Game Development

So here’s some quick code to save a screenshot of your OpenGL game in a TGA file. bool save_screenshot(string filename, int w, int h) { //This prevents the images getting padded // when the width multiplied by 3 is not a multiple of 4 glPixelStorei(GL_PACK_ALIGNMENT, 1); int nSize = w*h*3; // First let's create our buffer, 3 channels per Pixel char* dataBuffer = (char*)malloc(nSize*sizeof(char)); if (!dataBuffer) return false; // Let's fetch them from the backbuffer // We request the pixels in GL_BGR format, thanks to Berzeger for the tip glReadPixels((GLint)0, (GLint)0, (GLint)w, (GLint)h, GL_BGR, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, dataBuffer); //Now the file creation FILE *filePtr = fopen(filename.c_str(), "wb"); if (!filePtr) return false; unsigned char TGAheader[12]={0,0,2,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0}; unsigned char header[6] = { w%256,w/256, h%256,h/256, 24,0}; // We write the headers fwrite(TGAheader, sizeof(unsigned char), 12, filePtr); fwrite(header, sizeof(unsigned char), 6, filePtr); // And finally our image data fwrite(dataBuffer, sizeof(GLubyte), nSize, filePtr); fclose(filePtr); free(dataBuffer); return true; } I’ve been using this on my projects and it works, although I read a couple of times it’s better to use p-buffer or FBO, but I leave that for you to research. ...

I usually don’t do this, but come on, it’s John Carmack, and this 3h30m keynote given at QuakeCon 2012 is fascinating.

It all starts so pretty isn’t it? A clean project, a quick prototype, it works! It’s beautiful. Now it’s time to add more features, everything is planned out, all cogs have a place to be, it goes smoothly for a while. Now you realize other small components are needed, no problem, let’s make them… Eventually you do need to plug them into the game itself, and that’s when the problems start, most of the other stuff wasn’t built considering these new components. Will they break? ...

Working on Dary’s Legend has been my daily routine so I decided to make a time lapse. So this is a video compiled using Chronolapse, by taking a screenshot every 60s during a couple of days while I’m working on Dary’s Legend, the new game from Different Pixel. The video is being played back at 10 real minutes per second. This was recorded between 14-06-2012 and 30-06-2012 (some days are missing) ...

So, yeah I know I’ve been a little lazy about my blog it’s for a good cause. We decided to release a small teaser showing what we have. I can’t stress this enough, it’s a work in progress. I can’t find out how to embed the video with HD by default so don’t forget to see in 720p Lately I’ve been working mostly on small UI stuff, pixel tuning every menu/button and graphical interfaces in the game. It’s a bit hard mixing a lot of menus keeping a consistent and nice user experience. ...

So you have that Xbox360 controller laying around and want to connect it to your game? On XNA this is an out of the box option but if you’re using C++ you have a bit more work to do first. First of all, you will need the DirecX 9.0+ sdk. The includes. #define WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN // We don't want the extra stuff like MFC and such #include <windows> #include <XInput.h> // XInput API #pragma comment(lib, "XInput.lib") // Library. If your compiler doesn't support this type of lib include change to the corresponding one Let’s define the buttons ...

We finally released some screenshots of Dary’s Legend. Lately I’ve been working on the light system and fog of war for the game, it’s visible on the images. Here’s the official post but I’ve placed the images here for convenience.

New game, called Dary’s Legend, a roguelike, dungeon crawling type. This is what I’ve been working on lately, and … well not much more to say. I’ll try and do posts with relevant stuff regarding the development of the game from now on. Going back to coding now…

Quick question. I’m trying to decide where my next game should store their save files so I decided to make a poll. Personally I think that C:/Users/$USER$/AppData/Local/ is a total idiotic thing. Starting on Windows Vista there’s a pre-created “Saved Games” folder but most people seem to miss it since it’s not on the “My Documents” folder. There’s also other possibilities which many games I own use like ...

So these past 2 weeks I’ve been adding some “bits and bytes” to the engine. Taking a rest between some more complex game mechanisms I decided to start doing a video player. After a bit research I decided to choose theora, but a bit skeptic, I’ve used it before on a game company I worked at and I remember being a tiny nightmare, specially because of YUV->RGB(A) conversion and because of video/audio sync. ...