Potential tutorial series (Page 1 of 2)

Hi Nistur, tutorials would be great, I would love to learn more about maratis! I prefer video tutorials.

No need to rush. About what I would like to see, being a little beginner I would like to see some simple things and then more advanced, but those topics you mentioned are great. I'm sure will be a great source of knowledge about maratis3d and thank you for willingness to help.

If possible kindly try to publish a text version also.

Thank you.
Regards.

Right, no excuses for the delay in me providing anything. I am just plain useless.

I have, however, come up with, what I hope will be a better plan. I've started doing some text tutorials first, I'm going to do tutorials in "stages". The first stage will be getting comfortable with Maratis and developing with it. I'm hoping for feedback as to what to do next. Once each stage is written and published, I will cover the same topics in a series of screencasts. As I've already written the text, the screencasts should be simple for me to do, but allow me to give some more detail, instead of pages and pages of text, or thousands of screenshots.

I have started "stage 1" already and have the first 2 tutorials, setting up a Maratis project and then creating a code project alongside it. Any comments are welcome, either here or attached to the tutorials themselves. I'll try and finish what I want from Stage 1 this weekend, but I also need to go and buy food to keep me alive... so I make no promises.

Maratis Tutorials

Last edited by Nistur (2012-02-05 12:26:42)

No worries. I am going to try to finish the tutorial I'm on tonight and then do some planning for a couple more. I have a few infrastructure ideas for some. Just need to work out how I'm going to break them down

Tutorial 3 completed. It's possibly a little too much code, but there's a lot of setup code. Oh well. I also feel very bad for just hacking things in quickly, I am itching to get to the tidying tutorial and refactor stuff...

Which timers do you mean? Something like Vega's tutorial?

The way I'm writing this tutorial series is mirroring how I'm using Maratis to make my own game. A timer is a pretty standard building block in making games, so I'm sure it would happen sooner or later. Is there anything you're planning on using a timer for? I will do my best to accomodate what you need.

I can do that As I said, I was expecting to write a timer system at some point. What do you think if I put it in next, and have something like making the box do a vertical bounce, when it hits "the floor" it kicks off a timer for a set amount of time, it jumps up again. Does that sound acceptable?

The way I see it, it will have the following new things in the tutorial:
- Game clock wrapper class
- Custom game class to handle the game clock
- Timer class with command pattern callback

EDIT: It's been a while since I looked at Vega's examples, what I'm planning is slightly different to them. Rather than a timer which counts up to an arbitrary number, I usually prefer counting down, also, I'm going to try and add some degree of nice design to this and go forward not just hacking things together, like I did in tutorial 3.

Last edited by Nistur (2012-02-10 15:54:14)

I've started it. I'm going to have it up some time tomorrow. I'll have the first half (no code yet) up in a bit

EDIT: The first half of the tutorial is up. I got a bit carried away and I've started with the code. I was just having a problem with Maratis where it wouldn't load my level for some reason. So I got frustrated. Will finish it tomorrow though.

Last edited by Nistur (2012-02-11 00:11:11)

It's got a bit longer than I was hoping. But it's done. It's a step towards a nice framework to start working on. Anyway, here it is. Good night

Thanks, I had a look but I couldn't find the tick anywhere.
With regards to being synchronised at 60fps, I agree, that's probably enough for most situations, but there's also the possibility that something (could be either Maratis, the game or even external) which causes a tick to take longer than what was intended. I feel it's usually safer to have it time based so that we don't get crazy behaviour in some of these cases.

Also, incase anyone reads this and now wonders what the point of the game clock class is. There's very little right now, apart from the automatic ticking of timers, but later on, if you wanted bullet time or something, you could easily add time dialation factors to gameclock which would slow game logic but not require changes to Maratis libraries.

I'll update the tutorial later on today.

No problem, nice to hear some feedback
Those topics are pretty broad, is there anything in particular you'd want? The aim is to make a small game with the tutorial eventually, mainly using code for the game I'm working on. I haven't, however, decided what sort of game it would be. If you would like to contribute some sort of ideas for how you would use physics, for example, I'm sure it would be pretty simple for me to add some things into stage 2.

Animations, I'm still trying to decide on a design for. I've had experience with 2 different animation systems so far and they both used a state machine to handle them. As i'm planning on adding a state machine into the framework at some point, it seems like a sensible thing to (re)use. My only issue is, how to store the state transitions. Ideally, this should be exposed to a potential designer/artist, so they can tweak stuff, but Maratis Editor doesn't have anything like that yet, so it would be manually writing text files. Even if they were xml, reading it would be a pain. I'm thinking this may be a good candidate for editor/engine plugin behaviour. The other alternative would be to code the state transitions, which would be a quicker solution, but less elegant, I feel.