ACT Studios - Blog

How to get a job in the games industry?

pyroka — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:29:41 +0000

The uni have come up with an idea, and we’re the test subjects, basically as an extension of the PPD (Personal Professional Development) module from last year, we’ll be acting as mentors to the people coming into the second year after us, and helping them get into the industry, it seems like a plan of some use, and will make the PPD module actually relevant to the games programmers (It’s currently a general module that all computing courses take, and isn’t relevant to us in the slightest) so I’ll be posting my experiences here, and also any information and advise I get given, so when I get assigned to mentor a student (possibly more than one depending if more make it through the second year) I can point them here and it will hopefully be helpful.

MovieInfo

pyroka — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 18:46:44 +0000

MovieInfo is the name of a new little project I’ve been working on recently, to solve a problem I’ve been having, basically, I have a portable hard-drive with copies of all my movies on, about 60 of them, I tend to take it about with me and so lots of people get to choose a movie to watch, thus I’m tired of explaining them all so, since there is a web service IMDB that has all this info on the movies, I need a program that’ll grab that and store it, and present it for peoples viewing pleasure.

So with that in mind, I came up with this spec:

GUI – most people prefer using a GUI app to a command line one
Be able to parse the IMDB page and get information
Must store the information in a sensible way, so that it can be read by other programs
Must be able to filter films by genre
Must be cross platform – I know Linux and mac users too

So with that spec I went to work, firstly I had to choose a language, I was thinking perl, but I wanted something with an easer GUI, I didn’t want to get bogged down with that, so I settled on Java, since it now has nice regex support for easy parsing.

I’m storing all the information in XML files, so the information can be easily accessed by other things if wanted.

I also download the fist image relating to the film from the IMDB page and store that locally to display.

The project should have a first release in the next couple of days, but here’s a screen-shot so you can see what it looks like, comments and suggestions welcome.

MovieInfo

A* Pathfinder

pyroka — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 22:56:55 +0000

Well here it is, the Strawdog interview gave me reason to indulge myself with some AI coding for another demo, so I decided to do some A* pathfinding. Grab a copy in .ZIP or .RAR

Features Include:

Custom Binary Heap for quick addition and removal
Indexed array for very quick membership test
Debug mode to show all nodes that were visited and closed
Animation mode (might break) to see how the path is formed
Maps stored as text files, load in your own (note: does not guard against bad maps at the moment, so be careful)

Grab the source here

ACT Renderer

pyroka — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 11:05:41 +0000

Well it’s finally finished, feel free to grab yourself a copy in in either .ZIP or .RAR format.

It features: -

Template Vector and Matrix classes
Object and light managers to handle multiple object and lights
Several Drawing modes
- Point
- Wireframe
- Flat Shaded
- GDI+ Flat Shaded
- Gouraud Shaded
- Debug Texture
- Textured
- Textured Flat Lit
- Texture Gouraud Lit
Support for animations
Should open any MD2 model and PCX texture
Ambient, Directional and Point light types
Supports ambient, diffuse and specular lighting
Simple Material with reflection coefficients
Several Effects
- Negative
- Static
- Greyscale
- Tint
- Night-vision
- Emboss
- Colour Emboss
- Blur

The you can download a copy of the source code here (created with Visual Studio 2005) .ZIP or .RAR

ACT Renderer: Progress

pyroka — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 21:45:42 +0000

Work continues on the ACT Renderer, it now has textured view modes, including a flat lit version, next up is the Gouraud shaded textured mode.

Remaining To-do list: -

Gouraud Texturing
Spot Lighting
Animation Support
Z-Buffer
Post-Processing Buffer
Effects
Scripts

I’m aiming to have it done by the weekend, then I can move onto the DXUT project

Toolbox ideas

pyroka — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 01:10:22 +0000

I’ve just finished the fisrt idea for the tool/message boxes, I think I neeed to let it sit for a while to gage my true opinion of it

As you can see I went for a very clean lined look, I like it but I’m not totally convinced, I’ll look at it again tomorrow and put it to the rest of the team to see what they think, the plus sides of this style are that it would be very easy to make one in any size you liked, and its nice and simple thus small fiel sizes and hopefuully it won’t clutter the GUI too much, on the dowside it is very simple, and I’d probably have to copy the font in manualy, since I’m not sure what anti-aliasing options XNA has for text, last time I looked text in XNA was a bit of a black magic, but I think things have improved nowerdays. I’ll post again tomorow, and by that i mean later-on today, for the predants among you.

A little later than promised heres the next incharnation of the tool-box graphics, I think it works alot better.

I’ve enquired as to if its possible to turn off anti-aliasing for fonts in XNA, hopefully you can because that Tahoma font like that seems pretty perfect to me

Progress

pyroka — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 15:20:33 +0000

Mark has implamented the new graphics setup, complete with a very nice fade-in effect for the group logo, tonight I’ll be working on the graphics for the menus and buttons to get that looking upto par.

I’ve been doing some research on procedural modeling of citys which will be my main input for the game, apart from the graphics ofcourse, wich sorta fell onto me.

The citys will be procedurally generated based off certain data like the population etc.. and the appearance will change depending on if its a city or town and the like. Towns will grow intelegently in time with the population moving into the more desirable areas and leafing the less desirable ones.

We had a group meeting in the SUB today which we discussed the GUI and made some importand desicions there, we think that the GUI will bve easy to use, but no doubt it will change a bit before use. Mark is gonna have his work cut out for him implamenting the GUI toolbars as we have decided that they should be able to me made semi-transparent, dragged, docked and iconised. I’ll be starting work on the graphics for them tonight aswell

Ben is busying himself with working on saving and loading data from files, we’ve decided to encript the data to hinder the users if they try to edit them, the save-files will be quite large so we need to put shome though into how were gonna save and load so it won’t take ages and stall the game.

The group (read Mark and Ben) decided that they want people and cars roaming the streets and suggested using my pathfinding code for it, but that seems a bit overkill at the people will be in very low detail and not have any set destination, I’ll probably just do some code where they travel untill they reach a crossroads and then pick a direction to turn, we’ll have to see if that idea makes it, its not critical as the user will usually be pretty far out view and probably not notice.

We discussed the build mode, and decided that the camera will flip to a bird’s eye view when building structures so the player can better see what there doing, we also reinforced some ideas in the poll system whihc is now turning into a vital part of the game which is good, and we briefly touched on the reasearching but I suspect that they will be the main subject in future meetings.

All-in-all it was a sucessful meeting and was good to have the entire team in one place again, we’ve all got alot to be working on so a busy few days ahead, out next meeting will be later this week or more likely early next.

Oh and Mark has some pics of the new layout on his blog I’ll post them up here later but for now, heres the link

Imagine Cup

pyroka — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 01:37:57 +0000

Every year, Microsoft hold a programming contst, the Imagine Cup, this year is the first time they have included a specific games programming category, So me and two others (for now) formed the group RCS Entertainment and have come up with Go Green>

I’ll post more details later, but for now you’ll just have to salivate over the logo (designed by yours-truely)

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