Older blog entries for chakie (starting at number 227)

Hmm, I can't post to Advogato anymore? I can read anything just fine, but my diary posts seem to time out all the time? Has the engine behinf Advogato reached its limit, is my browser broken or am I just not wanted here anymore? Let's try one more time. This was written a few days ago, and I've been trying to post it a few times, never succeeding...

I've been very lazy wrt to posting here. Will try to be a better boy next year, that's my New Year's resolution. :)

Civil

Development has started for real again. I've added some code related to validating scenarios in the scenario editor, so that the user can make sure that saved sceanrios are valid and can be played.

Also started some work on terrain cleanups. That just needs to be done before we can get on with the show. msa has also tackled LOS (line of sight) and I'll try to add a facility for easily debugging LOS between two points on the map.

Oh, and TheCorruptor has added artillery units too! He's of course not satisfied with them, but I think they look *really* good. Screenshots will be posted once I do a few.

After we've done some progress I think we'll release 0.82, just to show that we're still alive (after a few months of silence). Yeah, it's good to be back!

MediaCube

Finally got my Hauppauge WinTV DVB-c card today. Will try to integrate it into the box tonight and play with it. I hope it all works well... Wish me luck!

mascot: modules don't work at the moment. Nothing wrong with your config, you'll just have to wait a few versions.

pabos: I feel sorry for you. I had a bit of a similar experience when starting with automake. I knew the rest of the toolchain pretty well before that, but still getting automake to work was rough going. Maybe you should leave the auto* tools for a while and just get to know Makefile:s and the compiler related tools first?

Panzers

Will do a 0.40 release today. I've done a lot of structural changed, such as integrated osgSDL into my source tree so that one dependency is removed. I haven't run the game for two weeks or so, as I have no 3D acceleration anymore. If someone actually downloads, gets it to compile and has problems running it, I hope they report the problems. I'll keep on developing the game "blind" for a while, but soon I know I have to see it running again in order to continue.

Oh why, oh why does the 3D card manufacturers have to be so damn bad at producing easy to use Linux drivers? I restarted X one day and all my hard work at tweaking hw accelerated OpenGL seem to have vanished. Poff. Just like that. Damn Matrox.

Been a while. Have done nothing useful. Bitter. Still looking for a job.

Mediacube

Started working on the actual case again for the box. Needed to have something where the harddrive could be mounted in, so some gluing gave me a nice little corner in the case. After that I need a hole for the IR receiver, small rubber feet under the case and some paint. Will take a few weeks, as I'm in no hurry.

I also decided to scrap the idea of an analog TV card. I ordered a digital Hauppauge DVB-c card that should be able to decode digital TV from our cable. So the box will then be a *full* PVR with timeshifting and whatnot. I'll use the VDR package for most of the functionality. I also plan on adding a few modules to it that would let it do basically the same as my current software. Could be fun!

Panzers

I think I'll release 0.30 today. Have done a lot but can't really test it at all, as I lost all hw accelerated 3D. Damn Matrox crappy 3D drivers. Unfortunately ATI and NVidia cards are so damn expensive. Sure you can get a cheap NVidia card, but those cards are already obsolete. A bit like when we went to play with some OSX Mac:s and the best 3D thing the machines had were GForce2MX (or something like that). The sales guy got a bit offended when I told him that the cards are obsolete. :)

Not much.

Releases a version 0.10 of Panzers a few days ago. It was buggy and uncompilable. Released 0.20 a few days layer. Same problem. I should actually try to compile my tar.gz packages before I upload to SourceForge, but I'm too lazy and I don't really care that much. People should just face the fact that versions of 0.x are buggy and suck. So, finally did a 0.21 that was just a little fix that makes automake include all the needed files. This one seems to compile, although it doesn't really work too well. Multiplayer just isn't there yet, and won't be for a while. I'm contemplating switching to SDL_net for the low level socket handling, which would give me chance to experiment with UDP with a lot less hassle then doing it manually. I normally hate using UDP, it's just too sucky, error prone and it's just plain sucky to make the manual error handling ("ooh, did that important packet with the data for the new player actually reach everyone?"), but it could be worth to experiment.

thomasvs: I got my automake problem solved last night. Basically automake didn't like header files with no extensions, like <foo>, but required and extension. So I added an extension .hh to the files and after a lot more weird problema and lots of help I got it to work.

I do see the beauty of automake, especielly when it works ok, but it sure is fragile. I like to be able to make dist and get a tar.gz, as well as dependencies, but I don't like losing sources (luckily I had most stuff in CVS) due to something automake doesn't like.

Anyway, I now know of the issue, so next time I have a set of do:s and don't:s to apply. :)

Panzers

Did an initial release last night, version 0.10. Now I have it out of my mind. It's not yet playable, as the server needs some work, but you can drive around and have a good time.

Create a project on SourceForge for Panzers and imported the sources there. I also tried to use automake for the project, but I've come to the conclusion that I don't like it. Too weird and buggy. Or then my Makefile.am:s are buggy. Anyway, it has clobered a lot of my header files, tries to link files into executables that should just be compiled to object files and so on. I get stuff like:

make[1]: Entering directory `/home/chakie/prog/c++/osg/panzers/src'
g++ -g -O2 -I/opt/osgSDL/include -I/usr/include   setup.cpp -o setup
/usr/lib/crt1.o(.text+0x18): In function `_start':
: undefined reference to `main'

"Oh, so my file is an executable? Well. No. It's not. Read my lips. In the Makefile.am I've listed the to applications that should be compiled and the sources that are required to be compiled. Can't you use that info? No? Well, can't you complain about any errors then? No? Ok, screw portability, I'm going back to plain and simple Makefile:s. They work for me, if they don't work for someone else then that's definitely not my problem."

I'm frustrated and in a bad mood. I've wasted several hours just because automake decided to clobber my source files. That was not fun. I had fixed up doxygen stuff for a lot of files and then they were gone. Poff! Just like that. Poff!

Feel free to flame me about how I'm a moron, idiot and just too stupid to use automake, but it should not be this hard. Isn't automake supposed to be simple than writing Makefile:s manually? Now you have to learn the syntax of Makefile.am, configure.in, autogen.sh and countless other files instead of just the simple and proven Makefile syntax.

Argh!

Tank game

Progressing from the setup screen to the main game now works ok in my tank game. Why is this a big thing then? Well, the whole thing has so far been more of a proof of concept thing than anything that was actually planned or designed. It's been a playground for ideas masked up as a tank game, but now I've come to my senses and added a real state machine for event handling, proper factories for doing trees, a somewhat sane scene graph design and so on.

It's actually pretty fun to think about the game in terms of scene graphs. Right now the root has three subgraphs: one for the setup data, one for all in game data and a last one for the upcoming end game screens.

Have only two tanks so far, need to model some more. Ideas for simple WW2 tanks. They should have planar and easy surfaces, and be relatively easy to design. I could also add some kind of rocket launcher thing, jeep, APC or similar if time permits.

Hmm, I think I will create a SourceForge project page for it, if all goes well I could then migrate my stuff there.

Movies

We bought the extended LOTR DVD a few days ago. Not yet watched it. Tonight we'll go see Harry Potter 2, as it opens here. Should be fun as I loved the books. :)

Ah, finally I have a not too stupid setup screen for the tank game. All the models (two at the moment, more when I have time to do some modelling) are in a circle and you can select the wanted tank using the arrow keys. I'm pretty satisfied, although it could look better. But what the hell, this is a silly little hack, it doesn't have to be as sexy as GTA. :)

Phew, horror at work. We did a little routine upgrade at a customer last Friday. The upgrade went smoothly, or so we thought. On Monday all hell broke loose and we've been putting out fires for two days now. Maybe the thing wasn't really ready for an upgrade after all. :)

Managed to see the concert version of Les Miserables when it visited Finland. Lots of fun and professional artists. Jeanette was really happy, she'd been looking forward to the concert for ages.

Have done some minor hacking on my tank game. I think it'll be called Polygons of Steel. Makes for a really nice acronym if nothing else...