My working enviroment.

If you were curious how my IDE (Integrated Development Environment) in which I create my games looks like, here is a screenshot. Every piece of java code which I have written, comes from the Netbeans IDE. As you can see, I program on the black background and mostly green texts. This is more polite for the eyes. On the screen you can see part of Sigmore Mines 2 "onUpdate" code.

My last exam - PASSED :-)

Yee :-) I've passed with B mark. Now as I have more time, I've decided to learn new programming language. I've chosen to learn groovy as an extension of my java skills.

I have also implemented in Sigmore Mines 2, the blackboard to store AI's knowledge.

My last exam

Today is my last exam. If I pass it, there will be only my master thesis waiting for me :-). After this exam I will have some free time, so you can expect more frequent updates on my blog. Anyway, wish mi luck.

Sigmore Mines 2 - 25 Jan 2008

I've added basic monster AI. Only wandering around behaviour to be more specific, so nothing fancy really. This is irrelevant for the players, but AI in Sigmore Mines 2 is using Behaviour Trees (Sigmore Mines used Finite State Machines). Anyway here is video, mage is my temporary monster ;-).

Sigmore Mines 2 : Video for 23 Jan

This is latest video of Sigmore Mines 2. As you can see, walls are one pixel thick. They are a border of a title, not a separate title , thus on the same area space you have much more to explore:). Also movement (and attacks in future) of units between cells are animated. What do you think? This was inspired by this screenshot.

About old project, about new project and about Windows Vista

I really have problems with inventing meaningful titles for my posts... anyway I want to tell you about few things.

First one may looks like advertisement and believe me, I also never imagined that I could say it, but... I really like Windows Vista. It came preinstalled on my new laptop. At first I was a bit worried because producer don't provide drivers for Windows XP and I was prejudiced that Vista is a big, slow, buggy cow.. Now it's almost a month since I'm working with Vista and to be honest, I don't feel like going back to XP again. Of course first thing I did was restoring classic start menu and disabling Aero and sidebar (not that Aero and sidebar killed performance, but I read somewhere that battery life is longer without them). As for performance, the fact is that start up time of Netbeans and also compiling times are much faster compared to my previous hardware, thus making me a happier man;). Also things such as a new way to navigate around folders makes me more productive:). I should also mention that first service pack is almost knocking at our doors (release candidate is ready for download now). This service pack should enhance stability and performance as MS says. Future will show :-)

Second and most important thing which may make happy some of my readers (are there any?). After getting another mail from fan of Sigmore Mines game I decided to "again" start working on Sigmore Mines 2. Yeah I see you people rejoice ;-). Keep in mind that I'm not forgetting my Dwarfs King game. I plan to work on them both in parallel. I mean, an hour a day devoted to developing each game is not impossible for me. I'm more concerned that I woudn't stop after this one hour... Anyway... I want to officially announce that Sigmore Mines 2 is being developed. Also I want to officially ask fans of Sigmore Mines for your motivating support (hint hint -> start commenting my posts;-) ).

Dwarfs Kingdom 18.01.2008

This is a video from the latest version of my game. Google reduced video resolution, but I hope you can still see something. There is one builder unit (blue dot), this unit is autonomic and constantly looks for work. Gui framework supports buttons, panels, push buttons, tool tips (displayed by the label at the bottom of the screen). Text near the builder represents current "thought" of the unit (later I will change it to icon representation).

Title highlighting implemented

I've just looked at my blog's archive and it looks like my blog has birthday with me:). I mean, my first posts on blogger are dated January 2007. I started to bore people with my stuff a year ago and I'm planning to write the same old boring stuff another year ;-).

As you can see from the topic of this post, I have implemented title highlighting which basically means that when player will want to build a structure, titles under mouse pointer will be green if structure can be build at this place or they will be red if place is inappropriate for building structures. In my next post I will give you some screenshots or maybe video (xvid) of my game - but don't expect release state graphics.

One more thing. I don't think that I have many readers (maybe 2 or 3 persons), but if you haven't noticed yet, I have created rss feed link and email subscription link. You can be notified to your email if new post on my blog shows up.

Happy birthday to me ;-)

I'm getting old:P From now on I'm officially 24 years old...

I've got a little slowdown in Dwarf's King development... I don't know how to implement resources system. I want something like in settlers game, where there are economic connection like wood->boards->buildings. My problem is that in my game player's environment is inside a mountain which means for example practically no wood..

Also during development of my game I think I have created pretty good 2D engine. I don't know if java community need another 2D engine, but if there will be some interest in it, I could make it open-source.

Happy new year!

Happy new year! I'm not very good at composing wishes, so this is all you will get from me:P.

Anyway during this few free days between Christmas and New Years Eve I have managed to rewrite my gui system. Now it's easier to create new controls, frame borders are implemented using decorator pattern and controls inside a panel can be laid with help of layout managers (right now I only implemented GridLayoutManager). But most significant new feature is layout auto scaling. All controls look the same regardless of screen resolution, also their position on the screen is calculated taking current screen resolution into account :).

Furthermore I have tested my engine on windows vista and it works flawlessly on it.