So, no blog post last week, I had actually managed to get some things done, just not really enough to blog about, my attention was irratic, jumping from task to task so much that I didn’t really get anything in a fit state to talk about. This week however, I managed to finish off some of the things I started last week, or at-least get them to the stage where I can write about them.

So the most major thing I did is that I finally moved the project over to using Premake, I’ve wrote about Premake before, but basically, it allows you to define project file that can then be compiled into Visual Studio, XCode or makefile projects (and more) so that you only have to maintain one file, (in my case, one file per-project and a master-file for the solution) and you can build on the 3 major platforms.

I also added the repository to Cerberus, (and it pretty much built first-time) so whenever I push to the main repository (hosted on BitBucket), Cerberus will download and compile the project on all the platforms I’ve set-up (currently only Windows, as I’m in the middle of setting up a Linux VM on my laptop) and e-mail me the result, it’s kinda cool to see my own CI software compiling my own engine, and then e-mailing me telling me it’s ok.

I’m anticipating some issues when I attempt to get Tyr compiling on Linux for the first time, I got a bit sloppy blocking off my Win32 specific code and I’m sure I will have fallen-foul of some of the warnings GCC has enabled that VS doesn’t, so I want to try and get this working as soon as possible, so I can sort these issues before I get too far with things. But I’m also tempted to leave it till the new year, where I shall be constructing a dedicated build machine or two (ideally one per-platform, but I’m debating just getting some OSX compatible hardware and VMing everything).

I also started the input library, (thinking I’d need it to progress with the editor) which saw me referring to this article by Keith Judge, which gave me a start diving into the weird and wonderful world of the Win32 RawInput API (I’d really love to talk to someone at MS who could attempt to justify some of those decisions…) which seems to be the way to go input-wise, and fits in with my whole taking care of things myself aspect.

Finally I looked into the editor, more precisely making it so you can translate, rotate and scale nodes using the mouse, like one would expect from a civilised program. I’d actually been working on that for a few days but apparently I wasn’t very awake when I was, it got to the stage where it was nearly working but not quite, but then the next day I had a look and it was glaringly obvious that the approach I was taking was making it stupidly hard for-myself and I re-wrote the thing in about half the lines of code of the original solution, and it worked just fine. So now you can drag nodes around the level… As long as those nodes have a size greater than zero, I’m attempting to come up with a solution for selecting/transforming nodes with no size in a way that won’t pollute the game-side code and only be available for the editor.

So that’s it for the past two weeks, this week I hope to clear up how I’m accessing properties (I’m planning some form of compile-time hash so grabbing properties by string is ok) and finish off the editor transforming code and add the buttons to the editor. Then I really need to look at dragging/dropping nodes from one part of the scene-graph tree control to another, as it currently very much doesn’t work but is a rather vital operation.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 3rd, 2011 at 3:56 pm and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.