ShrimpWorks

Guess it shouldn’t have taken so long for me to get around to doing this, but at least it’s done now.

Attached to this post you’ll find a zip file, containing a small example application which allows you to spawn PyODE physics-enabled cubes with the middle mouse button into a PyOgre world. You can then bounce and roll the cubes around by holding the left or right mouse buttons.

The code is fairly straight-forward, and I’ve included quite a number of comments. Should be easy enough to follow what’s going on if you’ve been through the PyOgre tutorials.

A note of performance and stability - you can safely spawn loads of cubes as long as there are not too many collisions going on at once (after around 50 cubes, things start to get really sluggish if there are too many inter-cube collisions going on). In practice though, I doubt you’d need that many collisions happening at any one time. Also, If you make a large pile of cubes, lift them all up, and let them fall down together, it seems to bomb out as there are too many collisions happening when they all land on top of eachother at once. I haven’t debugged this very much, so I’m not sure yet if it’s a ODE limitation, or something bad I’m doing in the code. If anyone works it out, I’d be interested to know.

Please don’t ask for advice on stuff like per-polygon collisions, terrain collision and the like, I have not really messed with this beyond the state of this example. Once you get the basics going after checking out the example, I’m sure a few questions shot off at the PyOgre Forums would turn up more useful results than asking me :).

Have fun ;).

As we all know, PNG images are so much cooler than BMP images. Especially with alpha channels.

A while ago, I found this rather spiffy PNG library for Delphi, which allows you to load PNG files into a TPicture or similar, complete with alpha channels. Generally, it works simplest with TImage, however being a TGraphic subclass, you can do all sorts of drawing and everything else on it.

ANYWAY, I wanted to be able to use these things on buttons (standard TSpeedButton and TBitBtn), however their Glyph property is a TBitmap, preventing us from doing a simple Button.Glyph.LoadFromfile and loading a PNG file. The other option is to load up the PNG on it’s own with a TPNGObject, and assign it to the glyph property, however the alpha gets buggered.

So I came up with a crackful work-around (as I’m finding 90% of all Delphi coding is):

procedure pngGlyph(Btn: TControl; Img: String);
var
    PNG: TPNGObject;
    BMP: TBitmap;
begin
    PNG := TPNGObject.Create;
    BMP := TBitmap.Create;

    try
        PNG.LoadFromFile('path\to\glyphs\'+Img+'.PNG');   // Update the path to your .png files, or update this to get them somewhere else.

        BMP.Width := PNG.Width;
        BMP.Height := PNG.Height;
        BMP.Canvas.Brush.Style := bsSolid;
        BMP.Canvas.Brush.Color := clBtnFace;
        BMP.Canvas.FillRect(Rect(0, 0, PNG.Width, PNG.Height));
        BMP.Canvas.Draw(0, 0, PNG);
        BMP.Canvas.Pixels[0, BMP.Height-1] := clBtnFace;

        if (Btn is TSpeedButton) then
            (Btn as TSpeedButton).Glyph.Assign(BMP);
        if (Btn is TBitBtn) then
            (Btn as TBitBtn).Glyph.Assign(BMP);
    finally
        PNG.Free;
        BMP.Free;
    end;
end;

To use it, you call it like pngGlyph(SpeedOrBitButton, 'glyphname');, and the procedure will hack your button’s glyph into something that looks nice. You can use fully alpha-enabled PNG files, and they should look right.

Of coarse it would be better to create a new button type with this procedure inside that, so you don’t have to call this for every button you want to add a PNG to, but I don’t really feel like re-adding a million buttons, it’s quicker for me to do a million procedure calls :).

Heh :D

So I’ve started work on my own small RSS aggregator for some or other web project I may or may not actually complete. And no, it’s nothing like Gregarius, it’s more of an ‘internal function’ of a larger project.

So anyway, after checking out the various RSS version specs and things, I hunted down as many feeds as I could to get an idea of the kinds of data I’m going to end up sifting through.

Wow. Despite the fact that there are standards out there doesn’t seem to mean much. Nearly every feed is a world apart from the next one, either throwing in millions of useless custom tags, renaming standard tags to some other random thing that made sense to the author and nobody else, leaving out loads of actual useful information, mixing and matching the specs as they feel the urge, and a million other randomnesses.

Anyway, on the way to making sense of it all, I fed some of them through MagpieRSS, which actually does a fairly reasonable job of making them a bit more sane. Still, I have to guess a lot of fields and things, and pretty much hope for the best.

At the moment, people’s RSS feeds generally seems more psychotic than some of their use of HTML.

Well, in the interests of Monster Hunt surviving a bit longer, I’m releasing the full UnrealScript source code.

Included is a basic license document, outlining in simple terms what you may and may not do. Basically, you may make any kind of MH mod or ‘sub-mod’, however you must give due credit for the original creation. Even if it’s very basic, please read it if you intend using it for creating a mod.

You’ll find the file at the end of this post… Have fun :)

MonsterHuntSource.zip

I was browsing around the BeyondUnreal Forums the other day, and came across an 11 page thread, with around 720 replies, about Monster Hunt. Interested to see what’s up, I checked the CSports rankings for Unreal Tournament, and was shocked to find MH is the #4 most played UT gametype in the world. Coming in after CTF, DM, and TDM.

Seems people have been making maps like nuts, there seem to be over 300 of them, there are a few mutators and mods available for it as well. I found there’s even a pretty large fansite, Planet Monster Hunt.

Not too bad for a mod I thought I had retired nearly four years ago ;).

My idea for implementing non-physics physics into my little game framework didn’t work out too well, so I gave in and took a look around for options.

It seems only ODE is available to Python, via PyODE. Not many [open source] physics engines seem to have Python bindings, which I find rather odd.

As it turns out, it isn’t actually all that of a mission to get ODE and Ogre working together, and the results I’ve got so far are quite acceptable. I can spawn loads of cubes (of varying sizes) and throw them around the scene and they bounce and jump around in a suitable fasion.

I haven’t tried with balls or polygon-accurate stuff yet, that’s next on the to-do list. I also intend writing a short how-to for PyODE and PyOgre integration at some point, as I was a little confused to start with, not knowing quite where or how to begin, and there is no PyODE/PyOgre example code floating around to reference.

EDIT: Example using PyODE and PyOgre now available -

It seems as though the guys at work are seriously looking into the option of doing some game development next year some time, and they’ve been busy checking out various engines and frameworks to help with this. Despite being the only person at work who plays games seriously, and my history of developments on the Unreal engine, I haven’t really been included much with what’s going on.

However, since game development (of any kind) is the number one thing I’d like to be doing with my life (NOT point of sale systems!!), I’ve decided to involve myself anyway :D.

I have been playing around with a couple of game and physics engines (games being discussed are potentially vehicle-based), and Irrlicht particularly seems rather nice. Korpse however, suggested I take a look at Ogre. I was very pleasently surprised to find the PyOgre project, which exposes about everything Ogre can do, to Python (you don’t even need the Ogre SDK, it works completely on it’s own), and seems very well supported. I’m a lot more comfortable with Python than I am with C++ :).

The only down side, is that Ogre is not a complete game engine, but rather simply a graphics engine. Meaning, I’ll have to work out how to add sound, physics, advanced input options (Ogre does support keyboards at least), etc on my own. There are a lot of options available for all of those, so I’m not really worried about it at the moment.

I’ve begin putting together a bit of a basic framework for myself, trying to base how things work around how UnrealScript works and interacts with classes and objects. It’s working out pretty cool, thanks again to Python.

As a test project, I’ve decided to put together a sort of basic World War II flight sim. All you need really is a model, some terrain, and basic flight physics (which I plan on simulating without the use of a physics engine, in a similar fasion to how I did some stuff in Unreal Tournament [pre-Karma]).

Since the scripting is going well, I decided to take a shot at a quick model. I came across Wings 3D – a simple “subdivision modeler”. Basically you start off with whatever primitive shape (cube, spheres, cylinder, etc) you think will suit what you’re going to build, and stretch and warp it into the final product. I’ve never modeled like this before, but it works surprisingly well.

After 2 hours work, I got the following result from a 16-sided cylinder:

There are quite a number of rather ugly polygons, but it was a learning experience :).

Update: DynaBar 2 is available, the download link below is out of date.

Finally got around to making a proper release of something :).

Presenting DynaBar, a PHP script which can create dynamic images through the use of plugins, inspired by the Userbars.com website.

I thought it would be cool to be able to have userbars with dynamic data in them, stuff like game server status, stats, etc., etc. to make them a little more exciting. I also wanted to learn a bit more about PHP’s image manipulation, so this proved a good oppertunity for that.

Basically, the whole thing works off a plugin system, which lets you drop in a PHP script (the plugin), set up a config file (the userbar), and link to an image. DynaBar then goes about loading the plugin, requesting it’s data (so it goes off and collects stats, or whatever), and building the final image (putting on the [optional] scanline effect, glossy shine, and layering the text data from the plugin on all of that).

I’ve also created a small designer script, which allows you or any users to create new userbars using plugins or whatever, with their own images and content, in a simple wizard-like interface. The end result is ready-to-use forum or HTML code. :).

Here are some examples, using plugins included in the package:

Image lost in time Simple, plain text (nothing dynamic about it).

Image lost in time This one queries LastFM for which song I’ve played most recently in my media player.

Image lost in time Finally, here we have Battlefield 2 stats, coming from BF2Tracker’s clan XML feed.

Grab the download from the bottom of this post. Please read the README in the doc/ directory.

I’ve had a couple of questions regarding my Battlefield 2 Stats in Python post, and how it may be possible to do the same in PHP, so I thought I’d add an update for that.

Simple PHP code for Battlefield 2 Stats retrieval:

    ini_set("user_agent","GameSpyHTTP/1.0");

    $info = "per*,cmb*,twsc,cpcp,cacp,dfcp,kila,heal,rviv,rsup,rpar,tgte,dkas,dsab,cdsc,rank,cmsc,kick,kill,deth,suic,ospm,klpm,klpr,dtpr,bksk,wdsk,bbrs,tcdr,ban,dtpm,lbtl,osaa,vrk,tsql,tsqm,tlwf,mvks,vmks,mvn*,vmr*,fkit,fmap,fveh,fwea,wtm-,wkl-,wdt-,wac-,wkd-,vtm-,vkl-,vdt-,vkd-,vkr-,atm-,awn-,alo-,abr-,ktm-,kkl-,kdt-,kkd-";

    $pid = '43595724';
    $data = file("http://bf2web.gamespy.com/ASP/getplayerinfo.aspx?pid=".$pid."&info=".$info);

    $stats = array_combine(explode("\t", $data[3]), explode("\t", $data[4]));

    printf("%s has %s kills and %s deaths and a score of %s", $stats['nick'], $stats['kill'], $stats['deth'], $stats['scor']);

Note that if you’re not using PHP5, you’ll need to add the following drop-in replacement for the “array_combine” function:

    function array_combine($keys, $vals) {
        $i = 0;
        foreach ($keys as $key) {
            $newarray[trim($key)] = trim($vals[$i++]);
        }
        return $newarray;
    }

It’s also important to note that while at the time of writing this, this method of retrieving stats works, EA, DICE and GameSpy are supposedly working on a new XML-based stats system for BF2.

Updated: Since this was written, some things changed with the stats system, and the GameSpy application requires you to pass a bunch of columns you want info for. This can help customise the data you get back, so you only request what you need. I’ve included all the columns in the $info variable, which you can customise. Make sure it contains only valid columns, or you won’t get any data back at all.

For info on what to do with the stats, and what all the columns etc. mean, check out the BF2 Technical Wiki.

Ever since installing BattleField 2, I’ve had a problem with taking screenshots. Basically, the game completely freezes up when I press whatever key is assigned to screen captures, and I need to reset my computer completely. Also, I seemed unable to use Fraps to make screen captures since the game seemed to be blocking all requests to whichever keys I assigned to Fraps’ capturing options.

I decided to rather just create my own utility. A simple application that hooks into the “Print Screen” key’s press, so when you press Print Screen, this app takes the image out of the clipboard, and will write it to a folder as a JPEG image. You can customise both the output location and the JPEG compression quality. The images are named after the current date and time.

It doesn’t work only for games, ANY time you press Print Screen, a screenshot will be saved. I think that could actually be pretty useful.

Yes, there are a million screen grabbers for Windows out there, but writing something yourself is both educational, and you know exactly what it’s doing. Also, I now have a single screenshot button for games, and everything else as well :D.

Note this may not work for all games, as some games tend to dump quite a mess to the clipboard when attempting a Print Screen.

This post also serves as a test for the attachment plugin for WordPress I recently installed ;).