So, the radio silence is now over, at least for this post. I’ve been toiling away on creating an editor for Gorgon so people can edit sprites, and images (somewhat).
Continue readingEditor v3
Author Archives: Tape_Worm
Gorgon v3 – Animation
I got the rework of the animation system for v3 done and up on the git hubs. Naturally, I took this awesome video of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpqGk8ZGoc8
It’s a music video. But not just any music video. A very bad, cheesy 80’s music video (the best kind). Of course, the music is metal \m/ (done, very poorly, by yours truly).
Anyway, that’s all.
Tape_Worm
June 13, 2018
So, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything here. Mostly because I’ve not been writing much code in the last while and real life has been my focus. Since I’ve been gone, I’ve become a software architect at my job, and that keeps me quite busy.
Forum is going away
Since it’s pretty dead there (not that that’s unexpected, I hardly update the site), I will be shutting down the forums.
They will be locked into a read-only mode so that any information required is still available.
If you have a pressing Gorgon issue, I recommend using the Github repository, or leaving a comment on the blog (the git hub site is preferable however).
As for Gorgon: Believe it or not, I still work on it. Just at an incredibly slow pace. Similar to time dilation in a black hole or something magical like that.
Git hub
I’ve finally given in and become a lemming and followed the rest of the planet to git hub. So, from this point forward, Gorgon’s source code will be hosted at Git Hub. The source code currently hosted in the Subversion repository at Google code will remain as-is indefinitely. This means that in order to get the most up-to-date version of Gorgon, you will have to go to the git hub repository.
And here’s the link (also posted on the right side bar over there):
Font editor
It’s been a very long time since I’ve made an update here. I’ve been working steadily on the font editor module for the Gorgon editor and it’s finally nearing completion (the last 99% of 99% of 99% etc…).
I’m quite proud of this thing. It’s supports a pretty well rounded suite of functionality for designing a bitmap font for use with Gorgon. Besides the usual standard stuff like font outlines, font faces, styles, etc… it also supports glyph brushes, custom glyphs, glyph advancement and offset editing and custom kerning pair tables.
Here’s a few images:
Cameras
In the 2.x version of Gorgon I wanted to add cameras. It was most tedious before when you wanted to translate an entire scene by an arbitrary amount. So when I started this thing, I created an Orthographic camera object. The previous version of Gorgon used an Orthographic camera internally and this was never exposed to the user. But in this case, I exposed the camera so that the user can define their own viewing mechanism.
There’s more info and a video inside…
Clearly I’ve not been posting
But I have been doing stuff.
I’ve been spending my time refactoring and just cleaning up the code in Gorgon. I made the mistake of getting Resharper and it put me on this crusade of cleaning up the code because apparently I’m just awful. Also, I’ve been finishing up the primary graphics API (not the 2D stuff) by adding a bunch of new things to it like geometry shaders, compute shaders, and hull/domain shaders for tesselation (this one is cool, if not a little baffling). I also made the API a little closer to Direct 3D 11 by adding views to resource object types.
More the editor
Here’s a another screenshot of the editor. This time with the Font editor plug-in in action. Note that this is very very very incomplete and may not look like this when everything is said and done.
The editor
So I’ve been busy working on building the editor for creating the content for Gorgon. I know I posted a screenshot of a very old initial version of the editor way back:
Ugly.
Anyway, I totally scrapped that old thing and restarted. And here’s a more up to date (but not even close to being done) screen shot:
A little better.
This new editor is going to be a replacement for all the tools in the previous version of Gorgon. It will handle file management duties (File System Editor in v1.x), sprite editing (Sprite Editor in v1.x) and atlasing (Atlas tool in v1.x). It will also add font editing. The big thing about this editor is that it’s entirely plug-in based. Meaning that the font editor, sprite editor, etc… are/will be DLLs that are loaded/unloaded as needed. What this means for you: You can write your own plug-in modules for it. Want to build a map editor and integrate it with the rest of your content? With the plug-in system in the editor, you can write your own map editor and host it right in the editor interface (if anything the minimized tedium of having to write UI code is worth it). Want to write out your content data as encrypted data? You can extend the file writing functionality to write out encrypted file data.
Unlike the sprite editor in the previous version, the files are no longer saved as loose files on your hard drive that require a separate utility (file system editor) to pack into a single compressed file. This editor now outputs data as a packed file (of course, this can be modified with a plug-in) so you don’t have to come up with a strategy to update your content, allowing you to edit directly. This is where it takes over from the file system editor and like the old file system editor this one is capable of importing files by either clicking on an Import menu item, or dragging and dropping directly from explorer. And, obviously, there’ll be a way to extract the files to your harddrive should you wish to do so.
I have several plans for plug-in modules for the editor including a sprite editor, image editor (a very very very very simple editor, use photoshop or paint.net if you want high detail stuff), a font editor and a shader editor (maybe).
FYI, the window will look like that in Windows 7 as well (i.e. no aero glass). I’ve modified it to look like the Zune window by including a new object in Gorgon.Common.Dll called ZuneForm. Basically you inherit this form instead of a System.Windows.Forms.Form and then you get a Zune-looking window.
DEATH TO D3DX!
FINALLY. I’VE FINALLY DONE IT! It took weeks of work, but I managed to exorcise D3DX from Gorgon. Behold my video playing an animated GIF using a 2D texture array:
I’ve provided extensive info after the jump thingy.
So I’ve been adding examples to the new version of Gorgon for the last week or so. The latest one shows how to use the new input system to use a Raw Input mouse, keyboard and joystick (if present, and is actually not using Raw Input as such). It’s a pretty silly example, but shows how to get the input plug-ins loaded, how to create an input factory and how to create the objects used to represent the various input devices.
You want pictures though. I have one. And it is here.
Boing!
Well, it’s been a while. I’ve been busy. You’ve been busy.
Anyway, I actually took some time to test out a piece of functionality for the new version of Gorgon. This new version of Gorgon will have a graphics API separate from the 2D renderer (the 2D renderer uses the graphics API however). This is unlike the previous version where the renderer was pretty much all you had access to. I had a user ask me a long time ago if it were possible to access the underlying renderer to render 3D along with the 2D. At first, it did not, but I did hack in a way to access SlimDX directly through a plug-in and it was awful.
So, in this version I decided to give the developer access to the full graphics API under the renderer. This allows the user to switch between 2D graphics and whatever they want. And here’s the results of my intense labour pain:
Yep, it’s a clone of the old Amiga demo “Boing”. As you can see, there are 2D elements (the text and the logo) along with the 3D elements (which were all done manually I might add, Gorgon does NOT have a 3D renderer so don’t get too excited). I’ve decided to include the code as an example program for the new Gorgon.
Rejoice.
.NET 4.5 – Visual Studio 2012
So, I got myself a copy of Visual Studio 2012 Pro. It’s pretty nice, except for the shitty all-caps menus (which you can turn off with the registry hack located here). I really didn’t have any plans on moving Gorgon v2.x to .NET 4.5/VS2012 until I saw this:
No more PIX! I can barely contain myself.
Gorgon in text mode…
Yep. Console window actually. Exciting. Just a silly example program showing how to use some of the functionality from the common library.
You can go back to sleep now.
Text mode. Now you too can write state-of-the-art adventure games. N, E, LOOK, INV, instant death… good times.