Douglas in GSoC

Not many things to update this week. I just started doing the internship, so I am still getting used to the new schedule. There is one thing I found out though: GSoC is like a million million million time more interesting than my internship. So sad that I cannot use GSoC to cover the credit requirement of my university. OK, back to business. There are two focuses in this week: one is the video replay menu, the place where you can replay the video you have seen in the game, and the other is the diary pages menu, where you can read April's diary. These two menus are both pretty easy, so I actually didn't work heavy on them. The overall logic for them is pretty straightforward and is basically the same as what we have done previously. Get the widgets, render them, put actions on them, done. The video replay menu A diary page Although pretty simple, there are still some small things that need to be treated specifically in these two menus. For the video replay m...

Time flies, isn't it? This week's focus is on the save & load menu. Similar to the settings menu, the most important part of implementing the save & load menu is to implementing the widget that shows the save data. I created a new class called SaveDataWidget for this purpose. A SaveDataWidget consists of three parts: the screenshot thumbnail, the text, and a blue outline that shows up when you move the mouse on it. The save menu of the original game The thumbnail and (most of) the text are already saved in the original save data. All I need to do is to extract them out and properly store and render them. The thumbnail will be read as a Surface , which will then be bound to a Texture and then got rendered by a SurfaceRenderer . Load the content The text further consists of two parts: the title of the chapter and the saving time. The title will be saved and loaded through the description field of the original save data, while the time is already s...

This week's main focus is on the settings menu, the menu that I deemed the most complex one before. Well, it is indeed complex, but the overall development process was again better than my expectation. Wish I can keep this good start along the way... So, the settings menu. The first things to do is, of course, to get all the widgets rendered on the screen. The basic part is identical to how the main menu and the diary index menu are implemented. Dump the game data, load them with class StaticLocationWidget , and they are in position.  But the settings menu have some other bothersome things. It contains two special widgets: checkboxes and sliders. These two widgets are not stored in the place where StaticLocationWidget reads resources and they behave differently.  The settings menu, see the checkboxes and sliders? One natural idea is to reconstruct the class StaticLocationWidget , making it a more general base class to handle all situations. But that would be a l...

Well, I guess the first week is the week that you learn the most. For the first week, I decided to tackle the main menu of The Longest Journey ,   for the reason that the main menu can largely improve the experience of playing the game and many components of the main menu can actually be linked to the future diary menu within the game. Due to its complexity, I never intended to implement the whole main menu out within a week. I planned to build a basic structure of it, got something on the screen and then I can move on to other parts based on the built foundation. So far, the outcome is, surprisingly, better than I have expected. That does not mean I didn't encounter difficulties. Right at the beginning, I found myself messed up in the different versions of The Longest Journey game data provided on the market. I got my game from Steam, and it turned out that I need to install two extra libraries to let ResidualVM fully support its different sound format. Have to say, usin...

Well, I didn't expect that making a blog will take my whole afternoon away. Making a good look on Blogger is really not that easy. I think I need to better strengthen my skill of choosing typefaces... Ok, not the time for nonsense. So, I am going to take my first Google Summer of Code project. As a long lover of game programming and development, I am so happy that I got accepted in the project of ResidualVM, a 3D game interpreter for old PC games. I don't have actual game programming experience before and now I finally got the chance to see and feel (and potentially mess with) an actual game engine. I am really excited about what will I experience in the coming three months of working. Well, for the project, I am going to further improve and develop the Stark engine within ResidualVM, which is the game engine for interpreting the game  The Longest Journey . To complete the project, I am going to implement the game menus and the shadow feature. The menus part doe...