Sonetto may have an year of not so active development.  Only now I (n2liquid) will start my studies for the entrance examination test in the university. That means I have only one year to learn tons of things I was delaying until today.  So, knowing my own self, I pretty much know what to do: give up Sonetto for an year (and only that!) and live for my books. It depends much, but Sonetto team is somewhat tied to the fact that we generally only manage to work and decide stuff when we discuss this stuff. That is, when working alone, one may have a bunch of ideas, but can’t select them and end up stuck in every problem found. Yoasakura would have to make each decision, code and continue his training at drawing. So I talked to a friend who is also on programming and open-source. He may help with the project, but we are not sure if it will work. I’m not even sure if he wants to do that, so it is not something to count with.

Regarding the BRGames contest, as long as its specifications are not released, we would say we are still trying (well.. not me, but Yoasakura, Marco, the “major” guy beyond the story of our game, although everybody work on it a little bit , and Cimirro, the musician).

It will be a somewhat tough time for the project, but it must be clear that nobody is thinking of giving up here. 2010, on the other hand, will probably be a very good year: I will not be on school anymore, the situation will be much better with Yoasakura finantially-wise and I’m sure he will have his drawing skills much improved by then. My studies start tomorrow. I wanted to put GenericMapModule to work before that, but seems like it won’t. Anyway, that’s it. I’m heading back to my city now (was out on vacation). See you next year .

Sure there aren’t news in this blog, but Sonetto’s activity can be proven if you see the SVN changes here. We aren’t paying much attention to the blog because Sonetto is going to participate in a brazilian game contest, and it’s going to be hard to finish everything in time. Thankfully, although the contest was already confirmed to happen, the official deadline wasn’t released yet, so we probably still have some time.

And not to waste this post without any news, Sonetto still doesn’t have the MapModule it had before we started rewriting it, but I’d dare saying it works much better than before (just as usual after a rewrite). We are not rewriting it anymore, but actually “adapting” the old code to the new decisions we’ve had. Yesterday I was hooking the InputManager to the ScriptManager. ScriptManager scripts now have access to input. Today I intend to do the same thing with the AudioManager and the Kernel (so that scripts can begin battles, for example), and then I’ll start implementing the MapModule and writing the Event-to-Event collision our WalkmeshManager lacks.

To an eventual brazilian interested in the contest, look it here [pt-Br].

We changed Sonetto license to a less restrictive one; now Sonetto source code will be released under New BSD License. This way, games created using Sonetto can modify the engine’s inner workings without releasing their source codes. This allows for commercial projects to be developed with Sonetto with lesser legal issues to be considered.

And more importantly, Sonetto is being fully rewritten. This time we will concentrate on creating a functional game engine instead of one that’s so flexible that becomes a general purpose engine, and not a J-RPG one anymore. We will still use the module system, but the interface between those modules won’t be so abstract as it was before, thus allowing the modules to be “aware” of each other, creating a more tightly integrated system. In the way Sonetto will be developed, the freedom you have to easily personalize your game ends in the modules. For the rest of the engine, it will be needed to modify the Sonetto Core source code, and that’s exactly why we changed from LGPL to New BSD. We want you (and us, of course), to be able to create highly personalized games without needing to release the source code. LGPL didn’t permit it, but New BSD thankfully does. You still can’t statically link to Sonetto Core, however, as it itself is statically linked to other LGPL’ed libraries, unless you release your project objects (compiled .cpp files, generally named with a .o extension), so that other people can relink Sonetto with other or modified versions of the LGPL’ed libraries used by Sonetto at their will.

Yoasakura’s personal rant:
People often think that J-RPGs are all the same, but each game have their own peculiarities. They may be similar, but they are not identical–each game needs its own personality, being it a different battle system, or a different menu behavior. (You see, even games from the same franchise, even sequels are not exactly identical.)

This post has to be written fast. I’ve got to go sleep.

I’m posting this just to say that I have implemented the sound sources thing that was lacking on the last update (about their positioning). Also, the WalkmeshManager is working just fine, althought its Event-to-Event collision test doesn’t work correctly yet. Still, the WalkmeshManager needs to be rewritten because its code is currently a mess. But what matters is that it is working now, and, most importantly, that we’re much more near to the fun part of the engine (yup, that means screenshots.. and maybe videos). Just wait and you will see

I’m finishing my day of coding now, and there is still time for a quick post here. I’ve commited the AudioManager with support for Sound Sources now, which are entities that can be attached to objects in the game to inherit their coordinates and render sounds relative to the Hero or the Camera. I didn’t finish this coordinate thing yet, but it can be done in a matter of 10 minutes. Also, I did a CollisionManager that uses a walkmesh to place the actors over it with an incredibly lesser computationally expensive algorithm compared to those using collision and physics engines. It is, again, based on Q-Gears code, thanks to them.

I’ve also uploaded some modifications Yoasakura did. He have created a “Slow Motion” debugging feature that can falsely decrease the game FPS and make everything run slower or faster than normal. It’s got to be useful! Yoasakura have also created a new concept for the Sonetto core: that of Module Factories. It standarizes more the modules, making Sonetto a more “focused” engine. It is a bit restrictive in a way, but much more expansible in another point of view (that of RPGs). I won’t go into details here because my time is short. I hope to post more news soon!

Yes, you’ve got it right. The AudioManager is being rewritten for the third time. The first time, it had a lot of features (almost the totality of which weren’t useful for RPGs) that didn’t work on my computer. It seems like my Realtek HDA doesn’t like OpenAL. I’ve managed to get them working together by lowering the hardware acceleration slider (on Windows) and by ripping off all the fancy effects OpenAL EAX extension gave. They were not important afterall, indeed. They were just giving us incompatibility trouble, etc. The second rewrittening of the AudioManager was working very well, but I’ve lost it. I just can’t figure where the hell I’ve placed those files, so I had to rewrite it once again. The good thing is that this time it’s working even better than the old one I’ve been writing it since yesterday, and now it’s only lacking support for sounds (BGM and ME code is okay). This last part is the easiest, however, so you could expect to see a new update by tomorrow.

Sonetto Project reached its 101th commit today. Ok, usually people use the 100th, but I didn’t notice it  last time, but it’s a good thing, as it indicates the project is progressing.

Unfortunately we have nothing new to show. We’ve been stuck trying to find out a way to make the player collide and slide with the world, and there are really few resources about this. Collision is so common in games, but still it’s complicated and there are no resources around to help, Most of Collision Detection Libraries today are focused on physics, and it seems that most of the indies around use physics to move their characters rather than directly by coding into their own engines. I don’t want to move the Sonetto characters using a physics lib, so the only way is to do it manually, and it’s pretty hard.

But we’ll figure out a way, it doesn’t matter how long it takes.

It has been 3 months since the last update. Well, the project has not seen much progress in the past months, because we didn’t have available time to work on Sonetto lately. But we’ve managed to work on some few things, like the Test Menu and the base of the Map Module. We still have long ways to go.

It’s nothing special, but the blog really needs an update, so, here it is.

Main Menu

Main Menu, Alternative Windowskin

Test Map Module

Map Module

Hello,

Hm, I said I would post soon and I ran up into a week with no updates. School problems. But anyway, here are the good thingies for today:
The InputManager has been completely rewritten and it is working fine. Differently from the last time we “finished” the InputManager, on this time I ended up thinking: “Humkay.. I think I’m not needing to see this code again soon”. On the last time, I thought: “Holy crap..! I really don’t wanna see this again soon!”. Instead, I think that now the code is okay, and that it’s going to be very intuitive for programmers to use it.

I have also editted many doxygen commentaries in many files. 29% of the code are comments, but I haven’t commented SonettoInputManager.cpp yet, and there are lots of uncommented classes throughout Sonetto. Perhaps we should comment them when we have some time.

Oh, and I almost forgot.. We are now using libSDL for input stuff, and we’ll be porting the AudioManager to SDL_audio soon (that’s my next step, I think). SDL will also be used to create a loading screen while Ogre boots up, and will probably be used together with Theora codec to display videos, but that’s a little far in the horizon for us to talk about.

Hello, folks

How long, huh? Going straight to the point(as I want to sleep), tonight’s updates were mostly cleanings in the code and project configurations. It may not seem much too important, but I really feel this night was worth standing up coding. Yoasakura have rearranged the SVN folders and created a nice “environment” for coding. There were some problems with such environment, but I think I’ve fixed most of it, if not all. The good thing about this is that now we can sit in our chairs and code. One of the main problems we were encountering was that we don’t have much free time, and each time we tried to code there were lots of things to fix before… and the time passed… and we didn’t do anything again. For example, I’m about 12 hours here, and I didn’t code anything great. Most of this time was spent fixing environmental problems. But now I feel that we have a really solid base to work on, and if I find 5 minutes to code, I can dedicate them to coding itself.

I have also modified a little how the Kernel singleton works, but that’s nothing that will be actually “visible” for the users. I just thought that way would be better. The InputManager is almost done, and is much, much, much more clean than the old one. We took about two weeks to code the old one, and this one was made in a day, and it’s lots better. It is just missing the analogical part and an efficient way to identify the joysticks plugged.

So, ’till the next update, hope it’ll be soon (probably today )