Snow day fun!

Hmm, seems like a semi-productive day. Snowing outside anyway so I wasn't going to go out

I got an XML parser sorted out for the game objects in my engine. Basically all game objects are component based (i.e they use aggregation rather than inheritance).

So now I have a bit more flexibility as I can save my test worlds in an xml file and have the world loader class simply load the world.xml file (or whatever) that defines all of the agents and other objects in the game.

Next up is to do the same for the behavior tree itself. I've already done an editor of sorts that I can knock into better shape for the XML creation of a tree, so its just a matter of using the excellent XMLReader library to parse in the BT itself. (Incidentally, if anyone is looking for an XML class that does the business, I am preferring this one to TinyXML, which I've also used in the project).

Fun thing is that I got libCurl setup yesterday to pull a spreadsheet from google docs as XML, I can then feed this into the world loader class and theoretically I can actually distribute my game "levels" via google!

I also wasted an hour or two looking at the various video capture software to try and record a video of the app (its not really a game yet). Tried wegame, guncam, fastcampro but of course fraps is the only really useful solution outside dumping raw frames and using something like premiere to turn that into a video. Fraps did a bloody good job of recording 720p video from the game, but unfortunately windows movie maker bites at encoding. But it was good fun splicing a few shots together and titling it all. Although I think the footage looks bad enough that I'll keep it to myself for posterity.

I also packaged up a .zip file of the game today to see how trim I can get it. A quick purge of some of the nvidia texture library from my media folder and I'm down to an 8meg zip file. If I were a bit more aggressive about pruning I think about 5-6meg is probably achievable. Not the ideal download, but then most of it is Ogre libraries, which now I think about it, I can mostly do without.

Anyway, a productive fun day doing some general AI coding and engine schlok and having fun making dumb movies to amuse myself. Life is good when it snows!!!