Here I sit, among fellow Game Design and Development (GDD) students in the GDD Computer Lab, my last quarter at Rochester Institute of Technology. There are so many things I want to do, and only so much time to do it; there's so much research I would love to do, but I'd have to sacrifice too much of my personal life, besides I'm not being paid to do it yet anyway. So, I've come to further realize, I think I would love to be paid to do research in the Video Game programming, related to graphics, user tools, etc. etc. There are A LOT of things I could do with user tools alone, especially when it comes to graphics, and it's something I'll be doing a bit of during this quarter so I can get a platform-independent Gadget System (UI and Application system) working!
I'm actually a little sad I haven't posted to my blog more, as there's much I want to share with the world, and I would love it for people to see I'm bursting with ideas and helpful thoughts. I have knowledge I want to share with the world, to help make it easier for people like me to get started and break into developing video games! So, I'll have to start tackling this more. I have a Matrix Tutorial/post I plan on releasing, it'll be about using them in games, not necessarily implementation; as from a programmers perspective, you don't need to know about the implementation to use it, as long as you understand it. There is soo much math behind all that goes into video games, and it would take a long time to get a grasp and derive every single thing that goes behind it all.
Right now I'm working on some utility functions, setting up a INI file for loading, saving, and editing INI files. From there, I plan on setting up a Settings class where you can setup automatic loading from the INI file; I was tossing around the idea of being able to monitor an INI file in realtime so if you make a change to it your settings will load them up, which in response will throw events and re-apply the settings to your current game. This seemed like a powerful debugging feature, though obviously should be a configurable option.
I think I may make a post on tools ideas, or at least make a post on the gadget system I'll be working on. One of the tools I thought would be neat would be to use a networked mouse or keyboard, which in reality is more useful for consoles, but I thought still could be a powerful feature. I know I can't wait to add networking features to my engine, I want to be able to use FTP or something like it for streaming files, either for transferring levels mid-game for user content, distributed processing, or what have you. I also thought it would be neat to pull in files from the web as well, though I'm not yet sure if it's entirely necessary yet; granted, I haven't thought about this in a while. I pretty much plan on using gadgets for managing everything that I can in the engine, to make it as easy as possible to work with, so you can tweak things in realtime with the utmost control.
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