I'm noticing my view counter for these post is slowly going up, I'm curious if people are actually reading these posts or if the views are all coming from miss clicks and spiders. So if your actually interested in what I'm doing, go ahead and leave a comment.
Code Update:
So what I have been working on is the character controller, which as the name suggest turns mouse movement and key presses into character movement and action. I've managed to solve a few issues i was having before, but still a lot of work to do on this front, so I'm going to probably be spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to make this work. As I have been working on it I'm also starting to realize I've been thinking about the relationship between entities and their physics shapes all wrong. I've been thinking that entities having 1 shape that can be used to get their position and rotation information and this is fine and dandy when your dealing with test cubes and simple shaped objects, but is going to really bite me in the ass later when I want entities comprised of multiple physics shapes. Now if this was a game that used simple pre-made animations, it wouldn't be an issue as all I would have to keep track of is the entity position, the animation name it's currently playing, and the time when that animation started, from that I could easily reconstruct everything needed. But as that I intend to make extensive use of procedurally generated animations for things like jiggle and ragdoll physics, I need a better way to keep track of that information then I currently have.
Story time:
Earlier this week I started working on another programing project and for it I needed to work with a part of the Windows API that I've never touched before, so I went looking on MSDN for some example code. After a bit of searching I found a page that said the example code that I needed was part of the Windows SDK. I pulled up the Windows SDK and couldn't find any example code anywhere, so I thought, it's probably just installed without something checked in the installer, I'll just reinstall it and that should fix everything...Windows SDK broke super hard. Except for a few tools, the Windows SDK directory was completely empty. After a few more uninstalls/re-installs, I decided to bite the bullet and try a manual uninstall. I quickly realized that the uninstaller doesn't so much uninstall as just delete a few files and call that good. It left a complete mess everywhere, there must have been at-least one registry entry for every single file in the SDK scattered all about the registry. I gave up trying to delete them all after a few hours and looked for other solutions. Where upon I discovered the SDK has a repair tool hidden away. Running it restored most of the missing files, but I was still missing some of the Windows API headers and libraries as well as all the crt headers and libraries. Now I'm not entirely sure the crt is supposed to be part of the Windows SDK before Windows 10, but I ran a search on my hard drive and the files where no where to be found. After a few hours beating my head against the wall trying to figure things out, I finally turned to others for suggestions where upon someone suggested using a virtual machine. I installed the SDK on a virtual machine and got all the Windows API files I was missing, but no crt files. I did a lot of googling in hopes of finding a solution. Most sources I found said I was just in the SDK while some others suggested that it might actually be part of Visual Studio it's self, I checked visual studio's install folder and no crt files anywhere. I also know that I was able to compile and run programs just fine before messing with the SDK, so it must have been part of the SDK. At one point I got frustrated and realized I has just been yelling at bing for a solid 10 minutes. The only lead I could find on a source of crt header and library files was Microsoft's new ucrt (yet another version of crt that Microsoft is trying to force on us because that worked so well all the other times they did it), so fine, white flag raised, how do i get it? It's part of the Windows 10 SDK. So i grab the Windows 10 SDK and install the damn thing. It gets to about 97% done and then stops and rolls back the install. The resulting novel that was the install log report contained a typical cryptic Microsoft error message that took me an hour or so to find the meaning of. The error in a nut shell was basically "your not running Windows 10", which it seems like a real dick move to do when the web installer (I'll discuss my disgust for web installers some other time) is at 97%. This left me in a bit of a pickle, because I needed those files, but I quickly thought of a solution. While it was installing I changed the permissions of it's root folder to block everyone from being able to delete files or folders so that it couldn't actually remove anything when it started rolling back. This worked perfectly and gave me the files I so desperately needed. I took the files, shoved them in the appropriate locations and then compiled my program, SUCCESS!!! The program compiled with no problems and so I ran it. It died with a missing the ucrtbased.dll error message, this confused me because I always statically link the crt as a way to doge the weirdness caused by Microsoft continuously creating new versions. so to see if I was accidentally using the dynamically linked crt libraries, I removed them. I then recompiled my program and again it compiled just fine. When I ran it again it complained about missing the ucrtbased.dll. Really puzzled at this point, I removed the static crt libraries to see what would happen when I compiled it. The compiler complained about missing the static libraries when I tried to compile it again. My only conclusion is that for some reason the statically linked libraries still require the dll, which is something I've never encountered before. But after i don't even want to know how much time, I finally got it working, so that's enough for now, I'll deal with it another day.
Learning to Art Update:
For arting it up, I've been working on shading. I'm not entirely sure how useful shading will be exactly, but I'm sure it's a good skill to have none the less. For it I found out about and made my first tortillon (no idea how to pronounce it) and it's really good, possibly even too good. The thing is so good at shading that I kind of feel like using it now at my skill level, it would become more of a crunch then a tool, so I have sat it aside and have been trying learn how to shade without it. I do however seem to have come full circle and am once again trying to learn to draw strait evenly spaced parallel lines.
