I had a lot of fun last week, and not just by getting drunk on friday.
It took me a bit more time than i would have liked, but i managed to get my physics and collision library (Box2D) to draw it's debug data to the screen.
To do so i hacked up a small class called Polygon, which has a couple of parameters to control whether the polygon is solid or not (aka, filled or just the outlines), it's color and a few others, and to set up its shape. For now i implemented functions to make it a square, ellipse, circle (which is a special case of an ellipse), line and a triangle, plus the extra function to pass in your own data about the shape (so you could make any shape you wanted).
This is my first class that is able to draw itself on the screen, and i used it to draw all of the shapes that Box2D is able to draw.
Box2D is (as its name implies) a 2D library for physics and collision. There are a bunch of other libraries out there to handle just that, but this one seemed easy enough to learn, and i didn't want to spend too much time researching different physics libraries and comparing them.
Box2D works by first making an instance of a b2World object (it's, well, the world where box2d bodies live in), and asking it to create bodies. When a body is created, you tell it to create a fixture, which is something that gives the body a shape and physical properties like mass, velocity etc. And if you want to kill a body, you have to give it back to the world, so it knows which of the many possible bodies to kill. More on this a bit later.
Then on each game update you tell the world to simulate by solving movement and collisions.
The result is something like this:
This is super simple for now, it's just two boxes, one of them being a static body, the other one dynamic (can you guess which is which?). What this opens up now is the ability to at least get something more interesting done, and having it draw on the screen.
My next step is to finish off my Entity structure, so when entities die, they are cleaned up properly. This is a small problem for me right now, because of the way i setup my entities.
My Entity class is more or less just a container of States, where a state is any set of variables grouped together in a logical manner. For instance, there might be a state which holds the amount of gold, silver and copper a person has, or it might be a simple flag on whether the person can do a double jump. The problem lies in the way states are destroyed. The entity knows absolutely nothing about the states it contains, because they are (for the sake of simplicity) just unique IDs.
Since an entity has absolutely no idea about what states it has, it becomes a problem when they are destroyed. I wanted to keep them simple, to i made them hold just the data they should have, and removed any piece of logic from them.
So how do you delete a state which holds a box2d body? If you don't return the body to b2World, it just stays in there forever, because nobody knows it exists anymore (except the world, but it doesn't decide when to destroy the bodies unless it's dying as well).
The first solution i'm going to try out will be callbacks on entity destruction, by using lambdas.
A lambda is a concept from functional languages, which is basically an anonymous function which does some work, and it's results can be passed to other lambdas, etc. By using a lamed for the callbacks, i can register a function to happen in case an entity is deleted, and it will auto-magically return the body to the b2World (if the body exists on the entity being destroyed).
On an unrelated note, i've decided to tone down my tech talk in the posts, because so many abbreviations hurt my head. But hopefully, i won't need to do it forcefully if i manage to get more game-progress content up here, which is surely far more interesting than reading about some obscure rendering api calls or the internals of some other thingamabob.
But that drunken friday was super awesome. :)
It took me a bit more time than i would have liked, but i managed to get my physics and collision library (Box2D) to draw it's debug data to the screen.
To do so i hacked up a small class called Polygon, which has a couple of parameters to control whether the polygon is solid or not (aka, filled or just the outlines), it's color and a few others, and to set up its shape. For now i implemented functions to make it a square, ellipse, circle (which is a special case of an ellipse), line and a triangle, plus the extra function to pass in your own data about the shape (so you could make any shape you wanted).
This is my first class that is able to draw itself on the screen, and i used it to draw all of the shapes that Box2D is able to draw.
Box2D is (as its name implies) a 2D library for physics and collision. There are a bunch of other libraries out there to handle just that, but this one seemed easy enough to learn, and i didn't want to spend too much time researching different physics libraries and comparing them.
Box2D works by first making an instance of a b2World object (it's, well, the world where box2d bodies live in), and asking it to create bodies. When a body is created, you tell it to create a fixture, which is something that gives the body a shape and physical properties like mass, velocity etc. And if you want to kill a body, you have to give it back to the world, so it knows which of the many possible bodies to kill. More on this a bit later.
Then on each game update you tell the world to simulate by solving movement and collisions.
The result is something like this:
This is super simple for now, it's just two boxes, one of them being a static body, the other one dynamic (can you guess which is which?). What this opens up now is the ability to at least get something more interesting done, and having it draw on the screen.
My next step is to finish off my Entity structure, so when entities die, they are cleaned up properly. This is a small problem for me right now, because of the way i setup my entities.
My Entity class is more or less just a container of States, where a state is any set of variables grouped together in a logical manner. For instance, there might be a state which holds the amount of gold, silver and copper a person has, or it might be a simple flag on whether the person can do a double jump. The problem lies in the way states are destroyed. The entity knows absolutely nothing about the states it contains, because they are (for the sake of simplicity) just unique IDs.
Since an entity has absolutely no idea about what states it has, it becomes a problem when they are destroyed. I wanted to keep them simple, to i made them hold just the data they should have, and removed any piece of logic from them.
So how do you delete a state which holds a box2d body? If you don't return the body to b2World, it just stays in there forever, because nobody knows it exists anymore (except the world, but it doesn't decide when to destroy the bodies unless it's dying as well).
The first solution i'm going to try out will be callbacks on entity destruction, by using lambdas.
A lambda is a concept from functional languages, which is basically an anonymous function which does some work, and it's results can be passed to other lambdas, etc. By using a lamed for the callbacks, i can register a function to happen in case an entity is deleted, and it will auto-magically return the body to the b2World (if the body exists on the entity being destroyed).
On an unrelated note, i've decided to tone down my tech talk in the posts, because so many abbreviations hurt my head. But hopefully, i won't need to do it forcefully if i manage to get more game-progress content up here, which is surely far more interesting than reading about some obscure rendering api calls or the internals of some other thingamabob.
But that drunken friday was super awesome. :)
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