Programming – Page 2 – Nuclex Games Blog

Visual Studio 2012 Express – Metro Only?

June 4, 2012July 24, 2012 Cygon

This post’s title says it all. I’ve just installed the Windows 8 Release Preview with Visual Studio 2012 RC. Just like in the previous release, Visual Studio 11 Beta, the Express edition does not contain any plain Win32 project templates, only ones for Microsoft’s new Metro UI.

This is a pretty scary situation for me: recently, the C++11 Standard was completed which finally makes threading in C++ bearable (when writing libraries, you no longer have to force a decision between Boost, TBB or POCO on your users). But C++11 threading was only added to Microsoft’s C++ compiler & standard library in Visual Studio 2012.

So unless Microsoft reverts the decision to no longer offer a free C++ compiler for Windows desktop applications, these are my options:

Buy Visual Studio 2012 Professional and exclude anybody out there who doesn’t want to shell out $500 from using my libraries. Make it harder to build any kind of team because there’s now a significant hurdle to entry. Probably be forced to modify 3rd party libraries in the future because Open Source projects will no longer test compilation of their code with Visual Studio.
Keep Visual C++ 2010 Express and either write my own threading wrapper (increasing dependencies of my libraries from 0 to 1) or just go with Boost and forget the rest.
Switch to Eclipse CDT + MingW and build my Windows desktop applications this way. That would give me C++11 threading (at least I suppose so – I couldn’t get it to work, see screenshot) but I’d have to always port anything I write to GCC (of which MingW is a port). Could be a good thing, since it lowers the barrier to port my stuff to Linux and Android.

Update: if you want to weigh in, I’ve been so bold and filed a bug report on Microsoft Connect: Support C++ Desktop Applications in Visual Studio 2012 Express.

Update2: the disaster is averted! Today, the Visual Studio blog announced that Microsoft has given in and will be offering two Express editions: The already known Visual Studio 2012 Express and, Visual Studio 2012 Express for Windows Desktop. That means it’s safe to use C++11 across the board now. GCC 4.6 has it, the modded Android NDK has it, and Visual C++ 2012 has it!

Targeting Win32 and WinRT/Metro at the Same Time

May 10, 2012May 20, 2016 Cygon

I’ve seen some developers assume that if you write an App for WinRT/Metro, you have to write it exclusively in C++/CX, a variant of C++ with lots of Microsoft-specific extensions. In reality, you only really need C++/CX to interface with WinRT, but everything under that layer can be clean ISO C++! In this post I’ll explain how I’m designing my Ogre game to run inside Windows’ Metro UI while still supporting other platforms such as Win32, Android and iPhone on the same code base.

A good start is to look at what’s different between a normal desktop application and a Metro application and then develop a design concept where these differences are abstracted or wrapped so the core game code does not need to know about them.

Perfectly Accurate Game Timing

April 7, 2012May 19, 2016 Cygon

These days, I designed a timing system for my game. Doesn’t really sound impressive, eh?

The problem with accurate timing, apart from hardware faults making timers change speed or jump back, is to resample a high-frequency clock running at 3+ MHz to the update rate your game is running with.

The naive approach would be to just cast the clock to a double and divide it by one 60th (if you want 60 Hz updates) of the clock’s frequency. But that’s not really such a good idea. Let me illustrate:

int main() {
  float a = 20000000;
  ++a;
  // a is still 20,000,000. The accuracy of the float has diminished so
  // much that you not only have zero decimal places, it cannot even assume
  // the value 20,000,001 -- only 20,000,002!
  
  double b = 10000000000000000;
  ++b;
  // b is still 10,000,000,000,000,000. Same reason.
}

Ogre 1.8.0 RC1 for WinRT/Metro

March 29, 2012May 19, 2016 Cygon

Here’s an interesting hypothesis: when Apple started its App Store, it was the El Dorado of software developers. Now Microsoft is adding an App Store to Windows 8. The Windows user base is huge, much larger than even the number of people running around with iPhones in their pockets (some estimates I came across average to around 75 million iPhone users [1] [2] versus around 600 million Windows users [3] [4]). Even if Windows 8 adoption rates are as bad as Vista’s you could turn a mighty profit!

What better way could there be to achieve that than to publish a 3D game on the Windows App Store when most of the world’s developers are still trying to get a grasp of WinRT? :)

Of course I wanted to use an existing 3D engine, so I reviewed my options:

Engine	Status
Ogre 3D	A user named Eugene on the Ogre forums already did all the work required fixing invalid API calls so Ogre compiles and validates on WinRT. This is what this post is about!
C4 Engine	No word on WinRT/Metro support. C4 is based on OpenGL, but Windows App Store only allows Direct3D 11 to be used. I’ve seen someone on C4’s forums working on a Direct3D 11 renderer, so if its source is released, C4 users might get lucky.
Unity	I believe Unity is well positioned for Metro support (they have an experimental Direct3D 11 renderer, I wouldn’t rule out porting Mono to WinRT either). No official statement yet and I’ll not risk betting on some kind of surprise. You can vote for Unity WinRT/Metro support here.
Axiom 3D	Axiom 3D is a .NET rewrite of Ogre. Work on a SharpDX renderer is on its way, and SharpDX will support WinRT/Metro. Sadly, Axiom 3D is severely understaffed, thus, despite fantastic people like Borrillis, the massive size of the code base means it’s moving slowly.

How to Consume DLLs in a WinRT/Metro Project

March 20, 2012March 20, 2012 Cygon

Yesterday, I published a small guide on how to consume DLLs in Visual C++ that explained how to best integrate a third-party library into a Visual C++ project. This is a follow-up article for Visual Studio 11 Beta users that contains the additional steps required to consume a normal (non WinRT Component) DLL in a WinRT/Metro project.

Assuming you have the DLL integrated into a WinRT application project as explained in my previous blog post, you will notice that when you try to run the application, there will be an error message stating that the Windows Metro style application could not be activated and the output window will report a missing dependency:

How to Consume DLLs in Visual C++

March 19, 2012March 20, 2012 Cygon

For the C++ game programmer, there’s a huge collection of Open Source and commercial libraries available doing all kinds of things from simulating physics, reading common image formats or storing your data to rendering cutting-edge 3D graphics. But consuming those libraries in you own applications is often accompanied with a bit of hazzle since you need to point your linker to the right import libraries, copy the right DLLs into your project’s output directory and add the directory containing the matching headers to your compiler’s "include" directories.

It will get a little harder even when you target the Windows 8 App Store, where you need to provide binaries compiled for 3 platforms: x86, x64 and arm. I’ve been using C++ for over 10 years now and over time, I have come up with a method for organizing and consuming libraries that has served me very well.

IslandWar: Animating Turrets

March 16, 2012March 16, 2012 Cygon

Given that a lot of my game involves turrets attacking and defending, after setting up my water plane and a small height-mapped island in it, the next thing I attempted was to import an animated turret in a way that lets me control its orientation and elevation from code.

To start with, I already used a consistent naming scheme for the bones in all my turrets:

Screenshot of Blender showing my bone naming scheme

In short, all turrets have a bone to change their yaw that is called "Rotor". The pitch of the gun barrels is changed by "Elevators" (there can be more than one in case the turret has multiple weapon arms). Finally, each gun barrel has a bone whose name contains the word "Barrel", i.e. "UpperLeftBarrel" or "Barrel1" and an associated muzzle bone exists named identically but with "Muzzle" instead of "Barrel":

IslandWar in Unity

March 13, 2012March 13, 2012 Cygon

I decided to give an old project of mine another try. Back in 2007, after I finished my freeware game Ball Race, I ventured forth to create my first indie title, IslandWar. This is what gave rise to a lot of the classes that can now be found in my Nuclex Framework, including the GUI system that I originally wanted to avoid because I knew it would sidetrack me.

Well, combine some procrastination with a beginning burnout (at the end of 2009 I was certain that I never wanted to work with computers again) and the game was left on hold indefinitely. In the meantime, someone else even published an iPhone game by that title with a very similar concept, so that means I’ll have to find a new title if I ever publish this game.

Since I originally started working on IslandWar in XNA 1.0 Refresh, several XNA versions have come and gone and Unity, which I already reviewed favorably in 2007 has now gained Windows authoring support (it originally was MacOS-only) and sports a free basic edition. So given the choice between updating all of the game’s code to XNA 4.0 and SunBurn or porting it to Unity, I decided to give Unity a try.

So these are my first steps in Unity. Try not to laugh too hard :)

NHibernate

December 24, 2011February 24, 2012 Cygon

In spring this year, I began work on a moderately sized business application. The time from learning what the program should do to the first prototype were less than 2 weeks. To pull it off, I basically ditched any sane development practice and started throwing code at the problem as fast as I could.

The application required a client/server model and the server had to store its data in a database. At that point in time, I knew about ORMs but had never used one before, but hoping for the best, I picked Microsoft’s Entity Framework because it had a visual designer and looked like I could just drag & drop my data model together and then figure out how to perform queries.

It fell flat when I noticed that I could only choose between TPT (Table Per Type) and TPH (Table Per Hierarchy) globally for the whole freakin’ model. So I tried NHibernate and quickly rebounded due to its learning curve, resorting to writing SQL queries myself and loading them into objects with a very basic class mapper that I had written for another, much smaller project some time ago.

It was tedious work, but at least hacking away for two hours got you two hours further, not one step forward and two steps back figuring out the ORM. And so I managed to get the prototype done with two all-nighters. In autumn, when the heat was off, I decided to do the database properly, using NHibernate…

Mogre 1.7.3

August 2, 2011April 17, 2012 Cygon

My last contact with Ogre 3D had been in 2008, when I had created an experimental x64 build (back then, OpenJPEG, FreeImage and some other dependencies didn’t yet build in x64 by default).

This worked out fine, but I didn’t find the time to actually do anything with Ogre. Finally, during the past weekend, I took a closer look at Mogre, a C++/CLI-based wrapper that enables you to use Ogre in .NET languages.