Peek-a-boo

edited September 2008 in General discussions
So...this engine looks pretty. How active is this project anyway?

Comments

  • edited September 2008
    Hi!

    Thanks for your message. Its development has been pretty active for the past year.
    Lately, for the past 10 weeks or so, there has been 35~40 hours of work done per week.

    But as I'm currently alone on it and as I also have a full time job as AI game programmer, I will probably get down a bit to around 20 hours per week if I want to keep my sanity! ;)

    That's why I'd like to find people to write wrappers for other languages, such as C++, Python, D, .NET, ...

    Also, if someone wants to write some tutorials after a while, that'll remove a burden from my shoulders, as it requires quite some times that I'd rather spend mine adding features to the engine like: scripting support, package manager, network, 3D, ...

    Oh, and more important, I'd like to find someone that'd like to work on a GUI/editor for orx. This will make the engine accessible to non-programmers. Unfortunately I really suck at (and hate) writing UIs.

    If you have any question, feel free to ask! =)

    - iarwain
  • edited September 2008
    Mmhmm. I noticed your svn usage on sourceforge was pretty frequent, and that you were the only one. :blink: I'm going to try and get my hands a little more dirty with this project ( so far gotten to linker errors, even following beautiful tutorial, I still fail ). Eventually, I think I could help out with a pretty gui. I've worked with qt quite a bit so I might be of some use there. First of all, I want to get more used to this project and how it works, etc. Anyway, thanks for the awesome project, I'll keep posting regularly...on this...empty...forum. Time to populate!

    Edit: Silly me, trying to use .cpp instead of .c. On to tutorial 2! Muahahaha
  • edited September 2008
    Hey, first thanks for you interest! :)

    I've been trying to have people to give some look at it for ages, but I'm pretty bad at comm. That's why I went for a website and tutorials, but this is very time consuming for me. Time that I can't spend working on the engine.

    Maybe I can help with your linker errors? Which OS/hardware/orx version are you using?

    I also made a slight mistake: I only put, in the externlibs pack, the libs I've had to modify a bit for my use (such as Box2D for all platforms (because of no write accessor on gravity) and SFML for visual studio (because of linking options). I should put compiled extern libs for all versions, instead of just putting the modified ones. Will do it next week, probably.

    I'm glad you're looking a bit more into it, if you have any question or need any help, just ask, I'll do my best to answer.

    Also, for the gui, that'd be wonderful, but we'll see that in a while, when you have a better grasp on orx, and if you still think it's worth of your time. :D

    As for the team, there used to be other contributors (a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away), but we split recently.
    Anyway I've probably written at least 90% of the code, so right now I'm the only possible maintainer. Though I hope it'll change in the future! B)
  • edited September 2008
    First, thanks for making this project. :)

    Linker errors = fixed! I was trying to use .cpp files rather than .c. Bad mistake.

    GUI...yeah, later.
    As for my setup, I have...erm...many.
    On win32, I use msvc2008, and mingw for some things.
    On linux, I have debian, and just but any compiler known to man.

    I tried on linux first, but gave up after I got lost in build process and makefiles were failing. So, I came over to windoze and got that setup rather quickly. Rather than linker error, it all worked out fine. So, I'm proceeding from here. Halfway through tut. 2 at the moment. Maybe later today/tomorrow I'll look into why the linux build failed, most likely case: user error.

    My initial impressions are that I like it...and already finding things I could suggest differently. Anyway, on with the tuts!
  • edited September 2008
    Any feedback will be welcome! :)
    As for all projects, when the dev is too much into it, he doesn't always make the best call for things.

    I tried to make the engine as easy to use as possible, but I probably missed a lot of possible enhancements.

    As for linux, I've been compiling it on ubuntu, after having installed SFML and Box2D. But I didn't use the makefiles.

    Actually the makefiles are created by a build tool called bakefile (from the wxwidget team), and I wasn't the one creating the config scripts, so I probably made some mistakes when trying to maintain them. I'll have a look at it right now.

    Usually, in windows or linux, and also for the GP2X version, I use codelite as the IDE, which generates its own makefiles. Code::blocks project files should also work smoothly, but I definitely find it less efficient, as an IDE, than Codelite.

    I'm looking at the default makefiles right now, thanks for the report! :cheer:
  • edited September 2008
    Sounds good with the linux update.
    Also, one thing I noticed I was doing a lot in the config/ini files was using parentheses rather than braces. Is there anyway these can be interchangeable? Again, small thing. On the other hand, I was really impressed with the adaptability of the ini files. Very very nice.

    I just finished going through all the tutorials. The only thing I missed that I was hoping for was more coding help. That's okay though, just means I have to figure it out the traditional way, reading the headers.

    File diving begin!

    P.S. Hehe, tu es francais. Hehe, je parle le francais un peu. Hehe. Oh god...too much soda.
  • edited September 2008
    Oui, on peut continuer en français si tu le souhaites!
    Also ich kann ein bißchen Deutsch sprechen. ;)

    Well, yes, I have to admit I only went for the highest level stuff in the tutorial.
    Mostly because the data-driven by config file system is something not that common and I thought it was the first thing for newcomers to learn.

    By the way, when you say you went through all the tutorials, you means the actual 10 tutorials in the tutorial section or the 8 videos on the simple tutorial?

    I went a bit more into things in some of the actual real tutorials (using events, clocks, etc...).

    The most uncommon parts are really the animation graph and the clock system, which really deserve some special attention. After, you'll find usual stuff you can find in most engines.

    A small question: for linux, whihc makefile did you use? The one in the gnu folder or in the autoconf one?

    The gnu one compiled with no issue on my linux, I'm trying to see if it runs now.

    As for brace/parenthesis, good suggestion, I'll add this feature probably by tomorrow. They'll be interchangeable.

    Thanks you for your comment on the ini files, I went with the inheritance and override features because they were solving some of my issues (i'm very lazy, so the less I write, the better it is, it goes also for config files ;) ).

    I went for an ini format, because config is part of the engine kernel (which is supposed to be portable and OS/hardware independent).
    So I had to write my own .ini parser and I didn't feel like writing an xml one, for example, and I didn't want any external dependency for the kernel. At least .ini format is very easy to understand, and inheritance makes it easier to use. :)

    PS: I sent you a PM, but I'm not sure you get notified when you're logged.
  • edited September 2008
    No french, no german, S.V.P. I live in Germany, I don't speak it.
    Tutorials...note to self: look first, speak second. I'm going through non-video ones now. :blush:
    And I used the gnu one, which means I most likely just copied a dir wrong or something. Nevermind it. I'll figure out my config mixup when I boot back into Linux.
    The clocks are nice, very similar to qt's timers. I guess the main thing for me to do now is to simply study up. Back to the books...
  • edited September 2008
    Aha, ok, I'll stick with English, I promise. ;)

    Well, I'm glad you were not through all the basic tutorials, this way you still have some more to study, and probably more to report. :)
    If one day I find enough time (and will power), I'll make videos for the other tutorials.

    Thanks for the clocks, I have to admit I don't know the qt's timers, I should have made some research before implementing them. :blush:
    I still have some work to do on them, anyway, probably post v1.0, such as assigning a clock to a specified thread and "freezing" modules updates when underlying modules become unavailable (hot plug support).

    As for the gnu makefile, it compiles on my machine, but the code doesn't run. :S Yet when I build it with codelite, everything works perfectly.
    I guess I'll have to dive in the bakefile (sigh) to see what's going wrong. I will keep you informed when I find the issue.

    There's one tutorial I'm not very proud of, it's the animation one as it doesn't really showcase the power of the graph. But this is a tricky subject, being a bit more complex to setup via config files than everything else. However, its use is far more simple than any animation engine I've been working with so far. I'll try to make this tutorial better and still keep it user friendly, if I can.

    Good studies! :)

    PS: I've been trying to "advertise" the engine on some forums, but usually I get very few, if some, answers. Like on gamedev.net, where I couldn't get a single answer. Do you have any suggestion about sites where I should write some stuff?
  • edited September 2008
    Maybe more stuff on wikipedia. That's where I got link to this site. :D Tutorials all look good, one thing I'd suggest is that since you have links to the source files, also include links to the applicable ini files. That was a minor inconvenience for me.
    Also, I'm having troubles with the final project. More linker errors.
  • edited September 2008
    Oh so true for a direct link to the .ini files! Thanks, will add them right away.

    I just made a quick wikipedia page a couple of days ago, but as orx is lost in the list amongst very famous engines, I wouldn't have thought anyone would actually arrive on its page! :blink:

    Maybe I can help with your linking problem on the last one? It's the only C++ tutorial, all other being C.
  • edited March 2009
    Hello
    I just download this tool. I'll give a try. My idea is to contribute with some sort GUI for Sprite Editor and Map Editor.
  • edited March 2009
    Hey MrGreen, welcome aboard!

    Thoses kind of editors would be very nice. I'm already working on a map editor on my own, I'll release it as open source when it'll be in a usable state (right now we can create basic maps but there's still a lot to do to have a full featured editor).

    Hope you'll find orx interesting! :)
  • edited March 2009
    Hello iarwain. I want to congratulate you with all the work that you done. I'm still at the tutorial point. My idea is to produce a simple platform game in order to understand the potenciality of this engine. I used the Kyra Sprite Editor and it's quite simple to use. (Kyra is another open source sprite engine base on SDL). My idea is to do something like that. Anyway I'll keep you updated.
    Thanks
  • edited March 2009
    Hi!

    First of all, thanks for your appreciation! =)

    I didn't know about Kyra, but what I saw on their website looks very interesting. Too bad the project has been inactive for a couple of years now.

    If you have any question regarding on how to achieve stuff for a platforming game using orx, feel free to ask! :)
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