It's been a while since my last post. I took a week off to spend time with a friend who came to visit me for a week here in Stockholm, which should explain the absence of my standard monday post. But it felt good to take a week off from work after work. :)
But now i'm here, and i can show the progress i've made 2 weeks ago.
The first piece of progress has been my finalization of the Entity Component System. It probably has places which could be made better (and i have an idea on how), but that will have to wait for a later time. I need to see how much i can do with the current implementation before i start pushing changes. Again. :)
In my previous post, i talked about the small-ish problem of having no control over the destruction of more complex data the Entity holds. I solved it by registering a callback to my Entity Pool class which is invoked on destruction of an Entity instance, and which then seeks the complex data and does it's magic. Using this concept, i made the Physics logic class register the appropriate lambda to the pool, so everything is cleaned up properly.
Then i started doing some work on actually getting Pong to a playable state. I haven't finished with that, but i have managed to get the foundation for it set up.
Right now, the paddles are there, the ball is set with a starting impulse in a specific direction, and the walls and goals are there. There's more work to be done here, and thankfully, i'm able to make a TODO list of what's left:
1. get input working so the paddles can be moved up and down
2. set up a random direction for the ball when it starts moving from the center of the field
3. get collision working between the paddles and the walls
4. make the goals sensors, which reset the ball back to the center of the screen, and increase the score
5. get the ball to bounce with a bigger angle when it hits the sides of the paddle
6. add awesome smashing next-gen graphics which will make this sell a ton of copies
7. add GUI element for score
8. make the ball increase it's speed with one of two possibilities:
8.a. as a function of time
8.b. as a function of the number of times it collided with anything
Most of these should be self-explanatory, but number 3. bears (rawr) a bit more explanation.
The way Box2D is setup, there are 3 types of objects: static (cannot move), dynamic (move and collide with everything) and kinematic (exactly like static, but can move). In order to detect a collision, at least one of the bodies needs to be a dynamic body. The above screenshot has the paddles as kinematic bodies, however, in my first setup, the paddles were also dynamic bodies, and when the ball hit a paddle, the paddle would suddenly fly away because of the collision, which is funny to see.
You can see the left paddle down in the corner, and the right paddle being hit and having collision way off.
One way i could solve this is by having the ball density really low, and the paddle density really high. That way the paddles will be almost immune to any forces being applied as a result of the collision, and the ball will behave as expected. And now, after putting this on paper, it seems as a very obvious solution, which i'll implement. :)
And that's it for this week. Tune in next monday to (hopefully) see a finished Pong game in my framework. :)
Thanks for reading.
But now i'm here, and i can show the progress i've made 2 weeks ago.
The first piece of progress has been my finalization of the Entity Component System. It probably has places which could be made better (and i have an idea on how), but that will have to wait for a later time. I need to see how much i can do with the current implementation before i start pushing changes. Again. :)
In my previous post, i talked about the small-ish problem of having no control over the destruction of more complex data the Entity holds. I solved it by registering a callback to my Entity Pool class which is invoked on destruction of an Entity instance, and which then seeks the complex data and does it's magic. Using this concept, i made the Physics logic class register the appropriate lambda to the pool, so everything is cleaned up properly.
Then i started doing some work on actually getting Pong to a playable state. I haven't finished with that, but i have managed to get the foundation for it set up.
Right now, the paddles are there, the ball is set with a starting impulse in a specific direction, and the walls and goals are there. There's more work to be done here, and thankfully, i'm able to make a TODO list of what's left:
1. get input working so the paddles can be moved up and down
2. set up a random direction for the ball when it starts moving from the center of the field
3. get collision working between the paddles and the walls
4. make the goals sensors, which reset the ball back to the center of the screen, and increase the score
5. get the ball to bounce with a bigger angle when it hits the sides of the paddle
6. add awesome smashing next-gen graphics which will make this sell a ton of copies
7. add GUI element for score
8. make the ball increase it's speed with one of two possibilities:
8.a. as a function of time
8.b. as a function of the number of times it collided with anything
Most of these should be self-explanatory, but number 3. bears (rawr) a bit more explanation.
The way Box2D is setup, there are 3 types of objects: static (cannot move), dynamic (move and collide with everything) and kinematic (exactly like static, but can move). In order to detect a collision, at least one of the bodies needs to be a dynamic body. The above screenshot has the paddles as kinematic bodies, however, in my first setup, the paddles were also dynamic bodies, and when the ball hit a paddle, the paddle would suddenly fly away because of the collision, which is funny to see.
You can see the left paddle down in the corner, and the right paddle being hit and having collision way off.
One way i could solve this is by having the ball density really low, and the paddle density really high. That way the paddles will be almost immune to any forces being applied as a result of the collision, and the ball will behave as expected. And now, after putting this on paper, it seems as a very obvious solution, which i'll implement. :)
And that's it for this week. Tune in next monday to (hopefully) see a finished Pong game in my framework. :)
Thanks for reading.
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