Now that we have a working game engine with entities it is time we start to build a little more management into the game engine. In this tutorial we will be adding a scene manager into the game engine so that we can swap scenes out quickly without having to do a lot of work. Before we do this you may be wondering why would I want to change the game engine design since we have a really good working game engine? The answer for this is more of an example. Making a game is more than providing a fun game to your players but a way to either show off their high score, connect with other players, start a new game, maybe even continue an existing game. The list is endless and in a way we will use scenes to manage the different options a player may wish to choose to do in our game. This is kind of leading into building a game menu. Read more

We last finished up getting some basic functionality out of the game engine after going through several long tutorials. Sorry about that but I wanted to cover some core information I have learned over the years when working with JavaScript and now adding in the Canvas parts. Read more

Last tutorial we started to build the basic game loop and did some basic work on creating a generic Entity class. In this next tutorial we will continue to work on the game engine and start to fill out some of the core functionality. We will work on getting our first entity created and onto a browser to see how all this stuff works. Read more

Welcome back to the next tutorial on building a game engine in Node.js and JavaScript. If you’re just joining please download the github repository so you can follow along. The previous tutorials talked more about setting up our development environment and automating some tasks for us. In this tutorial we are going to focus on JavaScript coding and setting up the game engine frame work. Read more

Welcome back to the next tutorial on using Nodejs and Grunt to build a simple game server. Last time we left off with just getting grunt setup and installed a few basic packages. The watch package helps us automate watching our development directory (src) and when a file was added or modified it would copy it to our build folder. In this part of the tutorial we will continue adding a couple more packages that will help us manage the build process and then send it to our test server. Read more

For those who are interested in getting a Node.js development setup this tutorial is for you. Since Node.js is based on JavaScript we will want to find a good JavaScript editor. In the past I've used Aptana for doing some hard core JavaScript development. It is based on the eClipse editor but they interfaced it in a way that has always made sense to me and is easy to use. You can also use Sublime Text editor, or Notepad++, or Visual Studio. It depending on your IDE preference. My only recommendation is to find an IDE that will do most of what you want, try it out and see if it fits your design needs. Read more

JavaScript has been around for many years and slowly it has done some major lifting on the internet.  Today you would be hard pressed to find a website that doesn't use it in some fashion.  We have fun and exciting libraries like jQuery, UIKit, Bootstrap, and MooTools just to name a few.  If I didn't write down your favorite library don't freat because there are probably millions on these tools out there.  But for the longest time JavaScript is just a browser technology, or is it? Read more

The buzz in Reno and probably just about every city in the world is playing this new game.  Just about every place I’ve gone for the past few weeks have people playing this game including my wife.  Since it was so popular I decided to give it a try. Read more

Today I had a lot of fun getting my Perforce repository move to a new CentOS 7 server.  Moving the data was easy but getting it to run as a service was a pain.  This is mainly because the init scripts are no longer used and now the new systemctl system has taken over.  I did some searching for answers on Google and Bing but nothing really was found for this specific problem.  I guess it is still fairly new and many admins have opted not to migrate to the latest greatest.  A similar issue when Linux started using the selinux system and many of my services wouldn't load because they hadn’t been added to the security footprint. Read more

The other day I was surfing for a new book to read for programming and found this one book which was decently priced and initially got it funding from a crowed funding source. This is great to see an author have a vision of a new programming book and then finding a way to get it funded before writing it. Read more

One thing I don’t like about many game engines is they forget to provide some basic level of UI features.  Even in many of the game engines I have developed this is a lacking feature.  In the CPlusEngine it now includes a few basic UI features. Read more

The other day I was working on our home network and ran into an issue with iSCSI.  We had decided that it was time to build a shared storage device that we could share files instead of using E-Mail.  Well this turned into a major disaster and got fugly real quick. Read more

This is a new concept feature I have been thinking about for the past couple of weeks now. There is a small interface for the lights and I’ve started a new Spotlight class that will act like a spotlight on the game screen. Read more

Added a new linked object class to the type of game objects that can be used.  The base class can hold a list of UGameObjects so that it can manage the position of all children in the linked object. Read more

Programming just about any game at some point will require you to do some simple vector math.  That is right I just said that horrid m word Math!  So it really isn’t that bad of a word and the more you work with it the more comfortable you will become.  Granted there are times it is hard to know when to use the right equation for the problem because there are just so many of them out there.  What I find helps is first breaking the problem down into what is know and what is need for the end results. Read more

You maybe wondering what a controller is and why you or your players would care.  The controller system is how you can make the game engine interact with the player.  This is at the core of any game that addresses how players interact with your game world.  Because there are so many different ways for players to do this the controller class was designed to be as generic as possible. Read more

You maybe wondering why this update is starting with Day 10 and not day 1. This is because a lot of the code was worked on while I was reading a book and those updates got mixed into the review. As time is available I will reproduce them on this page for completeness.

Spent quite some streaming time re-working the event system. The original system had some major limitations but after today’s work it now will be easier to use. The major new feature is the introduction into the event system of the interface IHandler which now allows a class that implements this interface direct access to the event system. Read more

Today I was able to get through the preference and the first chapter.  The odd thing is when I was reading even the author said most of the stuff in the first chapter was just mind numbing and very boring to read.  My question is if this is the case then why not spice it up a little and make this material a little more understandable. Read more

Many of our customers ask this question or don’t even know this is something important they should care about on their website.  Here is something just recently happened to our site which shows why it could be important to have running on your website. Read more

This is just day one but so far I have to say I'm impressed with the start of his book. The preface talks about how more and more collages are adding game programming degrees. This is great to hear because when I went back to school several years ago to get my game programming degree only a few specialty online collages provided a degree. In the preface he explains the book is geared towards 3rd year programming students and not the hobbyist type book. Read more