I think I will definitely have to have a look at the particle system within blender to try and work out what this whole modifier thing is At first look though, these seem like quite high level features whereas I am currently still looking at the fundementals of how the particle system will function. That’s not to mean that I’m not thinking of high level features and how they will tie into the low level system, just that I have no schedule yet to implement them.

With regards to Partio, why have I not seen this before? I’m not sure if it’s exactly what I want, but the ability for artists to make their particle systems in their favorite tool and load it into Maratis. The only issue I have is my pet hate when it comes to third party libraries… They usually take care of file I/O themselves. It looks like it may be frustrating to get it to load from the Maratis package system. We will see anyway.

With regards to my dilemma, I did a bit of planning last night and I think I have a fairly decent plan of how I want to do things. Expect another post either today or tomorrow with a rough design and the results of some little tests

http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/blog/DPSF-Dynamic-Particle-System-Framework–Free-particle-library-for-XNA-Windows-XBox-360-and-Windows-P

http://lesterbanks.com/2010/11/partio-open-source-library-for-particle-files/

Hope some of that inspires/helps, just realize I’d not had time to look much beyond the initial pages.

cheers and ttyl-
nl

I’ll take a peek and let you know.

cheers
nl

I’ve noticed from your website that you probably won’t approve of the fps concept, but the reason I’m using it as an example is that it demonstrates a lot of the features which can be used in practically any game genre.

If the tutorials are of any help, I would love to hear from you on that count

If so prob. not a bad idea, just wanted to make sure there weren’t tutorials somewhere for programming in general that you might be reffering to, give our conversation.

cheers
nl

If you want to follow through with how to start a project from scratch, and already have a reasonable idea of how to program, I’ve got a collection of tutorials slowly growing which might be able to help you there. I’d also love feedback on them, anything you don’t understand, I will expand upon.

I totally agree with you that the fact Maratis has an editor is great. To be honest, though, it’s not an ideal solution for all games. For internal levels a sort of “god view” can be very frustrating. To be honest, one plugin I’d REALLY love to see developed is an in game editor plugin. If you take a look at Sauerbraten as an example, you can see it’s quite nice to go around and just move things around. Of course you mostly create geometry in the Sauerbraten engine, but the concept is there. But the Maratis editor is infinitely better than no editor at all.

I’m sorry that I may have misunderstood about your level of skill, but hopefully my comments may be of help to other people at some point anyway.

Didn’t mean to give false impression of current skill set,,I do know how to program overall, but not enough to not be very frustrated as a end goal to creating something that runs LOL . I started with basic on Vic20 ( dont ask ), then C-64, amiga and now pc of course. I know the most about, but also some java/c++, but not enough to create a project from scratch per se. One language under ones belt is usually enough for any other typically. I was going to use panda3d at one time to create my ideas, but opted not to for several reasons one being no ‘editor’ unlike the wonderfully conceived maratis.

That in large part is the reason I latched onto maratis, in conjunction of course, with all the other fascinating features, and as we both know now, much more to come in part thanks to plugins

I’ll address your other points later, but I wanted to be more transparent in saying I do know how to program for the most part. It’s going to take some time, as once sung by prob. , my favorite singing group, The Carpenters

cheers
nl

The thing I would say that any project, and especially an open source project, could do with in terms of help, is feedback. You’ve already given me good feedback that I’m heading in the right direction so again, I thank you. It would be good, in future when something more substantial exists, if you could also provide feedback on how you are using things and how you would like to use those features. Much as, primarily, these things are usually originally made with one project and solution in mind, I tend to find that it creates a more stable and flexible design if you consider other posibilities. Of course, as teams are usually small, in this case only me, quite often features might have to be put on hold indefinitely if they don’t directly affect my own outcome. However, once they have been mentioned, the thought will be there, so usually things will be developed with extension into that area in mind.

I’m not saying you, or anyone else, isn’t welcome to get their hands dirty and help with the programming. Anything I write, apart from my game itself (for now) will be under some form of Open Source license and be uploaded to github, people can quite easily fork my code and merge back. Of course, right now there’s not much point.

I tend to find, with these things, people either have their own ideas about how to do things, and attempt to make their own solutions, as I’m doing, or they latch onto someone else’s existing solution. Both are perfectly valid ways of doing things, they both will improve the quality of the free and open source software available. However, as such, I’m in no position right now to even begin to request help, I have no software at this stage to back it. Once I have, I’m sure I’ll be asking people if they have any experience in UI design for the editor, or any host of things. If at any stage people wish to contribute without me asking, all they’d have to do is send me a message.

With regards to you mentioning your lack of skill twice now, that is definitely not something to worry about. The absolute best thing you can do is throw yourself at a project, ideally one that’s already rolling, and try to wrestle it into your control. People always say that programming is difficult, but it’s really not. The syntax can be a little confusing and the the vocabulary daunting, but the underlying rules are, for the most part, incredibly simple. All you need is to understand simple constructs like if/else, for, while, and a basic understanding of classes/structs and you’re good to start digging into other people’s code. The syntax familiarity comes pretty quickly, most languages have precious little “in the language” and most is in libraries. The vocabulary itself (ie libraries) you can basically forget about while you’re learning. There’s absolutely no reason to try hard to remember what every single stl container does and what parameters map::erase takes etc. It’s not like a spoken language where you can’t realistically look in a dictionary for every word. Don’t worry about those things and look them up at every stage if you need to. An interesting metric is that, over the course of a project, the average programmer writes about 20 lines of code per day. Of course that’s a lot to do with refactoring and rewriting, but on the other hand, if you try hard and make sure you write 30 lines of code, but they’re mostly right, you might only rewrite 10 of them later, you’ve done well.

Finally, before I run off for lunch, I would love to read more about your game ideas and see how you’ve been doing