API.

I wanted to have full support for dynamically switching between full screen and windowed mode while in the game. So we got that feature running, also there was some other related features to being in full screen and clicking on some other window in the event that the user has multiple monitors but the game is only active on one monitor. Similarly the game engine must also handle an ALT+TAB out to another application or window, and from windowed mode the game should pause rendering when the game is minimized or placed in the background.

We got it to pause the game rendering but the game itself is still executing and eating up the CPU. When the game engine is not active of course it should not be eating CPU power because the user might have to do something important like writing a blog post, or responding to some important e-mail or making a quick edit on some web page. Since most video games require the full attention of the computer hardware games are developed with a very high priority setting for executing on the CPU. Just because the rendering is paused doesn’t mean the priority level has changed so we still need to implement a system that will drop the priority level thus not requiring large amounts of CPU time to do nothing when the user wants to work on something else for a bit, or step out for a quick lunch between levels or whatever.