2009 – Nuclex Games Blog

Installing wTorrent on Gentoo

December 31, 2009February 9, 2012 Cygon

If you want to download torrents on your Linux system, there are several clients to choose from. One of the nicest and fastest clients is rTorrent. It is full-featured, supports encryption, dynamic host table exchange and achieves fantastic download speeds.

But its best feature probably is that it isn’t bound to any windowing toolkit. You can install one of its GUI frontends to manage it on your fancy KDE 4 desktop machine, but you can also run it on a headless system and manage torrent from a text-only console. And if you happen to run it on a home server like me, there’s wTorrent, a beaufitful AJAX-driven web frontend that allows you to manage your torrents in your browser.

Screenshot of the wTorrent web frontend for rTorrent

Installing wTorrent isn’t the easiest thing to do, so, as when I tried to get the best out of my SSD, I decided to write this small article explaining how to do it. I’m using Gentoo Linux, but it shouldn’t be too hard to apply this article to another Linux distribution.

Game Architecture Day 1

December 25, 2009February 19, 2012 Cygon

Welcome to day 1 of the XNA Game Architecture series! We’re about to create a small 3D Shoot ’em Up using the principles of modern software architecture.

If you missed the introduction, this series is about the architecture of games. Instead of focusing on a single concept, we’ll be focusing at how it all comes together and how you can keep your game’s code manageable and clean. You’ll be looking over my shoulder as I write a small game and explain why I do things one way and not the other :)

Today, I will start the project by creating a development tree that contains the actual XNA project and some third-party libraries I’m going to use within the game. Normally, I would add those libraries as I go, but I’ve got a pretty clear idea for this project and it will be easier for you because I can just package them all in a handy zip archive which you’ll find at the end of this article.

Aligning an SSD on Linux

December 24, 2009February 9, 2012 Cygon

I’ve got a small home server with a software RAID-5 for storing my files. It also runs a few virtual machines and acts as a NAT router for internet access. Nothing expensive, just some Frankensteinian patchwork built from old hardware left over when I upgraded my workstation. Nevertheless, I granted it a brand new Intel X25-M SSD last week.

Photo of an Intel X25-M SSD drive, which is a metal box smaller than a CD case

Did I mention that this server is running Gentoo Linux? I thought this would be a good time to do a fresh install and get everything right that might have gone wrong the first time. Besides, installing Linux always is an interesting (and masochistic) experience, especially when your chosen distribution has no installer :)

Because getting my partitions and file systems aligned also proved to be difficult task, I thought why not make a small article out of this!

Game Architecture Series

December 20, 2009February 20, 2012 Cygon

Series

I’m planning to start a short article series:

There are a lot of XNA tutorials out there that explain the basics – how to display a sprite, how to do collision detection and how to render a bunch of colorful particles with additive blending. But there aren’t many articles that explain to you how you’re supposed to put it all together – how to structure a game so that it is easy to extend and remains manageable when the amount of code begins to grow.

The discipline that deals with this issue is called software architecture. Like programming, or any other creative process, it relies a lot on tacit knowledge – finding a good solution without first running down an alley of dead ends (that you can identify using the Principles of Object-Oriented Design) requires a lot of experience.

What I will do in this series is let you look over my shoulder as I design a small game and try to explain my motivations for choosing one design over another while I do so. This will give you a solid starting point and an understanding of the design process that you can apply to your own game projects.

The Meaning of 100% Test Coverage

December 3, 2009February 26, 2012 Cygon

When I release components, example code or even just helper classes, I often tout 100% test coverage as a feature. Which (as I probably also state often enough :P), means that my unit tests execute 100% of all lines in the source code. But what advantage does this actually bring to a developer, and, just as interesting, what does having complete test coverage not mean?

For people practicing true TDD (test first -> red, green, refactor), 100% coverage is nothing unusual, though even they may decide to not write tests for all invalid inputs possible: if a piece of code satisfies all the tests and the tests cover everything the code should do, it’s enough. If you’re building a library on the other side, the use case of a customer providing invalid inputs will be a valid concern worthy of a test.

I, however, am currently adding unit tests to an existing code base and I decided to go for 100% test coverage. In this short article, I will explain why I see complete test coverage as a worthwhile goal, what effect going for that level of test coverage has on a project and what it says about the code.

Nuclex Framework R984 Released!

December 3, 2009February 21, 2012 Cygon

I just uploaded a new release of the Nuclex Framework on CodePlex!

It has been a lot of work getting the GUI library finalized. For once, I really wanted to have 100% unit test coverage on the whole library, which meant a lot of work ensuring the design allowed for this and thinking of all the test cases. But hey, what other GUI library can provide that level of unit tests! :)

Another feature I didn’t want to let go of was control navigation with the game pad and cursor keys. The idea is that you, the developer, just throw some controls on the screen and the GUI will automatically figure out which control to change focus to when the player uses the thumb stick on his game pad. This means you can just add four buttons labeled “New Game”, “Options”, “Credits” and “Quit” to your screen and voilà, you’ve got a main menu the user can interact with using his mouse, keyboard or game pad.

Site Relaunch

November 29, 2009February 21, 2012 Cygon

Noticed anything different about this website recently?

I just finished a complete overhaul of my website. Because my web design skills are utterly hopeless, this time I just gave in and bought a finished template that I had fancied for some time already.

WiX XNA Installer 3.1

October 21, 2009February 21, 2012 Cygon

I just uploaded a new release of my WiX XNA Installer template that has been updated to XNA 3.1!

If you happen to have a customized installer built on the XNA 3.0 template, fear not, for the required changes are very small! Use your favorite Diff/Merge tool and copy over any changes referring to Xna_3_1 into your existing installer.

I have declared this release a beta because I haven’t gotten around to testing it on all possible operating systems.

A Look Back: Gothic 1

September 30, 2009February 10, 2012 Cygon

In just two days, “Risen” will be on the store shelves. Risen is the inofficial child to the excellent Gothic series, a trilogy of role-playing games produced by german developer Piranha Bytes.

Because of this special opportunity, allow me to revel in ancient times and take a look back at the series’ previous games. I have played all parts so far, including all add-ons, with the exception of the publisher’s cannibalization attempt that is “Forsaken Gods” (which means I played exactly one Add-On, “Night of the Raven” :P).

In my opinion, no other game can compare to this series, no Elder Scrolls, no Baldur’s Gate and no Fallout. Read on to find out why I’m so addicted to the Gothic series :)

Scan of the Gothic 1 package cover

Nuclex Framework on CodePlex

September 21, 2009February 21, 2012 Cygon

The Nuclex Framework has been released to CodePlex today!

Instead of only writing about all the cool stuff and then pointing people at my Subversion repository whenever someone asks for the source code, I finally sat down and published the entire Nuclex Framework on CodePlex, together with lots of examples, documentation and screen shots.

The Nuclex Framework consists of small isolated building blocks that you can pick from, so you can easily use just the things you require and ignore the rest (or even create your own trimmed-down edition of the framework if you’re not worried about doing it all again when a new version is out).

All the highlights I wrote about in this blog (and quite a lot that I didn’t write about) are neatly organized in there. And the code’s quality should hopefully speak for itself :)

Just to list some of the more interesting things, there’s a Deque collection (faster than List<> and LinkedList<> and much less garbage), 3D vector font rendering code, 7-Zip content compression, a 3D SpriteBatch equivalent, rectangle packing algorithms for texture atlas creation, a flexible multi-threaded particle system, a work-in-progress GUI library with skin support, a cleaner game state management system, a debug overlay renderer and some helpers that allow you to automatically create VertexDeclarations from a structure without listing the VertexElements by hand.

So what are you waiting for, check it out! :D