So last time I wanted to focus on getting the Systems working via import/export. I have managed to do this now although It doesn't work in the same way as the components. 

Systems can only be ran once by the engine and entities apply to be acted upon by them. Even though the code allows you to do "entity->AddSystem<RenderSystem>()" what it is actually doing is just adding the list of entities that will be processed by the render system. 

After doing all this and basically getting the ECS in a state where I could start adding the components that were in the level editor I decided to stop. Instead of adding all the old components I am going to steer clear of the level editor for a while and instead focus on a small game. One that wouldn't even need a level editor.

Enter Space Invaders...

So I've decided to remake the classic arcade game but in 3D. The functionality will be very similar to what the original was (unless I decide I prefer something else). You will still be able to play it in the same view style as well i.e. Top Down. Alternatively you will be able to play it in a first person mode as well.

Anyway that's the basic idea here is what I have so far:

It's really not that impressive and creating functionality it a little bit tedious at the moment as I'm having to create loads of classes for the components and systems. Once I have written these I will be able to reuse them for games in the future I hope.

All is going well... Oh on another note I bought a new nVidia Geforce 970 gtx and have just installed it so I may get distracted by shiny new games. 

Cheers :)

Since last post I have been working on the parsing of entity instances from XML just like how it does for the Assets. This did bring up some interesting questions about entity communication and caused a fair few changes. Currently in XML there are a pair of <Entity> tags inside which there are a number of <Component> or <DataComponent> Tags. These in essence define what the entity is which is really generic and great for re-usability.

The problem is that a lot of entities need to send messages to specific other entities for example a lot of entities may want to know the players ID to send messages specifically for that entity. Previously the Entity ID's were just unsigned int values that were generated when an Entity was created, which made it impossible to know which entity was the player unless the order stayed the same. 

To overcome this I have now changed the Entity ID system to be a little more flexible, initially an Entity has an EntityType and an EntityName. An example of this could be "GUI" and "StatsBar", this along with the original unique ID now combine to make a unique ID such as "GUIStatsBar34". I know what you're thinking: "But that doesn't overcome the not knowing the player ID problem". Okay so to overcome this, you can either provide Entity Type and Entity Name or specify the Unique ID yourself. So for the player the UniqueID is "MainPlayerID". 

This overcomes the issue of knowing a specific entities ID and also gives some better debugging information. Previously an Entity would have an ID of 37 and I would have to guess what it was from the Components and Data Components that it had. Now I can just look at the ID and it should give me some hint as to the object I am dealing with.

Okay so not much to show this time but there has been quite a bit of work behind the scenes. Next few things on the cards are to get the networking aspect of the engine setup before going much further, especially as this may involve some changes to the messaging system and general game architecture. 

Happy Coding :)

The past few days I have been finishing up some of the extra functionality for the GUI and fixing a few bugs. After doing this I decided it was time to make my engine a lot more data driven and decided to allow for the parsing of XML to load the assets such as Meshes, Animation Data, Sounds and Textures. 

This luckily didn't take much work as I had already created generic classes for parsing XML in a previous project( Another Win for reusable code! ). 

So now Instead of having a couple hundred lines of code for importing the assets for the engine I now have two lines:


ParseAssets parser( mEngine );
parser.ParseFile( "Assets.xml" );

With a tidy XML document that looks a little like this:

There are still plenty of adjustments to make and I'm hoping that even more of the engine can be loaded using XML, such as:

• All Game Entities with positioning
  
• GUI Layouts
• Engine Settings i.e. Resolution/Shader Detail/Shadows Toggle

One massive advantage to this way of loading is the most obvious in that the code is a lot less cluttered but it also means that you don't need to recompile when you only want to tweak game specific values; further than that it means that you can load radically different levels/assets that you may need for testing without having to change any source code. 

Cheers :)