What are you working on?

[frag.machine]

Awesome. I'll take a closer look on that in the coming weeks.
Thanks for taking the time to implement what seems to be a really useful addition to the engine coders toolbox!

[toneddu2000]

Thanks for taking the time to implement what seems to be a really useful addition to the engine coders toolbox!

Indeed. I hope Spike is passing nearby in these hours..

[Jay Dolan]

Thanks guys. I would only ask that you temper your expectations and maintain an open mind regarding the approach. That is to say, Objectively has, so far, been very polarizing in terms of the feedback I've received from places like Reddit or ##c on Freenode. Some people think it's novel, clever, perhaps even useful, while others say that I'm bastardizing C, that it's useless because it only works with gcc and Clang, etc.

Personally, I look at it like this: if I didn't go OO, then much of the inheritance and class hierarchy that makes UIKit so powerful would be sacrificed, or would be very cumbersome to employ. I'd end up with a global namespace with literally 1000 or more functions -- it'd be Gtk+ all over again. And if I instead used C++, well first of all, it's C++, and secondly, C projects may not wish to use a C++ library.

And I have to say, through building an MVC framework on top of Objectively, I've been pleased with its features and relative ease of use. The only part that is tedious is the boilerplate of laying out class and interface structs, and documenting them. While I have Eclipse code templates for this purpose, I need to invest the time in an Xcode wizard to do the same. Or maybe even a command-line utility for generating type sources -- that way it's available to everyone, even if they're only using Vim.

Anyhow, frag.machine, here's an example of subclassing ViewController to implement an application. You can imagine a game implementing a ViewController for each "menu." If there are truly specialized functions of any given menu, those could be implemented here. But primarily, you simply override the `loadView` method to populate the VC's view hierarchy, bind Actions to your Controls, and that's about it. The default implementation of ViewController handles the initialization and presentation of the View, event propagation, etc. This is all any typical game engine would have to do:

https://github.com/jdolan/ObjectivelyMV ... ntroller.c

[Jay Dolan]

Hi again,

Just an update on ObjectivelyMVC:

Editable text inputs, and select inputs are now implemented. Also, High-DPI (Retina, 4k) display support for beautiful looking FreeType fonts.



What remains is:

* Slider input
* Draggable views
* Coordinating of multiple ViewControllers in a given window
* Graceful context restart
* Probably lots of little things

But this is surprisingly close to usable at this point

[toneddu2000]

Very cool Jay Dolan! How hard do you think it would be to add it to a quake engine like FTEQW? (but the coolest thing would be to have 'api' in quakec to use those cool UI stuff!)

[Jay Dolan]

It's extremely easy to integrate into any SDL2 / OpenGL application, toneddu2000. That's the whole point!

Here's a snippet of code taken from the example application: https://github.com/jdolan/ObjectivelyMV ... es/Hello.c

Think of this as your main loop in Quake:

Code: Select all


   while (true) {
      SDL_Event event;
      
      memset(&event, 0, sizeof(event));
      
      if (SDL_PollEvent(&event)) {
         
         $(helloViewController, respondToEvent, &event);
         
         if (event.type == SDL_QUIT) {
            break;
         }
      }
      
      SDL_RenderClear(renderer);
      
      drawScene();
      
      $(helloViewController, drawView, renderer);
      
      SDL_RenderPresent(renderer);
   }


As you can see, you only need to give ObjectivelyMVC a chance to handle events, and a chance to render the view stack. Both calls can be conditionalized in your engine to only execute when the UI should be presented / active. ObjectivelyMVC imposes absolutely zero control flow on your application.

[toneddu2000]

That's more clear now, thanks Jay Dolan

[toneddu2000]

Finished playing Rage (yeah I know, it came out in 2011 but I prefer to buy games when they're super cheap!:) ) and really I cannot understand why so many considered it trash. Probably it's for me of the best id games ever conceived for technical aspects, deepness, and gameplay, of course.

[frag.machine]

Finished playing Rage (yeah I know, it came out in 2011 but I prefer to buy games when they're super cheap!:) ) and really I cannot understand why so many considered it trash. Probably it's for me of the best id games ever conceived for technical aspects, deepness, and gameplay, of course.

Oh boy... OK, I'll bite it. I never played Rage and, based on almost all reviews, I avoided it even during steam sales. So reading what you wrote above, I picked a YouTube video to check it out (Yeah, warning! spoilers ahead, so don't click it if you have any plans to play this 5 year old game yet).

Well... Seriously ? When I heard people complaining that the game has no ending I was puzzled trying to imagine HOW could this be possible. Well, I can't find a better way to describe what I saw in the video: it's like when Willie E. Coyote tries to cross a painted tunnel in the wall. The supposed "ending" is that bad.

id was never that great to flesh game story, and I'll accept if you argue that in general the gameplay is decent/good (a lot of people says so, and I haven't played it after all). But this ending is... non-existent. I probably can't even spoil it with the video because well, the video simply doesn't contains a game ending. It's something else.

[toneddu2000]

yeah, personally I found end one of the most intriguing part of the game! Because, imo, it's not an end but a new beginning of hope, which it's quite awesome in a story developed in a game! The story of Rage, how it's developed, for me it's second only to Half Life 2 one. You can talk to everyone in the cities and you've really the idea to be in a post-apocalyptic, savage world. The thing I admired most is the incredible amount of detail id put in every square meter of every "ambient". When you're in the shrouded bunker, you can almost smell the gasoline in the barrels, or, in the gearhead vault, you can feel a bit of putrefaction mixed with old rusted metal. Believe me, seen with high quality settings, it's highly immersive! For the action gameplay part no doubt about it: best id game ever so far! If new Doom used same body reaction to weapon hit.. we're good! When you shoot to a very speed enemy like mutants, for example, the physics of his body reacts to the shot, but, since he was running, he kept running with his body inclined a little bit ... stunning imo!
You said you didn't play it, huh? Well, I reccomend you to buy it when it's in sale and don't trust too much on gameplay videos.. playing it's another pair of shoes imo!

[frag.machine]

Heh, thanks but no, thanks. Last time I gave a chance to a game that was bashed that much by reviews was Duke Nukem Forever. I played for like 2-3 hours and then uninstalled it. Never looked back.

[toneddu2000]

yeah, Duke Nukem forever took me down too! I couldn't even play 2 hours with it. It seemed like a bunch different things put toghether without soul.
Fortunately, for me at least, Rage was a completely different approach. It has soul to sell. If you search on YouTube the "Dead City" chapter (oh man what a level), you'll see why!

[Barnes]

advanced specular lighting


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvBrYYnERNA

[toneddu2000]

I like a lot the one on the right, bottom row. Good work Barnes!

[Jay Dolan]

Looks outstanding, Barnes.