Tag Archives: 3D

Late night quick post

Tonight I have finished hooking up and testing another major component of my project: cannons and cannonballs.
And in-game menu screens.

But the most important thing to mention is the bugs that still appear in the game app. Some are partly deliberate, those that allow me to break up the system when I need to see things but also bugs from stupid mistakes like memory leaks and such.
These are all good to talk about if I am going to build a conclusion but tonight I think a quick mention is all that can be mustered.
Tomorrow I will try implementing a health system. Seems the obvious next step after cannonballs have been added.

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Today: learning and doing activities. Tomorrow: repeat.

Today has been a day of guitar-playing, reading, interpreting, typing, mouse-clicking, and dragging.

I built a 3D model of the Bahamas islands plus Turks & Caicos islands. I am using it as the sample of a 3D islands world in my iPhone game project. This is fun! Building in 3D is new to me, but things don’t go in one ear and out the other in this sort of subject. There are SO VERY MANY things to learn in Blender, because it’s not a user-friendly 3D modelling program. I didn’t know that when I started learning it, but now I do know it.

I got into using it from someone’s internet article of 3D and 2D graphic rendering engines for iPhone and iPod touch (and I suppose now, iPad). The person had SIO2 and Oolong as the top two ranked options, but in pros-and-cons, listed Blender as a con for SIO2.

But that’s probably because like me, that person had no experience with 3D art and modelling.  Anyway, I spent the latter half of January going through Blender 3D: Noob to Pro, and have progressed about 40-50% through it.  I should really finish, except SIO2 does not fully support everything, and I’m trying to catch up to the 40-50% full competency of SIO2  before going on with more complex Blender subjects (like animated armatures).

So anyway, going through the tutorials in the source code is what must be done, not reading step-by-step how-to documents.  This is a guerilla-style learning.  Gotta get my feet wet by jumping in 100% and swim with the sharks.  Not that anyone associated with SIO2 is a great white shark, more like very pleasant whale shark… that sounds really odd, but I’m tired now.

When complete, this project will be a lot of fun (I hope!).  A lot of ideas come to me when I’m in a lucid state, so immediately in the morning before I am out of bed and just sort of coming out of unconsiousness, I try to figure out what ideas are lurking.. at the edge of thought.  Collect them up!  They’re worth money in the right hands, my hands!

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Documentation and 3D game engines

I am progressing slowly but surely. The 3d rendering engine for the iPhone that I am using is called SIO2. I am finding it slow going because the documentation is not what I call good. There are no step by step procedures in the tutorials and the reference doc materials are very raw, with no clean summaries,except those on the front page of the website that describe, in point form, the most general capabilities. Those capabilities are great,but after putting in the time to download the engine and try out the tutorials, I am coming to a question: is a pre-existing system better than developing a system in-house, if the existing system is so time consuming that the learning curve is almost as long as the development process?

Here I am frustrated with the lack of good quality and complete learning materials, but the existence of the system is still better than developing my own system. That is because in the time it would still take to devlelop my own thing, the existing thing may (or may not) improve, and in other cases I may find some help that I had not found at first. So the learning of an existing system is better.

This experience is going into the heaping pile of experiences of bad documentation for products I have seen. There is a wiki, and I might start contributing to it.

Going forward in the future, the skill to produce good documentation may become a very valuable transferable skill in the workplace. It seems very boring in some product contexts, ie. Vacuum cleaner manuals, software application manuals, inflatable air matress instruction sheets. Yet this world needs a better, universal, written method of learning that appeals to the reader. Something like google’s API doumentation, and apple’s iPhone and iPad documentation.

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Defining iPhone game app scope

I’ve had a bit of annoying troubles today. Not a whole lot, but a bit. I’ve gone through them after a bit of stress.

Classical music does wonders for slowing down and calming my super-fast reading eyes, that my mind can’t keep up with. It also brings a bit of patience. So tasks may be done.

And I didn’t start listening to classical music until around 7:30pm. heh.  Earlier in the day, I built up a document of screen names (eg. load screen, main front screen, instructions screen) and the contents and behaviours on them, from a number of existing iPhone game apps. Using these notes as a starting point for constructing the outer scope of the game. With them, it becomes much easier to see where everything fits from a top-down perspective.

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Created a new iPhone app

Using iTunes connect, I have setup an app submission. The app is a game whose name is yet to be announced, and is not yet finished. So, the submission will be completed for the review to begin when the game’s design and development are complete.

This is exciting!

Last night or the night before, I installed the iMario app, a free or paid soundboard app. It is too simple, but has a bit of nice images. The sound does not play well, eg. If you press the starman button, the sound plays for several seconds, but if pressing the block smash button, the starman sound cuts out. The playback of any sound is imediately ended if starting a different sound.

Back to the iPhone app: app developers may start the submission process without submitting the product, so I am doing this as an exersize to learn the process now.

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iPhone & iPod Touch apps

Last night I succeeded in enrolling in the iPhone Developer Program.

This permits two major activities:

  1. Installing in-development projects onto a real iPhone/iTouch (compared to only running projects in the iPhone simulator on the macbook)
  2. Submitting developed projects to the Apple’s AppStore.

Soon a few ideas I have will be submitted, but first they need to be designed on paper.

There are some free resources for creating the visual design of an app on the iPhone/iTouch.  Stencils exist for most, if not all major image editor programs like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator and Omnigraffle. Also I found some graph paper of all things, but with the iphone body printed overtop, and when printed off it’s at 1:1 scale, and it’s just great stuff.  So this needs to be my focus next.

Boat, screenshot from ipod touch

Right now I am still burning through the Blender wiki, learning the 3D modelling program as fast as I can, so I can get a better ship modelled.  Earlier this week, I created a 9 polygon little boat.  two sails, a rudder, a deck, a stern, and a 4 polygon hull.  Wooohooo

The tutorials teach how to build a person, and a mountain range, and then a lot more crazy things.

The objective is creating a couple of 3D content files that I can load into a 3D game engine which I’ve downloaded called SIO2 and use it to build a demonstration first, then a full app after.

Later, I may make a tank game and call it TomTank.  Revisit the dumb but funny days of QBasic in highschool.

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