So my last post was about how I had become slightly too addicted to playing games and that had taken away from me actually making them. I'm glad to say I have managed to get right back into it again, and quite successfully. So what have I been doing?

So I have been looking into the collision filtering mechanism that Physx supports. The basic mechanism allows you to provide a mask and a group to decide whether two objects require a collision callback.

Although this does seem quite flexible it has some serious limitations, mostly because the mask and group are just uint32's which seriously minimises the number of masks and group you can have for one game. Originally I was thinking about going through and creating some generic groups e.g.:

• Player
• Enemy
• Boundary

The list could go on to name a few more. Basically what you would then do is on a per Entity basis in my engine you would setup a group that was Enemy and it should provide collisions for Player and Boundary. Having all this mask and group stuff just didn't seem flexible enough and I would still then need to provide the game logic to check which enemy it was and which type of boundary to decide the outcome. So instead of this I am still going to use the mask and groups as it provides some optimisations but I just have it decide whether to call the callback or not. i.e. mask can be 0 or 1 and group is always 1. This seems to work well enough, I know it's probably not as efficient but I think making it easier to use is much more important. 

After getting all the collision filtering working properly I had then implemented the Entity Destruction System that listened for kill entity messages.

The physics system would handle the collision logic, i.e. when there is a collision between a bullet and an enemy an EntityDestroy Message is sent for both of those entities. 

There was a lot of bugs that cropped up with this, specifically because my message system is instant i.e. an entity destroy message is sent, the Entity Destruction System will go straight into the handler for this and if the entities was then removed it would cause complications because the physics system is still in a for loop of all the Entities.

To combat this I created a destruction queue and handled this in the update function of the Entity Destruction System.

There were also a lot of random bugs with the entity destruction as I had never really fully tested it that way. The memory was always cleaned up when I closed the program but that was different from choosing an entity in the middle of the container and removing it and all of it's components and the systems it was subscribed to. I also had a similar issue with removing Mesh Instances, I had never actually removed singular instances from the scene before so that had to be implemented.

I got through it all in the end and all seems much better now. Anyway enough talking, here is where it is at:

Oh as an added note I also added some functionality for freezing an axis. The player character was colliding with the walls and then spinning off in directions that I didn't want, now it is fixed on the Z and Y plane allowing only movement across the X.

So there it is, I have what is essentially some of the most basic functionality for Space Invaders:

• Enemy's Dropdown when Colliding with the Boundaries
• Enemy is Destroyed when a bullet hits it.
• Bullet is Destroyed when it collides with an Enemy.
• Player can sideways
• Player can shoot bullets
• Player is restricted by Boundaries

I'm really impressed with how this is going, and I am relieved that I can finally complete a task that I have been receiving e-mail task overdue notifications about for weeks now.

So what's next on the cards? 

I am going to plough on, the next few things that I need to look at are:

• Enemy and Player Health and Lives
• Enemy firing ( initially will be pseudo random )
• Dealing with Game State, Level Start, Level Failure, Level Completion

There is plenty to do but I really think these things won't take long at all. A lot of the groundwork is already in place. 

​Cheers :)

​Okay so this a blog post basically to express my own dissappointment.

I don't normally do negative posts because... well why would you want to be negative? positivity breeds motivation. At this point I think I just need to talk about the reasons I am not being very productive and in talking about it hopefully make a change.

So I went on Holiday a while back and since then my motivation for doing my project is almost none existent. I think the combination of getting back into working life and also getting into a couple of games is the cause of all this. 

For a while I was playing Counter Strike: Global Offensive almost every weeknight. Then on the weekend I was spending time with my girlfriend and seeing family/friends. I got way too into this routine, more specifically I was becoming a little addicted to CS:GO. This was to the point where I would forget to have tea or do any chores around the house. So a week or two ago I realised I had to stop. Playing it wasn't even fun anymore either as I had progressed to a level where it was far too challenging for me to actually get any kills/win many games. So at this point I was just getting frustrated, except I had to play "Just one more" until eventually it was 1am and I had work in the morning.

So the other day I realised (with a little nudge from Meg) I needed to uninstall the game in an effort to hopefully start doing something productive. So I did. I uninstalled it, and this is the first week where I haven't played it at all in a long time. I have however recently bought a load of old school RTS Games (Age Of Empires II, Cossacks:Art of War, Cossacks:European Wars). When will I ever learn! So this week I have managed to play Age of Empires each night and I seem to be falling into the same trap. The only positive from this is that the panning of the camera makes me feel a little nauseous and so I can't play more than maybe 2-3 hours. Because of this panning problem I am hoping I will get bored of playing shortly and then I can concentrate on doing at least a little bit of work on my projects.

Not a technical post, more just a look inside my strange brain. 

I am hoping just putting all this stuff down will help me realise how daft I am for playing games so much!

Thanks :)