Potato Development Live Stream

Hi. From times to times I will be live streaming my development efforts. Check it out at http://twitch.tv/n0_named_guy

EDIT: Livestreaming is now up
EDIT2: Due to technical problems, I won't be able to livestream just now, see you back in an hour.

Netcode progress

Good news! Net code has stuff working! It is still not functional. A partial handshake is made between client and server. The client already loads the level the server is in.

Now I need to put the controller code working. By that I mean sending the keystrokes from the client to the server. It has been tough but hopefully it will be done.

If you wanna help please make yourself heard by commenting on the blog, delivering patches, making forks, etc...

Network protocol draft

I drafted a simple network protocol to enable Potato for multi player games. Here's the link: https://bitbucket.org/N0_Named_Guy/potato/wiki/Network

Potato 7.0 is now live

So this is the "shader build". As I previously said, this game doesn't use deprecated OpenGL functions (or I tried not to).

Here's the links:

Potato 7.0 (Windows 32 Bits Binaries)
Potato 7.0 (Visual Studio 2010 Project and Libraries)

Version 7.0 Changes

• Memory leaks were fixed
• Use of custom shaders
• Creation of two new managers:
• a shader/program manager
• a 2D surface manager
• Favoring of explicit setup/clean calls instead of implicit construction/destruction
• Big changes on the internal API to account for shader use

For a change log of sorts, checkout the commits.

Now with shaders!

Hello there! I finally made the game run using shaders. So some neat graphical effects can be done. For now it lacks any kind of lighting. It is something that will be worked on later.

I am thinking in supporting user-made custom shaders, so certain players and objects have special effects. But we'll see where the road will take me...

Yet another glitch

Playing with shaders is fun...!

Freaky bugs

Bugs happen. Some of them are freaky. Here's an example of one I ran into while chaging the way textures were loaded:

Potato 6.4 is out

A new build is out there with the fix I made yesterday (the crash on exit bug).
Some tweaking on the net code, but none of it is actually functioning.

Here's the links:

Potato 6.4 (Windows 32 Bits Binaries)
Potato 6.4 (Visual Studio 2010 Project and Libraries)

For the Linux folk it is much easier if you git clone the repository and compile it yourselves.
For the Mac folk, donate me a Mac, and you'll get your binaries as well...

Development Environment Setup

In case you haven't noticed yet, I've posted on the wiki two ways to setup the development environment. One for Windows with Visual Studio 2010 and other for Linux using make (with some modifications it may work on other Unix-like systems).

If there are any doubts on how to setup the development environment, let me know.

Big Bug Fixed

Remember when the game was closing it would crash? Not anymore!

The culprit was the json-cpp library. After spending countless hours tracking all my calls, it turned out I was using an old version of this library that would call a pure virtual function on one of its destructors, if an JSON object was used in a static manner. Well, I use static objects everywhere, because I have no need to worry to clean them up. When the stack gets smashed so do the objects declared there. Win/win!

The fix? Get their svn code, include it on my code and make the appropriate fixes (that consisted on changing the #include file names).

New build coming out soon!

Potato Netcode

Well, racing games (with whatever mechanic) should have a multiplayer mode. There's a half-assed local multiplayer capability in the code. Well, in others words, I could implement that easily, but, as I am going for the long haul, I'll try to implement a simple protocol for the game's network multiplayer mode.

Let's hope for the best!

Potate Gameplay Ideas

It has came to my mind a way to improve Potato gameplay. To go beyond the simple racing mechanic. I am thinking in finding a way of making this a multi-vehicular racing game. Confusing? I'll explain.

Each track will have its segments. In each segment the player takes a role of a specific vehicle. Whether this should be done be triggering or by player input, I am not sure yet. But one possible implementation of the idea is as follows:

The first segment you have a car-like mechanic, because you're on the road. Suddenly, the road ends, you must turn into/move into a boat, because there's a lake you must transverse. Afterwards, you should catch/turn into a plane to overcome a lava pit. Then back to the car. There may be shooting mechanics...

Keep in mind this is simply a draft. I was typing these ideas as they came flowing....

Play with Kinect

There's a great tool I've been working with called FAAST. What it does is translate gestures, poses or body movement into keystrokes. So for fun I've written a wiki page explaining how to set FAAST up in order to play the Potato project with the Kinect on your Windows PC.

Here's the link for the wiki page: https://bitbucket.org/N0_Named_Guy/potato/wiki/Kinect

Development wiki

Hello there!

I've been writing up a wiki to help possible Potato developers better understand the current code base. I've made also a little page that explains how to set up the source code in Visual Studio 2010. Eventually I'll add a wiki page on how to set it up on Linux (it's way easier, trust me), and maybe on OSX (bare in mind that I don't have a Mac).

The wiki link: https://bitbucket.org/N0_Named_Guy/potato/wiki/Home

Open Source!

Hi there folks! I've been quite inactive due to my studies. But I am kinda back. I don't know if I have enough time on my hands to keep developing this project. So, I've opensource'd it... Here's the link to the repo:

https://bitbucket.org/N0_Named_Guy/potato

See you =)

A different model

I'd just like to let you all know about the new model that I'm making. Its progress so far:

EDIT: Here's the current state


EDIT2: Now it looks like a dolphin

Potato Public Version 6 - Revision 1

Oooopsie... As you should've noticed, there's no terrain collision. I am a dumbass, and here are the changes I made to fix my dumbassery:

On the file data/players/ship.json, where it reads "climbangle": 55.0, it should be "climbangle": 45.0,

Also, here's the download link:
http://bit.ly/potatov6_1

Potato Public Version 6

Here's a build reflecting the current state of the game:
http://bit.ly/potato_v6_1
http://bit.ly/potatov6

Windows only, I promise that as soon as I have a VM set up, I may start making Linux builds.

EDIT: changed the download link and changed note color

A video!

Here's a new video, showing off the current state of the game. There are a few terrain collision bugs here and there, but hopefully these will be fixed soon enough.



What's new:

• Better behind the scenes code
• Configuration loading revamped
• One single main loop
• Some interpolation bugs fixed (floating point math sucks)
• Primitive way of drifting
  

The Four Day Diary

I am working on this since November 2011, on and off, and never took it seriously. But now, that the Project Potato is gaining some weight (it has about 3k lines of code, not counting with external library source code and configuration files), I started to keep a diary of the stuff I achieved.

I now intend to keep the diary on this blog, and not on a mere text file.

This diary has only 4 days on it. So, for preservation purposes, here it is on it's original form taken directly from a text file:

== Diary ==
17 Feb 2012
* Sliding code complete. Fully dependent on gravity (as it should)
* Implemented Euler angles (yaw, pitch, roll).
- Player now rolls while turning
* Touched the ambient values in the goals and the ship object
* Removed the rear mirror
* Made public release 4 (at http://omploader.org/vY3UwYg)
- Made Facebook post
- Made a LD post (at http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/02/17/potato-project/)
* Moved the main loop to the Potato class, instead of every world have its own
loop.

16 Feb 2012
* Improved XZ terrain collision
- Instead of checking height difference, check for the slope's angle.
* Begun work on player selection

15 Feb 2012
* Add json files for each type of vehicle (with their model and stats)
* Begun work on dynamic terrain LOD.
* Customizable controls via configuration file
* Messed with the XZ collision
* Initial work on "sliding". Downward slopes accelerate, upward slopes break

14 Feb 2012
* Added goal

Hello World

Hello there. My name is David Serrano, and I am a 21 year old Computer Science student.
I love coding and trying and inventing stuff up. In this blog, I'll try to update my coding efforts as much as I can (or what I allow me to).

At this moment, I am making a 3D racing game. I don't know on what will it turn out to be. I treat this project, that I unimaginatively dubbed "Project Potato", as a sandbox, where I can try stuff out.

So, without further ado, a screenshot! (I would put more out, if I had more to show so far.)


Oh, and a download link: http://omploader.org/vY3UwYg (Windows version only, Linux version(s) coming soon)