I started learning basic character rigging & animation in Blender.

Even though it’s still a bit rough, it already looks quite nice at the scale I’m using in the game. Some finer details might be useful for promo materials & cutscenes.

The old clay stop-motion animations had only 5 frames of animation! Making those was fun but also a lot of work.

The rigged 3D model animation is super smooth thanks to interpolation. I’ll try to match the animation speed to movement. It’s never going to be 100% accurate but it should not look like ice-skating…

New debug feature added to the game: recording inputs during gameplay and playing them back later.

This helps me reproduce a given scenario with a single button press. I can also do a Quake-style “timedemo” recording and use it as a performance benchmark.

To make replay work properly, I had to set a constant seed in my random number generator and make sure all entities were using it. The storage format is not optimal. Recording a long session would probably use more disk space than necessary. But we’re still talking a few kilobytes per minute, so it’s fine.

I upgraded my home machine to macOS Catalina. Big mistake.

• Zero interesting new features
• Devastro 2 OpenGL renderer broken
• Left 4 Dead unplayable (oh no!)

My OpenGL window went black. Was I using OpenGL wrong? How? On my quest for the answer, I ended up rewriting significant parts of the rendering core, updated all my shaders and created a new SDL port. It took several nights to get things working again.

The good thing is that switching to SDL was one of my mid-term goals anyway. I’m going to need it on Windows. To complete the port, I added SDL event handling and audio backend.

It was nice to get rid of the Cocoa boilerplate. One thing I missed in the SDL API was a function to set a fixed aspect ratio for my window. I had to do it like this:

cocoa.m:

#import <Cocoa/Cocoa.h>

void SetWindowRatio(void *window) {
    NSWindow *win = (__bridge NSWindow*) window;
    win.aspectRatio = NSMakeSize( 1280, 720 );
}

main.cpp:

#include <SDL.h>
#include <SDL_syswm.h>

extern "C" void SetWindowRatio(void *window);

// and later..

SDL_SysWMinfo wmInfo;
SDL_VERSION(&wmInfo.version);
SDL_GetWindowWMInfo(sdl.window, &wmInfo);
SetWindowRatio(wmInfo.info.cocoa.window);

Fixing Left 4 Dead was easy. Add a new APFS volume, install Mojave, install Steam, move data files over, tell Steam to use them → no need to re-download everything. The nice thing about APFS volumes is that they share space, so I don’t have to think about how big each partition should be.

I’ve been neglecting the level editor a little bit. It didn’t get fully updated with IMGUI, mainly because it was a mess. It had gone through the entity system development with only quick updates here and there and it showed.

Last night I decided it was finally time to dig in. After an hour or two of cleanup and refactoring, things started looking much better. I wrote new entity & variant selection lists and fixed a few bugs related to Box2D. Overall line count went down, which is always a good sign. So much for custom UI components!

During a recent rewrite of the menu system, it occurred to me it would be nice to have a visual preview of the various animation easing curves available in the engine.

So I made a tool to do that. Pick an easing function, see the curve and an animation showing its effect on alpha, scale and position. 20 minutes, 150 lines of code.

This will make it much easier to pick the right function when creating new UI and in-game animations.

Luckily I’m done with the menus for now. If I ever need to add more polish, I might attach this new interface directly to the actual element being animated. That would make this a real WYSIWYG tool.

This was a big one. I switched to Box2D for collision detection & physics.

My old system was nothing fancy: axis-aligned bounding boxes, a “sliding” mechanism for collisions, sector based space subdivision. Worked well for Superforce. However there’s a lot more happening in Devastro 2. More bullets, more particles, more enemies, more complicated level design, player motion needs to be fluid around obstacles etc. Box2D seems like the right tool for that job.

First I had to rip out large amounts of old code both in the game and the editor. Everything was completely broken for over a week. Fortunately the Box2D integration went well and the game is now back up and running.

The Box2D API is nice and there’s plenty of documentation & example code.

To improve rendering performance the game builds a texture atlas from all the images. This process is quick enough to be done at load time. I wanted to have a clear idea about the atlas layout. Xcode does have some support for viewing OpenGL textures but it’s been crashing on me almost every time I used that feature. So I did what I usually do when a 3rd party tool fails me: I built my own inspection tool to look at the OpenGL textures directly in-game.

Even in its initial simple form it has already helped fix a few issues.

I’m planning to extend it with zoom & pan and a way to track usage of the individual images in the atlas.