Jesus saves...but does he back-up?

For me the save game is at the core of what I'm interested in as far as pet projects go, what you've done, who you've met, what colour key you've got in your inventory, that sort of thing. I've seen a couple of threads about it but this one I like as it goes that little bit beyond the basics of getting the file set up it also discusses serialising properties of a given object.

UDK and Borderlands 2

There's nothing like, a glimpse of the magic or a peek behind the curtain. Day job aside it's nice to see what the basics of UDK can actually lead to. Check out the glitch video where the player breaks out of the map and finds himself stood on a very familiar checker board block, a real insight to the vastness of the level too. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxrfRvcZ55I

Passion never goes away

Faking an AS3.0 document class in AS2.0

Depending on which VM you want to use, some people are still forced to use AS 2.0 for Scaleform development. if so here's scope can be a total nightmare, so why not start off your classes in a nice orderly fashion by faking an AS 3.0 document class.

BIT-101 - Document Class in AS2

Amazing list of tutorials from Tegleg

Tegleg is amazing on the forums ans here's a pretty stunning list of tutorials and bits n pieces

How about this for an exremely comprehensive list of programming resources

I found this list of resources from From Amit Patel over at WillyG's blog. 

My latest quest is to wrap my head around ussing Visual Studio with UDK and try and get nFringe working as not having intelisense in Flash Develop is just driving me insane.


EDIT: Found this in my drafts, thought the links alone were worth publishing this post.

Unreal script and intelisense

The one thing that has driven me insane trying to work with Unreal script hasn't been the syntax, nor the way the script is layered on top an invisible laye of C++ commands running all the time. It's the fact I'm still not comfortable writing code from scratch.

Everything I'm doing is copy and pasted and that's mainly down to not having the features I'm spoilt by having in Actionscript using FlashDevlop.

I've managed to hack my way through to having some sort of syntax colouring but it's just not enough, I need intelisense, I need 'Go to definition' and that's why I've decided to give Unrea Script IDE a shot, it's layered on top of Visual Studio, which as nasty and bloated as I remember it, is the real deal in terms of game development.

One thing I must mention is that not following the installation instructions can, as always, bite you on the arse.
RTM.

How to get UnrealScript Syntax in FlashDevelop

I've copied the as2.xml and used the syntax highlighting xml I grabbed from from a link on the UDK forums

UnrealScript.xml save it here:

C:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Local\FlashDevelop\Settings\Languages\UnrealScript.xml


Then Edit the C:\Program Files\FlashDevelop\Settings\MainMenu.xml

Add this:
<button label="&amp;UnrealScript" click="ChangeSyntax" tag="UnrealScript" flags="Enable:IsEditable+Check:IsEditable|IsActiveSyntax" />

Underneath:
<button label="Label.Text" click="ChangeSyntax" tag="text" flags="Enable:IsEditable+Check:IsEditable|IsActiveSyntax" />


Then in  C:\Program Files\FlashDevelop\Settings\ScintillaNET.xml

Add:
<include file="$(BaseDir)\Settings\Languages\UnrealScript.xml" />

This should now give you and option to use 'UnrealScript' in the syntax dropdown.

I've created an empty Haxe project and saved it inside C:\UDK\UDK-2012-02


One of the main features I can't stand in visual studio and notepad++ is having to maintain my project file, in FlashDevelop the project shows what's actually on disk and for me that's a huge time saver.

In my opinion Flashdevelop is simply the best code editing tool I've used. It's customisable, simple, and easy to use. features like duplicate line, wrapping searches and project /outline panels are worth their weight in gold when it comes to spending less time fighting your IDE and more time coding.

Magically disappearing assets in UDK

Last weekend I started adding my kids pictures into a UDK as we have plans to make a simple game, collecting items and battling trolls usual sort of stuff. I downloaded the latest beta for Adobe Photoshop 6 draw a path around each character, made it into an alpha channel and saved it out as a tga 32bit to keep the alpha.

I've not really played with alphas and transparencies in UDK but my idea was to create a simple plane, stick the texture onto the plane and that'll do me. Although it was a bit more trial and error than i had imagined I finally got there (see pic)

For the texture I used compression for TC_OnBitAlpha and for the material I plugged rgb into diffuse, alpha into Opacity then set the Material / Blend Mode to BLEND_Alpha_Composite. This seemed to work fine until I noticed the translucency in the sea material was cutting through the 'prince' material, so back into the material for a bit more tinkering and Misc / Enable Separate Translucency seemed to do the trick.

So, everything seemed to be going well, I imported a couple more textures, created materials and left it for lunch. When I came back I reopened my UDK level to find all the newer textures had gone.  

I tried and retried and managed to replicate it every time, I even imported static meshes but everytime I closed and reopened my level they were gone.

Being the dog with a bone type, I added a new level saved it various places, I eventually reinstalled Feb edition and then March just to be sure and every single time I got the same results.

I took it to the forum and checked everything anyone suggested to be sure, then I realised it had something to do with saving the current level verses saving the package.

I separated my textures and materials into their own package and it saved and reopened fine. Pretty much just as I did JetFire left me this gem

"Looks like if I import a texture and don't use it, it gets lost? < this, if you're embedding assets into your level file, rather than a separate .upk- If not used in the scene they'll get wiped. So, either use them, or put your stuff into separate upk's which don't have this feature."

So there you go, use or you lose.

I'm going to have a textures_materials package from now on.

Not so mental notes on GFxMoviePlayer, GFxObject and GFxValue

I do make mental notes, lots of them, it's just that some don't seem to stick as well as others.

NB this is from UDK 02/2012


GFxMoviePlayer which extends Object (the base class for everything in UDK) is pretty much the viewport and is permitted only one gfx movie which is set in it's MovieInfo variable, this all makes perfect sense now.

GFxObject also extends from Object, but this time it's constructor uses the 'within' term, which I can only guess (for now as I have no idea) that within the context of there actually being a GFxMoviePlayer and therefore a GFxMovie that a GFxObject can exist.

class GFxObject extends Object within GFxMoviePlayer

dependsOn(GFxMoviePlayer)


It's also worth noting that in the comments above this constructor, someone just as confused by all this, took it upon themselves to straighten things out with this gem:

/*
GFxObject is GFxValue in Scaleform code
*/


GFxValue the fundamental datatype in scaleform code for a MovieClip, now that I can understand