Jason T Clark.net

Hello everyone.

I’ve been living under a rock the last few weeks. It’s took me quite a awhile to get the first draft of Chapter 2 for the Second Life book. Geez, writing a book is hard work! However, I hope it will pay off in the long run. And, yet again, keeping up with 4 blogs has been a nightmare.

Anyway, I’m making a promise to myself to blog at least 3 times a week about SOMETHING. I mean, I did figure out how to get the OGRE tutorials to work, I should tell you about that….and, I should also tell you guys about some of the kewl freelance projects that are out there too. OK, so stay tuned, I’m going to light the fires and kick the tires…..

Currently crafting the pages of Chapter 2.  It’s starting out pretty good I think.  Well, that’s really all I wanted to say.  Back to Work!

So, among all the other things that I have going on, one thing I have been promising myself is that I would learn a game scripting language, starting with TorqueScript. Right now, I am wearing many hats- all simultaneously, and it’s sort of an expert juggling act that I’ve been mastering for quite some time. Tossing up the bowling ball, while catching the flaming torch, and remembering that a slippery tuna fish is in my other hand gets tiresome, true- but the love of all things related is why I attempt this act in the first place.

I picked up this book , 3d Game Programming: All-in-One, in an attempt to familiarize myself with the whole picture. The book includes a brief introduction, and sections on building, scripting, texturing, etc. And since we know that each of those topics can get very detailed, right now I need to just get a general sweep of everything as I expose myself to Game Development. The book comes with Torque, which is an independently licensable game engine- made especially for homebrew game developers and small game development startups. The book actually uses Torque in all of it’s examples, but of course the ideas are applicable in other areas.

I am just getting started with looking at Torque in depth, so if you have some tips, pass them along.

Hello All! I haven’t had much time to blog here, especially since I have two other blogs that I’m trying to keep up with. I will let you all know that I am writing a book on Second Life, and you can find out more about it here:

http://platformsecondlife.com

According to this article I read in TechCrunch.com, Entropia Universe has announced that they are licensing Crytek’s CryEngine2 for the new version of their MMOG platform. The developers at CryTek are responsible for creating the engine behind the jaw dropping visuals we all witnessed when the video game FarCry was released. This is good news for the Metaverse residents who long for the day when environments like Second Life and Entropia will be visually “on the level”. It’s comforting to know that companies like Entropia realize that making their environments as visually stimulating as possible is quite important in the long run. I’m sure Linden Labs isn’t far behind.

And so, the journey begins. Something terrible is happening at IBM Codestation. The fate of Codestation is in YOUR hands.
IBM Codestation Log
Teleport to IBM Codestation

Since I’ve become rather proficient with writing Java code, I figured I would try to answer that age old question: Can commercial quality games be written in Java? And so, the journey begins.

While visiting the 3D Game Engines Database on DevMaster.net, I came across jMonkeyEngine (jME). I have to admit, one of the most elementary rules of measurement that I use when evaluating a game engine is the screenshots. Take a look at this:

To me, this screenshot illustrates that this engine is capable of rendering quality graphics, but how’s the performance? No way to tell that other than testing out something, right? That means a “Hello World” program is in my future- take a look at this:

package net.blackpyramid.test;

import com.jme.app.SimpleGame;
import com.jme.math.Vector3f;
import com.jme.scene.shape.Box;

public class Helloworld extends SimpleGame {

    @Override
    protected void simpleInitGame()
    {
        Box b = new Box("Mybox", new Vector3f(0,0,0),
            new Vector3f(1,1,1));
        rootNode.attachChild(b);
    }

    public static void main(String args[])
    {
        Helloworld hello = new Helloworld();
        hello.setDialogBehaviour(
            SimpleGame.ALWAYS_SHOW_PROPS_DIALOG);
        hello.start();
    }
}

Pretty simple, huh? Create a node, attach the node to the scene graph- done. So far so good. Now it’s time to dig a little deeper.

The wiki page seems to offer alot of information, and the jME documentation looks pretty good. I think I will try to learn how to load a 3D model, just to see what it looks like.

Stay tuned!