Oli's old stuff

Tinkering with retro and electronics

Aug 3, 2016 - 6 minute read - oldcode

Updating Manta-X (Part 3)

Updating Tech

Whilst I have have stripped out a lot of cruft and slowly begun bringing the project up to date, remember that a lot of the technologies we’re currently based on are very old - even after the update from a couple of years ago when I brought in SDL 1.2, TinyXml 2 and Visual Studio 2012.

I decided that whilst things are fairly simple, I should upgrade some of the foundations - it’ll be easier to do it now before things get more complex.

SDL2

The first thing I wanted to do was get onto SDL2 as it is the current branch that replaces the old 1.2 branch. The biggest reason for me doing this is that at some point, I’d like to upgrade to OpenGL 3 and that they’ve improved a lot of things, including controller support.

First thing to do was to look at the really handy SDL2 migration guide and get an overview of the main changes. For me, it was mostly around creating the window and handling keyboard input.

I tackled it head on:

  • Downloaded SDL2 version 2.0.4 to deps
  • Updated premake to reference it instead of 1.2 (folder paths, link objects)
  • Compile
  • Fix resulting errors

The errors were exactly as the SDL2 Migration guide suggested. The window creation & OpenGL context stuff was slightly different, which meant changing the RenderWindow. Keyboard input needed to use scancode - so that got changed in KeyStates and PlayerControllerComponent. Once I’d changed a few minor things to handle these changes I was up and running on SDL2 without any side effects. And that was it. The upgrade was committed in a single CL that migrated to SDL2 and removed SDL1.2 entirely.

Visual Studio 2015

Visual Studio 2012 is good, however the toolset supports a very limited version of C++11. There’s a bunch of stuff in the C++11 standard that I like plus I generally perfer to be on a fairly recent compiler version where possible. As a result, I wanted to upgrade to Visual Studio 2015.

Turns out that my prior changes of upgrading to SDL2 and using premake made this as trivial as updating my premake.bat file to pass the argument vs2015 instead of vs2012. And that was literally it. Clean, build, run - it all went through without a single issue.

TinyXML

I used to be a huge fan of XML. Nowadays I don’t touch it if I have a choice. Like all the cool kids out there, I use JSON. I use it professionally and it’s a lot more familiar to me on a hand-authoring and parsing point of view. A couple of months ago, I wrote a JSON Parser for fun to practice my TDD skills. It turns out that this exercise will be useful.

Being that I wanted to transfer a lot of the component initialization code to be data-driven, I decided to start this work by using my JSON library.

Over several commits, I gradually migrated away from XML to JSON, loading components from a JSON file. The cumulated in me removing TinyXML from the build. Like everything, premake has made this sort of thing very easy so far. I’ll write more about the migration to JSON in another post.

If you’re not using it - go use premake now. It’s excellent.

Old Tech - Next Gen

There’s a bunch of old technology in this project still.

OpenGL

I’m using a really old-skool, immediate mode OpenGL renderer. This style of renderer was old-hat back in 2004 and in 2016 it’s prehistoric. I want to upgrade to using shaders, vertex buffers and all that. The thing is, I don’t know anything about it. I’m going have to learn it - this project would be a nice way of learning this stuff as it’s small and could be done pretty quickly. I’ll be looking at this in the future as it’s something that interests me.

Texturing

I ripped out my own texturing and image loading system as it wasn’t used. I had a basic (uncompressed) TGA loader and that was it. I’m sure that when I need it, there will be a bunch of libraries out there to use. I’m confident that’s not going to be a concern.

Milkshape3d

The 3d assets in this game are created in Milkshape3d and loaded from the source format. They’re low-poly and untextured - I’m happy with low-poly although this was 2004 low-poly, not 2016 low-poly!

The real problem is that there hasn’t been an update to Milkshape3d since 2009. That’s 7 years ago. It’s abandonware. I could keep using this tool or I could migrate to another tool. Having asked on Twitter, the three main recommendations are:

  • Blender
  • Wings3d
  • Maya LT

They’re all viable (although Maya is a a harder justification due to cost), but the biggest blocker is the tool itself and time. Modern tools seem to have a super-complicated interface compared to Milkshape3d. All of these will take a lot of time to learn to achieve stuff as basic as I have now. However, if I ever wanted to add more content to the game, I’m going to have to decide whether to battle on with a dead tool or to dedicate time to a newer tool.

When it comes to deciding on the tool, the export format will be important - this will basically be my import format, or something I use to derive it. I’m pretty confident that I won’t need to roll my own importer and that assimp or similar libraries will help.

Pipeline

The game currently loads raw source assets without processing. Currently the “conversion” to game format is done at load time. For now, this is acceptable - however at some point in the futre, I’ll likely need to build in a conversion pipeline. I’ll do this when I need to - definitely bottom of the pile for now.

Build Improvements

I’m a HUGE advocate of testing and continuous integration. One huge gap right now is that my only test strategy is to run the game and manually verify the results. This is not a scalable approach. As I add new features and the code gets more complex, things will break. Things will break. And I won’t know about them until it’s too late. Adding a level of testing (unit tests & integration tests) will help here. I’ve been using my own test framework upptest for various other projects, so it’d be easy to add this here.

The next thing that would be useful would be to hook up a system such as Visual Studio Online or Travis CI to ensure that the project builds on a machine that isn’t my laptop. It’d also help for initial non-Visual Studio compilation verification (eg: clang). Again, this could be easy to set up now whilst things are simple - it’s worth considering if I indend to treat this as a proper project.

Wrapping up

There’s a whole bunch of other tech improvements or decisions I can make, however I’m defintely not make them now. I’ll tackle each problem as it comes, making the choice using the information I know at the time.

The next post up, I’ll be talking about how I ripped out the XML ShipClass system in favour of a JSON-based component initialization approach.

Until next time!