My Name Is Matt

Are you a game developer reading this post? I’m not ready to join your forces yet. I’m sorry if I lead you to believe that.  Someday, but not now.

Oh, you’re not a game developer? How did you get here? Oh well. If you don’t know me, there’s the door (points to back button).

Oh, you know me! Oh, that’s right.  I remember now! I remember that time at the place!  Nice to see you again.  So, there isn’t much to show you here.  If you were looking for the ol’ music stuff, you can go here:
http://mynameismatt.net/index(music).php .  I’ll get something better up later.

Otherwise, you can check out the moblog!  Just click the moblog tab!

Alright, well, I’m going to go away now.  Make your self at home. *wonders away*

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*wonders back* Oh, since you stayed this long, here is some information on our project. At the moment, I am love with it.  I can’t wait to murder someone!!

Occasional Enthusiasm/Om Nom Depot – (Tentative Title: Sol)

What I've Been Lookin' For - Brandon Bensen – Sung by Meg

Let Down – Radiohead – Sung by Matt (w/Meghan)

In an Airplane Over the Sea – Neutral Milk Hotel – Sung by Matt

Is you is or is you ain’t my Baby –  Tom & Jerry? – Sung by Matt

Have Mercy – Loretta Lynn(jack white) - Meg (w/Matt)

Play Crack the Sky - Brand New -  Sung by Both

Love Doesn’t Last Too Long – Weepies – Sung by Meg

Medley: Ain’t No Sunshine.Kansas City.Hello
(Carl Withers/The Beatles/Lionel Richie) – Sung by Matt

Here Comes the Sun – The Beatles - Sung by Both

Sun It Rises – Fleet Foxes - Sung by Both

Lilac Wine – Jeff Buckley -- Sung by Meg

Alright, so I’m learning Unity 3d.  I believe that I will more likely get a job right now if I have a Scripting Language skill-set, so I am going to make a game from start to finish.

I started learning today, and I’ve already started creating my first game based off a boardgame “Zombie Plague”, which was loads of fun.  I’ve included a terrible screenshot, but only for the before.  It is merely a proof of concept at the moment.

Matt

Hello.

So, let me start with 3D pong room.  I have the collision detection working that I specified in an earlier post.  I don’t have any reflection physics or rotating paddles or anything like that yet, but the groundwork is definitely there.  I also messed around and wrote a depth of field shader.  I want to stress that this was all things that I did not read on, but coded from line one by myself without tutorials.   I am going to get the source code on the site soon.

I recently bought a book entitled “Essential Mathematics for Games and Interactive Applications”, which is already helping me out with efficient algorithms.  I’m going to spend spring break (next week) making sure I can get my code in tip top shape.

I spent most of last week getting prepared in my schoolwork for leaving 2 days for GDC.  So, I went to GDC and it was a lot of fun.  It’s where I bought the book.  I got back on Sunday, all energized to make games.  However, I caught the stomach flu Sunday night and have practically been unconscience till Tuesday afternoon.  Now that I’m walking around, I’m ready to get back at coding.

Here is a screen-shot of that depth of field.  It still needs work, I know.  But, I do know how to fix it.  So, that will be up soon.

Looking back at 3D Pong Room, there was a lot of very basic things I learned.  Good programming practices is one thing, but I’m referring to game development.  I think the main misconception that I had going in was that just because I could visualize exactly how it worked didn’t mean that implementation would be that easy (probably because I played with Klik & Play as a kid). I also learned a lot about how the program has a lot of dependencies on the system it is currently running. You don’t really have to worry about resolution and time between update calls affecting the functionality when your in web applications development.

I talked to some people recently about the game development process itself recently, and it made me realize that I haven’t really “created” a lot in 3D Pong Room.  Let me list the things I sat down and created from line 1.

• Artificial Intelligence of Player 2
• Anything that has to do with lines (ball tracers, players grid, input layouts, effect file)
• Non HLSL Post Processing (the HLSL for motion blur was read from GPU Gems online)
• Camera, Ball, Paddle Movement
• Bounds Checking
• Text Based HUD
• Dynamic Light and Transparency of the Paddles

The rest of the content was read from a book or website.  There is quite a bit of it that is heavily modified; Things that made it convenient for me, such as allowing me to create a grid from the quad class.

So, what I am going to do now is try to “Create” more.  The next feature I am going to add to 3D Pong room will be the ability to rotate the paddle so that you can angle the ball rather than just rely on friction.  That means that bounds checking isn’t going to cut it anymore.  I came up with a collision method Thursday on the way home from work.

The idea is that the sphere would cross into the Axis-Aligned Box of the paddle, then test to see if it crossed the hyper-plane of each surface of the paddle.  Here is a 2D visualization:

There are flaws to this method, or at least my current implementation.  I’m still going to do research, since there is no since in reinventing the wheel, but I will make sure that I understand them, then build on them from there.

Also, if I am able to get this working well, I will update the AI so that it will angle the ball towards the opposite end of the room.

I will keep the site updated.

Hello.

Well, I compiled 3D pong room and made a setup, which I put in my portfoli0.  However, due to my current lack of time problem (it’s midterms here at ASU), I am not able to test it on any machines.  What I can say is that it works on my 2 machines, both of which have the .NET framework & DirectX 10 installed.  My mom, however, has DirectX 11 and wasn’t able to install it properly.

If you attempted to download and run the game, only for it to not work, I am sorry.  As soon as I have more time available, I will fix any bugs.  It is in beta after all, right?

Hope everything is well.

P.S.  Good luck to Vince Zampella and Jason West.

So, I cleaned up the code, made it much more reliable, and added a few new features, such as themed sky-boxes.  I sent a copy to my mom, and she is officially the first “Beta-Tester” for the game.

As far as adding audio, I tried!  However, X2audio is proving to be somewhat of a hassle to learn right now, and Calculus III test is looming.

Anyways, I’ve also added all the source code into a zip and put it on the portfolio side.  If there are any problems, send me an email.

hello@mynameismatt.net

Did a lot of work on code clean up today.

Changed it so that all variables for HLSL are in my effect namespace. That way, I don’t have to keep making variables. Also, made it so that the scene is rendered into a quad, which is then sent through a post processing shader. That resulted in me playing around with code I got from nVidia & GPU Gems 3.

Motion BLUR! This is not going over smoothly with the mouse, however.

3D PONG ROOM is now in the portfolio!

Okay!  I now have the basics for a game here.  Pseudo-Pong-Physics? Check. Menu? Check.  Settings? Check.

The Code isn’t the prettiest it’s ever been, but here we are.  I am working on getting it efficient before adding sounds.  All of it is included in the installation.

There is also one component that is due for changing. That is the hole behind player 2.  It will be a mesh of some sort and not an ugly lo-res sky box.

But, let’s consider this release…alpha.

Okay, I talked to the good people in the forums over at “gamedev.net”.  I knew it had to do with Z-buffer issues, but I didn’t think about float point accuracy when you spread your projection matrix.  Shouting out to MJP & adt7 for their help.  Errors are fixed.

I also added it so the light slowly comes on before the action starts.  In addition, I improved some of the inefficiencies of the code.

Here are some screenies.  The left shows what happens when the ball is closer to the player.  The  grid begins to show and the paddle goes transparent.  The right picture shows the ball as it is traveling away.

Hello world.

So, I finally got pong up and running efficiently.  All the pseudo-physics work, and friction works.  I changed all the textures, changed the walls to be grid like, added lines that show where the ball is in 3d space, and added simple shadows.

However, there is a glitch that I’ve been battling since the beginning.  For some reason, anything that intersects with anything else seems to randomly blend.  If you look at the attached screen shot, there is a jagged pattern to the quads where they overlap, but the ball that is in the cube is completely random.  I noticed it shows less when the objects are closer to the camera, and get awful when they are far away.   Looking online for help now.