Recently I have been looking at the overall design of my game/engine and decided it needed a bit more housekeeping to ensure that there is a good level of abstraction so I can replace or rip parts out if I ever need to. A while back I managed to create two seperate libraries for Sound and Networking, meaning that those two could be used within any other project fairly easily.

This time round I'm having a look at seperating out all the rendering code into it's own library which is a little bit more difficult as it is a much larger portion of the codebase.  Whilst doing this I realised that the rendering code and also parts of the engine code both rely on some of the maths classes that I've created so I decided to seperate that out as well and have both libraries depend on the Maths Library. 

After some thought I cracked on with doing the housekeeping and started by splitting the GUI parts of the rendering from the normal scene rendering as the GUI part will eventually be going into it's own library. For now the GUI parts are staying as part of the Engine as I didn't want to try and do too much at once. This new Renderer Library is now complete along with the Maths Library. 

In total I now have these libraries as part of my visual studio solution:

• JBEngine
• Networking
• Sound
• Renderer
• Maths

The next part I need to do is to take out any application specific code that I have put in the JBEngine project. This will allow me to compile the JBEngine as a library and use it as part of a new project which will either be the game or the level editor or any other application I want to use it for.

All is going well just need to crack on with these few bits and I will feel loads better about the whole design of the engine...
Keep Coding :) 

So I've been working on this little application in Cocos2d-x 3.1 and I've got the idea fleshed out a little and started developing a few things. 

There were a few issues with getting the code to compile perfectly each time on different devices. The first of which is that when you add any new classes to the project you need to add them to the visual studio solution if you want to compile for Win32, you also have to add the new cpp files to the Android.mk file under LOCAL_SRC_FILES: for it to compile properly for android. 

Another thing to remember is making sure that the images that you use are stored in the Resources folder so that they can be found when compiling for the different platforms. 

After figuring out these little things I have now got a fairly streamlined development cycle. Initially developing for iOS when on my Mac and then testing on android fairly often.

Here is what the game looks like so far ( mind the poor graphics ):

So there isn't really much to the game right now but the main purpose is to round up some sheep into a specified area on each level. I am at a crossroads with the design at the moment as I am stuck on how I want the dog to be controlled, I have two ideas:

1. Have the dog be controlled by dragging him towards the sheep in real time. The dog will have an energy bar which runs down as you move him and all the sheep need to be in the specified area before the energy runs out.
2. You draw a path for the dog to take but again you only have so far you can make him go and then you let him run and see if all the sheep are rounded up. If they weren't then you have to start again and draw a new path. 

Both these ideas will potentially work but finding the one that is most fun will be a challenge so I'm going to play with both and choose the one I feel is best.

Currently there is a flocking algorithm implemented with the predator avoidance added in so that they always run away from the dog. This algorithm will need tweaking quite a bit to get right but it's hopefully not too far off.

Next thing to be done is adding some obstacle avoidance, i.e. making sure they don't wander off the screen or bump into each other. With the flocking algorithm, they shouldn't bump into each other at all but there may be a point when I want to put fences or rocks or other obstacles in the scene to make it more challenging. Cocos2d-x comes with Box2D and Chipmunk but I'm not too sure which to use yet, or whether to roll my own as the collision detection stuff really isn't too complex for this game. 

Anyway Development is going well :)

I decided it was time to revisit the ability to change the screen resolution of my projects as currently they were all hardcoded to 800 x 600. This has taken some work as I had to deal with ensuring that full screen textures were being re-sized, GUI elements use the correct resolution for positioning and working with mouse input. I have finally got it to the point where you can fairly easily change the resolution, although currently this isn't in real-time i.e. resizing a window. 

Still plenty more work to be done and I haven't started proper work on revisiting the physics yet. The demo went really well and has spurred me to do a lot more work so hopefully I will get round to doing it fairly soon. 

I have been keeping tabs on cocos2d-x for a while but didn't want to fully delve into it until now. They have recently added support for a proper maths library which was one of my main nuisances with the older versions. 

I threw together an app fairly quickly that built for iOS, Android and Mac( Not tested any others yet ). It seems to be fairly simple, and I love that you can use all the C++ features including the STL and the C++11 features. I'm hoping to keep developing this small idea that I have and get it released as soon as I can. I know I shouldn't really start another project when I haven't finished my Desktop game but this project has much shorter goals and can be used to give me a little rest when the engine work gets too much. 

Anyway development is going well on both projects, I will try and get some images up of the Cocos2d-x project shortly to show the progress I have made. 

Keep Coding :)