This is me saying 'hi' to all new people! If you're reading this, please (create an account if you haven't already and) reply with your own word/phrase/SSN/whatever you want.
Well, I have 2 ideas for games, one is a 2d fighter in the vein of Street Fighter, and the other is an 3d action RPG type game. I also have been juggling an isometric turn based strategy game similar to Final Fantasy Tactics.
Alright, sweet. My first (obvious) suggestion is to run through the tutorials and get used to how orx works. And yeah, if you have any questions, just ask. We'll be more than happy to help.
Another thing, is that I've become too absorbed into the code like iarwain and don't see faults in it anymore. If you have any suggestions to make it better, post them!!! Iarwain is very good at implementing suggestions within an hour or two of you suggesting them. :P
Another thing, is that I've become too absorbed into the code like iarwain and don't see faults in it anymore. If you have any suggestions to make it better, post them!!! Iarwain is very good at implementing suggestions within an hour or two of you suggesting them. :P
That's because everything's perfect now! Just kidding of course. Any suggestion is really appreciated.
The engine has improved a lot with suggestions from M1SF17 when he first arrived and had a fresh look on it.
As for implementing them within a couple of hours, I'll try my best as long as it's not adding full 3D support or the like. :P
Networking is something that has been talked about.
Timeline for it is looking pretty near to be honest.
You'll have to get a more accurate response from iarwain though...
Also, welcome.
Yes, true, network support is getting near. I was even thinking about it today.
My next effort will be to try to make the GP2X version work correctly, then focus on Mac OS X / iPhone versions though.
I'm not sure yet if after this I'll focus on network support or on scripting and package modules. Any suggestion about this?
I'm also more interested in network support than in package and scripting.
Package was more to prevent end user from cheating when messing with the config files, but as of now those config files can be encrypted/decrypted on the fly, it gets less urgent.
As for scripting, well, it may help to grow a community, but I'm not even sure. Network will definitely be a plus for some of the ideas I have. So I'll probably go for this!
i'm rotor. i got 10 years worth of art and design experience under my belt. i'm looking to learn to program to program simple games, and i will be focussing in a circular scrolling shooter game similar to Gyruss for the NES. i did a fair bit of LUA scripting, but i'm no hardcore programmer, so this is going to be challenge for me.
I'm really looking forward to what you'll achieve with your shooter! If you need any help (regarding orx or C/C++ if you don't feel comfortable with these languages), please ask, I'd be happy to help!
orx's lacking of a good doc (and wiki), so any question could be used for a later FAQ and wiki.
thanks for the warm welcome! i'm also interested in what i will come up with, this is quite a steep learning curve i have to endure. quitting is always easy, but i am quite keen on getting something started at least.
I was looking for a long time for a 2-d engine that was both simple to use and cross platform and that I could interface with in a C like language (I prefer c++). ORX seems to hbe the perfect match.
My plans are to make a complex strategy game. Most of the ideas are still in concept stage and I can only describve it as a mix of civilization and ceasar.
Currently just getting familiar with the engine. Documentation can be somewhat lacking sometimes and thats causing me to make unexpected discoveries. Such as the engine using radians instead of degrees, perhaps this should be documented?
Also drawing objects I noticed that 0,0 isn't the top right corner like I'm used to from a previous engine. It looks like there might be some way to change the way this coordinate system works, but I haven't found it yet.
I'll be doing some familiarizing this weekend and then I hope to get started on some game prototypes.
I was looking for a long time for a 2-d engine that was both simple to use and cross platform and that I could interface with in a C like language (I prefer c++). ORX seems to hbe the perfect match.
I'm glad you found orx to your taste and I hope it'll meet your expectations!
My plans are to make a complex strategy game. Most of the ideas are still in concept stage and I can only describve it as a mix of civilization and ceasar.
That sounds ambitious and interesting. Hopefully you'll be able to prototype something fast using orx. If you have any questions, I'll be more than happy to help.
Currently just getting familiar with the engine. Documentation can be somewhat lacking sometimes and thats causing me to make unexpected discoveries. Such as the engine using radians instead of degrees, perhaps this should be documented?
Yeah, documentation is a wreck. The doxygen doc is quite complete but is too low level generally and lack some details like for the unities used such as radians for angles.
I'd love to have a wiki that would be a base for an extensive and higher level doc that the community would then extend. Someone suggested to use the tutorials for such a wiki base. I just need to find some time to put this wiki together now.
I've already asked on twitter, but does someone know of a good wiki system I could install?
Also drawing objects I noticed that 0,0 isn't the top right corner like I'm used to from a previous engine. It looks like there might be some way to change the way this coordinate system works, but I haven't found it yet.
I wanted to move this part to the help request section, but didn't find out how to do it.
Basically orx is different than libraries where you have to specify where you want your objects to be rendered on screen.
This lower level calculation is made by the render plugin given all the informations it gathers on the objects, camera and viewports.
If an object is at position (X, Y) and your camera is also at (X, Y) (I'm intentionnaly removing the Z component for the explanation), your object will appear in the center of your viewport (most of the time if you have a single viewport that occupies the whole screen, it's also the center of the screen).
This behavior helps tracking objects with camera. If you set an object as a camera parent, the camera will be centered on this object.
If you have only one static camera and a viewport that covers the entire screen, you can set its position at (CameraWidth/2, CameraHeight/2). This way the world coordinate (0, 0) will be mapped to the top left screen corner and the coordinate (CameraWidth, CameraHeight) will be the right screen corner).
I'll be doing some familiarizing this weekend and then I hope to get started on some game prototypes.
If you have any other questions, I'll try to reply as best as I can!
Yeah, documentation is a wreck. The doxygen doc is quite complete but is too low level generally and lack some details like for the unities used such as radians for angles.
Personally I was thinking of just changing the comments for orxObject_SetRotation from "Sets object rotation" to "Sets object rotation (in radians)". This should update it when you generate the doxygen docs. If you feel elaborate comments make your code too bloated, I think doxygen even has a way of loading comments from a seperate file.
I'd love to have a wiki that would be a base for an extensive and higher level doc that the community would then extend. Someone suggested to use the tutorials for such a wiki base. I just need to find some time to put this wiki together now.
I've already asked on twitter, but does someone know of a good wiki system I could install?
A wiki is a good idea. The only one I know is MediaWiki. Which is the one Wikipedia uses. I remember setting it up once, don't think it required much knowledge of php and was easy to set up. You will need to read up about the way MediaWiki pages are formatted, but it shouldn't be a problem really.
May I ask, are you hosting this site via a shared hosting company? Because they often offer control panels with easy setup for forums and wiki and such. That should simplify installtion to a few clicks.
If an object is at position (X, Y) and your camera is also at (X, Y) (I'm intentionnaly removing the Z component for the explanation), your object will appear in the center of your viewport (most of the time if you have a single viewport that occupies the whole screen, it's also the center of the screen).
This behavior helps tracking objects with camera. If you set an object as a camera parent, the camera will be centered on this object.
If you have only one static camera and a viewport that covers the entire screen, you can set its position at (CameraWidth/2, CameraHeight/2). This way the world coordinate (0, 0) will be mapped to the top left screen corner and the coordinate (CameraWidth, CameraHeight) will be the right screen corner).
Thanks, I actually thought of the same thing a few hours after posting this question. Although your answer elaborates further on what I already suspected.
Personally I was thinking of just changing the comments for orxObject_SetRotation from "Sets object rotation" to "Sets object rotation (in radians)". This should update it when you generate the doxygen docs. If you feel elaborate comments make your code too bloated, I think doxygen even has a way of loading comments from a seperate file.
I'll update all comments related to angle later tonight. Feel free to sync the latest version from the svn repository. Also the svn repository contains a few corrections and additions to the latest release, such as the localization module (which is actually a convenience wrapper based on the config system).
I'm all for comments and don't mind having them in the code. I was just thinking that the project would benefit from a more accessible high level documentation as some people will probably be reluctant to dive into the doxygen one (and I totally understand that!).
A wiki is a good idea. The only one I know is MediaWiki. Which is the one Wikipedia uses. I remember setting it up once, don't think it required much knowledge of php and was easy to set up. You will need to read up about the way MediaWiki pages are formatted, but it shouldn't be a problem really.
I have only a small knowledge of dokuwiki and knew mediawiki only by fame. I was first looking at some wiki I could integrate with joomla (mainly for authentication) with the minimal amount of work on my side as I already have trouble finding enough time to code and make additions code-wise. Furthermore I always had some grudge against web-based technologies when I have to deploy/install them (not as a user).
I couldn't find any satisfying solution to integrate to joomla so I presume I'll install a separate wiki and merely add links between it and the main site.
May I ask, are you hosting this site via a shared hosting company? Because they often offer control panels with easy setup for forums and wiki and such. That should simplify installtion to a few clicks.
Unfortunately my host doesn't provide such facilities but everything else turned to be so good compared to all the former providers I had before that I don't plan on looking for another one.
Thanks, I actually thought of the same thing a few hours after posting this question. Although your answer elaborates further on what I already suspected.
I'm glad you figured it out by yourself and I hope it won't be too much of a bother for you. I got used pretty fast to it, even when it came to UI/HUD object positionning.
On an unrelated note, I tried to reply to your first 2 posts directly by pm so as to make sure you wouldn't be blocked too long (I don't have possibility to post on the forum during my working day). Did you receive correctly the notifications?
Hi! New to Orx as well. I'm more a graphic artist than a coder and I've got quite some experience in game making, but I'm more used to Flash/Actionscript which I find quite simple as a language. I have a very minimal knowledge of c/c++ . Right now I find myself with plenty of free time, and I feel the urge to make a solid, "actual" game that won't be limited by Actionscript's poor performances. Orx seems to have all the features I was looking for - Portability, performance, relative easiness and a way to somewhat learn C/C++ - and I would really like to get comfortable with it.
As of yet it hasn't exactly been a walk in the park. For example I had some trouble getting things to compile properly to start with, until I finally figured out I could just download VC++ express for free and follow the video tutorial from there. Haha. I'm now at tutorial 2 (clocks) and there is again something blocking my path: keyboard input doesn't seem to work (but I'll start another thread for that).
At any rate, I can see the potential of Orx and I'm willing to give it al least a chance to show its real power =P. Iarwain seems quite involved in continuing Orx, and the general climate here on the forum is pretty nice too, so this sounds like something that would be worth contributing to. If I start working with Orx seriously I'll be more focussed on using it than improving it directly (which I... uh... wouldn't know how to do), but that means I could at least provide the community with tutorials/examples and advice regarding game logic, too.
The kind of game I'm aiming at right now is some kind of 2d side scroller. I would say a simple one, but the objective is to actually make it awesome xD (through awesome visuals and a lot of efforts to make it slick). Sooo that soon-to-come "Scroller" game engine/editor is also very interresting in my book =D.
I'm glad to see you're motivated by trying out orx. As you've seen, orx's only usable with C/C++ right now but in a couple of months C# and Python might also be available.
Sorry about the settings with Visual Studio, the videos I made are pretty old now, I just need to find some time to make some clean articles on the wiki pages for different platformes/IDEs.
If you think others might learn from your firsts steps with orx, and if you think orx might suits your needs and want to get more serious about using it, maybe you could contribute through the wiki at some point.
Lately I had to stop working on the wiki as I wanted to advance on Scroll and writing on the wiki takes such a big amount of time. Btw, any feedback about the wiki would be welcome!
As you're saying you'd like to make 2D side scroller, Scroll might be more helpful being a layer on top of orx. I actually just finished writing the basis tonight and it now needs some serious debugging. If you'd like to test some alpha build in a couple of days, please let me know as there are probably tons of details I didn't see.
I'll now have a look to your input issues, let's meet in your other thread!
Alright, I'll keep that wiki in mind. Regarding setup instructions, I think the biggest problem is not the video tut itself (which I found quite reliable) but the fact that, for someone not familiar with compilers, there is almost no information on what software to use to get started. For example, it would be very helpful to mention that visual c++ express is available for free. I actually found about this in the forums of another game engine (HGE, which I also have an eye on), after unsuccesfully trying to apply instructions from the video to Dev C++ and CodeLite.
As for Scroll, that should be interesting of course. I'll first try to get familiar with orx itself =P. What will Scroll add/help with ?
By the way, I think I read somewhere that you live in Montréal? That's also my case (!) Et je parle aussi français.
Ah yes, that's totally true, I never spoke about which tools are needed to use for orx. I made the assumption that orx will be used at first only by coders, and I completely skipped that.
It's good to have some external sights to avoid this kind of mistake. When I'll do the "setup" wiki pages I'll keep that in mind and tell where to find IDEs, etc...
As for Scroll, well, it's a layer on top of orx that will let you have a lightweight editor adapted to your game. Ie, you'll be able to place all your objects, scale/rotate/tile them at will, use different layers, snap on a grid, and so on.
The editor will let you load/save your maps, of course, but also let you play your game directly in it so you can easily tweak your levels.
The good thing is that you'll have only one C++ class to extend to customize your game, and the editor will be embedded with your executable without you having to do anything for that.
And yes, I'm currently living in Montreal, I figured you were also around here so I sent you a couple of private messages those last days, did you get them?
Comments
Hop, sticky sticky!
Just wanted to add a simple thing: if you have any questions about orx features, feel free to ask in the forum.
Another thing, is that I've become too absorbed into the code like iarwain and don't see faults in it anymore. If you have any suggestions to make it better, post them!!! Iarwain is very good at implementing suggestions within an hour or two of you suggesting them. :P
That's because everything's perfect now!
The engine has improved a lot with suggestions from M1SF17 when he first arrived and had a fresh look on it.
As for implementing them within a couple of hours, I'll try my best as long as it's not adding full 3D support or the like. :P
kidding, i may need network before if i ever get into it!
if motivated i'll get through some tutorials tonight and create my first (actually, second or third) object with this version
btw hi everybody!
Timeline for it is looking pretty near to be honest.
You'll have to get a more accurate response from iarwain though...
Also, welcome.
My next effort will be to try to make the GP2X version work correctly, then focus on Mac OS X / iPhone versions though.
I'm not sure yet if after this I'll focus on network support or on scripting and package modules. Any suggestion about this?
Oops, duplicate.
Package was more to prevent end user from cheating when messing with the config files, but as of now those config files can be encrypted/decrypted on the fly, it gets less urgent.
As for scripting, well, it may help to grow a community, but I'm not even sure. Network will definitely be a plus for some of the ideas I have. So I'll probably go for this!
curious about the backend you're gonna use for that btw.
I'll be trying now to split my object from the bmp containing all the sprite, using the object tutorial as iarwain suggested me
I will first focus on iPhone and GP2X anyway.
i'm rotor. i got 10 years worth of art and design experience under my belt. i'm looking to learn to program to program simple games, and i will be focussing in a circular scrolling shooter game similar to Gyruss for the NES. i did a fair bit of LUA scripting, but i'm no hardcore programmer, so this is going to be challenge for me.
Welcome amonst us!
I'm really looking forward to what you'll achieve with your shooter! If you need any help (regarding orx or C/C++ if you don't feel comfortable with these languages), please ask, I'd be happy to help!
orx's lacking of a good doc (and wiki), so any question could be used for a later FAQ and wiki.
Again, welcome here!
thanks for the warm welcome! i'm also interested in what i will come up with, this is quite a steep learning curve i have to endure. quitting is always easy, but i am quite keen on getting something started at least.
im new, and i wanna play with orx :-)
greetz
Welcome amongst us! Hope that what you'll find here will suits your needs.
I was looking for a long time for a 2-d engine that was both simple to use and cross platform and that I could interface with in a C like language (I prefer c++). ORX seems to hbe the perfect match.
My plans are to make a complex strategy game. Most of the ideas are still in concept stage and I can only describve it as a mix of civilization and ceasar.
Currently just getting familiar with the engine. Documentation can be somewhat lacking sometimes and thats causing me to make unexpected discoveries. Such as the engine using radians instead of degrees, perhaps this should be documented?
Also drawing objects I noticed that 0,0 isn't the top right corner like I'm used to from a previous engine. It looks like there might be some way to change the way this coordinate system works, but I haven't found it yet.
I'll be doing some familiarizing this weekend and then I hope to get started on some game prototypes.
Hi Alastriona and welcome amonst us!
I'm glad you found orx to your taste and I hope it'll meet your expectations!
That sounds ambitious and interesting. Hopefully you'll be able to prototype something fast using orx. If you have any questions, I'll be more than happy to help.
Yeah, documentation is a wreck. The doxygen doc is quite complete but is too low level generally and lack some details like for the unities used such as radians for angles.
I'd love to have a wiki that would be a base for an extensive and higher level doc that the community would then extend. Someone suggested to use the tutorials for such a wiki base. I just need to find some time to put this wiki together now.
I've already asked on twitter, but does someone know of a good wiki system I could install?
I wanted to move this part to the help request section, but didn't find out how to do it.
Basically orx is different than libraries where you have to specify where you want your objects to be rendered on screen.
This lower level calculation is made by the render plugin given all the informations it gathers on the objects, camera and viewports.
If an object is at position (X, Y) and your camera is also at (X, Y) (I'm intentionnaly removing the Z component for the explanation), your object will appear in the center of your viewport (most of the time if you have a single viewport that occupies the whole screen, it's also the center of the screen).
This behavior helps tracking objects with camera. If you set an object as a camera parent, the camera will be centered on this object.
If you have only one static camera and a viewport that covers the entire screen, you can set its position at (CameraWidth/2, CameraHeight/2). This way the world coordinate (0, 0) will be mapped to the top left screen corner and the coordinate (CameraWidth, CameraHeight) will be the right screen corner).
If you have any other questions, I'll try to reply as best as I can!
Hope this helps!
Personally I was thinking of just changing the comments for orxObject_SetRotation from "Sets object rotation" to "Sets object rotation (in radians)". This should update it when you generate the doxygen docs. If you feel elaborate comments make your code too bloated, I think doxygen even has a way of loading comments from a seperate file.
A wiki is a good idea. The only one I know is MediaWiki. Which is the one Wikipedia uses. I remember setting it up once, don't think it required much knowledge of php and was easy to set up. You will need to read up about the way MediaWiki pages are formatted, but it shouldn't be a problem really.
May I ask, are you hosting this site via a shared hosting company? Because they often offer control panels with easy setup for forums and wiki and such. That should simplify installtion to a few clicks.
Thanks, I actually thought of the same thing a few hours after posting this question. Although your answer elaborates further on what I already suspected.
I'll update all comments related to angle later tonight. Feel free to sync the latest version from the svn repository. Also the svn repository contains a few corrections and additions to the latest release, such as the localization module (which is actually a convenience wrapper based on the config system).
I'm all for comments and don't mind having them in the code. I was just thinking that the project would benefit from a more accessible high level documentation as some people will probably be reluctant to dive into the doxygen one (and I totally understand that!).
I have only a small knowledge of dokuwiki and knew mediawiki only by fame. I was first looking at some wiki I could integrate with joomla (mainly for authentication) with the minimal amount of work on my side as I already have trouble finding enough time to code and make additions code-wise. Furthermore I always had some grudge against web-based technologies when I have to deploy/install them (not as a user).
I couldn't find any satisfying solution to integrate to joomla so I presume I'll install a separate wiki and merely add links between it and the main site.
Unfortunately my host doesn't provide such facilities but everything else turned to be so good compared to all the former providers I had before that I don't plan on looking for another one.
I'm glad you figured it out by yourself and I hope it won't be too much of a bother for you. I got used pretty fast to it, even when it came to UI/HUD object positionning.
On an unrelated note, I tried to reply to your first 2 posts directly by pm so as to make sure you wouldn't be blocked too long (I don't have possibility to post on the forum during my working day). Did you receive correctly the notifications?
As of yet it hasn't exactly been a walk in the park. For example I had some trouble getting things to compile properly to start with, until I finally figured out I could just download VC++ express for free and follow the video tutorial from there. Haha. I'm now at tutorial 2 (clocks) and there is again something blocking my path: keyboard input doesn't seem to work (but I'll start another thread for that).
At any rate, I can see the potential of Orx and I'm willing to give it al least a chance to show its real power =P. Iarwain seems quite involved in continuing Orx, and the general climate here on the forum is pretty nice too, so this sounds like something that would be worth contributing to. If I start working with Orx seriously I'll be more focussed on using it than improving it directly (which I... uh... wouldn't know how to do), but that means I could at least provide the community with tutorials/examples and advice regarding game logic, too.
The kind of game I'm aiming at right now is some kind of 2d side scroller. I would say a simple one, but the objective is to actually make it awesome xD (through awesome visuals and a lot of efforts to make it slick). Sooo that soon-to-come "Scroller" game engine/editor is also very interresting in my book =D.
Welcome amongst us!
I'm glad to see you're motivated by trying out orx. As you've seen, orx's only usable with C/C++ right now but in a couple of months C# and Python might also be available.
Sorry about the settings with Visual Studio, the videos I made are pretty old now, I just need to find some time to make some clean articles on the wiki pages for different platformes/IDEs.
If you think others might learn from your firsts steps with orx, and if you think orx might suits your needs and want to get more serious about using it, maybe you could contribute through the wiki at some point.
Lately I had to stop working on the wiki as I wanted to advance on Scroll and writing on the wiki takes such a big amount of time. Btw, any feedback about the wiki would be welcome!
As you're saying you'd like to make 2D side scroller, Scroll might be more helpful being a layer on top of orx. I actually just finished writing the basis tonight and it now needs some serious debugging. If you'd like to test some alpha build in a couple of days, please let me know as there are probably tons of details I didn't see.
I'll now have a look to your input issues, let's meet in your other thread!
As for Scroll, that should be interesting of course. I'll first try to get familiar with orx itself =P. What will Scroll add/help with ?
By the way, I think I read somewhere that you live in Montréal? That's also my case (!) Et je parle aussi français.
It's good to have some external sights to avoid this kind of mistake. When I'll do the "setup" wiki pages I'll keep that in mind and tell where to find IDEs, etc...
As for Scroll, well, it's a layer on top of orx that will let you have a lightweight editor adapted to your game. Ie, you'll be able to place all your objects, scale/rotate/tile them at will, use different layers, snap on a grid, and so on.
The editor will let you load/save your maps, of course, but also let you play your game directly in it so you can easily tweak your levels.
The good thing is that you'll have only one C++ class to extend to customize your game, and the editor will be embedded with your executable without you having to do anything for that.
And yes, I'm currently living in Montreal, I figured you were also around here so I sent you a couple of private messages those last days, did you get them?
Et je parle aussi français!