The Editor Prototype...

Here is the screen-shot of the editor....

Still having a few issues with the frames per second counter, not quite sure why... hopefully will sort it out on Thursday. Can't really do anything yet in the editor... I just wanted to get a feel for whats possible or not with window controls (haven't really dealt much with them before)

Day 3 - Camera, Input, and Skybox

Added the following this morning to the SadismEngine.dll:

• Camera
• DirectInput
• Skybox

And i've also included the first screenshot, this first build allows you to move the mouse around to look around the scene, I have not yet added the camera position movement yet.

As soon as I get my ADSL installed and some webspace I will be uploading weekly builds of the game, engine, and editor.

My next step is to add a Frames Per Second counter, and have another look at moving some of the Direct3D code to the SadismEngine.dll instead of putting it all in the Windows Form code file. I've also started working on the user interface for The Sadism Editor, I will post a screenshot on Monday night.

Day 2 - SadismEngine.dll

Well I managed to accomplish quite a bit today.

Added the following to the dll:

• ObjectPool (controls the loading / releasing of textures and meshes)
• HighPerfTimer (returns the amount of elapsed time since the last rendered frame)
• Entity (add an object "entity" to the scene)
• EntityManager (used to manage the order of updating and rendering the entities)

In order to test the above I created windows app that calls the dll, the app initializes a DirectX window so that I could visually see the objects rendered.

Tomorrows goal is to add a First Person Shooter (FPS) style camera class and add ability to load a skybox to the SadismEngine.dll and try post the first screenshot on this blog.

Day 1 - It has began!

So my goal is to make an awesome game engine, but of course an engine is pretty useless unless it can do a few basic things... And in order to use the engine we don't want to have to rely on a lot of coding (which is usually slow and tedious).

Instead we want a simple yet powerful editor to allow us to use the game engine to create games.

So if we going to have an editor "The Sadism Editor" (SED) and a game engine "The Sadism Engine" (SE) we are going to need to have a lot of common code, so instead of having common code we are going to need to create a DLL, which I'm going to call Sadism.dll

Oh and by the way I will be doing all the coding in Managed DirectX (MDX) using C#.Net.
Why C# you say? Well why not? Its runs at about 98% of unmanaged DX and its a lot quicker to code in C# than C++ (well for myself it is anyway). Check out Tom Millers blog (creator of MDX)

So what have I accomplished today you might ask???

• Direct Input 9 (just keyboard & mouse supported so far)
• Camera Class (use the mouse to move the camera around - like all FPS)
• Resource Manager (for textures and x files)
• Skybox (loads any x file, its an un-lit scene and supports alphablending dds files)
• High Performance Timer (keeps the game movements at the same speed on different PC's)

I did the above pretty quickly, mainly because I had done it before, so only had to make a few changes to make it more "engine" friendly.

I've done the above in a windows form, yet I still need to put it all into a nice Sadism.dll file.

Its getting pretty late, and I do have a day job which takes up a lot of time... So I better go to sleep.

Tomorrows goal is to get the Sadism.dll up and running.

Introduction.

I decided to create a log of the progress of my latest project... The Sadism Engine.

My background:
I'm a hobby programmer and love writing games, I have created many game demo's over the last few years, I've only released 1 demo on the internet. The reason being mainly because I haven't had an internet connection since I moved out (so that's the last 3 years).

Living in South Africa high speed internet connections don't come cheap... and a simple internet connection can set you back a few hundred Rand a month all inclusive. Just recently the priced dropped a bit and I decided it was finally time to get an internet connection... I've ordered ADSL about 3 weeks ago, and im still waiting for them to come install it.

Im currently using my Cellphone's GPRS (via bluetooth) from my PC, the speed is pretty ok, it at least allows me to browse the net.

I've been working on creating games for the last 6 years now with a friend of mine who does all the art work. The first game demo we released was about 5 years ago and it was called Magic Dust 2.