CrashTheuniversE

These have been crazy days for the Team and me. A change-point with no return.

I’ll keep on coding and shaping up this project now, here and when should go live…only time will tell.

I have to post Mathware (as it is fairly fine on the Vector Math side). I’d like to put the Matrix calc as well, at least basic functions. That’s because I want integrate Mathware in the Fallen project. That would be useful for a lot of code to become simplier and more functional.

Last but not least, the Fight system. I’ve checked out and in the end there is not all that much to do to parametrize and balance a simple fight system. Things get a little bit harder due to controls on iPhone and due to the screen dimension and occlusion as well as responsivenes of the controls. (Often the Events run on a queue that is much slower than it should be …).

Anyway there you need like 4 or 5 params to play it right. I’ll check what to do and test it soon. More on the Fallen balance and fine tuning notes soon. (I have to put the ideas here for a review). me >>>>>>>>>>>> myself.

I’m recently working some hours more on the engine (LAIN) for the iPhone version of one of our upcoming games, FALLEN. One problem that arouse is that internal functions for images loading from the iPhone OS are both not thread safe with OpenGL ES (for example if you are loading in the background an image with glTexImage2D while you are rendering chances are that there is a pthread crash coming especially if the file is large). Moreover there is another terrible problem… they are SLOW. In the end I made my custom loaders for a set of data formats and had improvements both in speed and control over the creation process. To set up an efficient loader for formats like JPG or PNG or PCX wasn’t complex since I had them already for the other versions of the engine on other platforms (like PC tool and DS), but that’s really strange how some operations end up being slower than they should.. I think that some code must be done in asm (especially the DCT calculation and the AANSCALE decompression). The worst feeling that I have is that I don’t have a fast memory to access to store the quantization table inside. Due to the zigzag filter that means a lot of casual access right now to memory that yes enters the cache, but probably is getting out soon as the plane decompression proceeds. Honestly I would like to know if there is a way to control what’s inside the cache more efficently and have more info on that, but Apple is not providing too much of that low level info that for a programmer like me is really frustrating. I’ll see what I can get in the next week of work, since there is a lot of time to spend on other elements of the engine as well. But a good note for myself is to check in the next days a coherent way to better manage the code. On DS i had my D/I TCM that was helping … that made a lot of difference. I felt bad it was a little short in resources ( DTCM is small and is eaten by the STACK that lies inside it) but at least having a KB or 2 of damn quick and controlled memory was sweet

CtU.

And while listening to 15 … I’ve run a new open source project on SourceForge.net. That’s Mathware a C/C++ math library that I hope to use as a common ground for Maths coding ^_^. Gross, I know, but you’re welcome to contribute check it out at http://mathware.sourceforge.net ^_^

First thing to do… I’ll upload all my previous engines and code snippets so that everybody who cares can download them. I’ll have a separate page for them. I don’t think anybody will care, but I’ll do since I’m always looking for my code around! this way I can keep them at one place and take them back when I need them.

Check out Source Code page…

I had my website inactive for a long time. I always hated blogs and didn’t want to write one. I still do But I need a Sandbox for my ideas to be left somewhere I can comeback to them from everywhere (office, home, …) and work on them a little. If you are accidentally coming to this website… well I’m sorry :). I’m writing to myself here not to you.

By the way I’ll write about my coding and video game making stuff, plus the additional burden of being myself … a 27 years old guy with a video game company and too much math and coding spirit inside to live normally .. *sigh*.

That’s it…