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Game Development

Multiple meshes and network coding

I’ve been more motivated this weekend due in large part to taking a break over last week. So on Saturday I got the ability to show multiple materials on a single mesh. You simply apply more materials and 3DS and the game will automatically detect this and assign names to each group of polygons. It […]

I’ve been more motivated this weekend due in large part to taking a break over last week. So on Saturday I got the ability to show multiple materials on a single mesh. You simply apply more materials and 3DS and the game will automatically detect this and assign names to each group of polygons. It will even load the specular, diffuse, and ambient colors that you set in 3DS max.

Since I store the name of the material with the polygon group I can use this to flag polygons. So I can name a polygon group “SpawnPoint” for example and now in the game I know where to spawn.

With this, I’m pretty sure I can skip the whole phase of writing a ship and a level editor.

That took most of my energy. But today I got the basics of the client / server framework up. With my very first game I had two different applications – a client and a server. The problem with that is that it was almost literally double the code,, with a lot of cutting and pasting. Maintenance was pretty hard and it was hard to test. With my second game I had the server and client on the same computer but they shared memory space. This means for every situation I had to think of what to do for client only, server only, and client and server. A lot of my network code went through the system, so was good for testing, but a lot didn’t get tested this way. With this game the client and server are independent, each with their own launchers. However, they are both in the same solution and code is split between client only, server only, and both. For testing, I use the client and have the server class inside the client framework using a #ifdef. This is nice because it’s a complete test yet is still easy to manage, with no duplicated code. I don’t have to think of local or remote clients. Lastly, I can do everything on one computer, in one instance of the program.

I’m exhausted again. I ordered Black and White 2 and X3. I will probably just play those for a while to recover. In the meantime I’m waiting for my wife to start working to relieve the burden of this.

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