Recap
First a bit of history. My primary goal since teaming up with Josh has been to get to gameplay as soon as possible. In a particularly productive team meeting early on this led to the birth of Lil'T. The original goal was to have a single, playable system in a week. Something basic with player controls, a nebula, and some asteroids. This was back when I had just finished the BSP implementation. We had been working solely in the engine and didn't even have a separate (code) project for LT. I didn't know any LUA or how to start writing gameplay that leveraged the engine so this was a good motivator to start knocking down those barriers. I think it ended up being about 2 weeks before we really got to the point we wanted to be. I have to say, hooking up the BSPs for the first time and being able to click things in the scene felt really damn good.
Now, as much as I want to get to gameplay, the second major goal is making sure the code we write is shippable. It can't be prototype stuff that's going to need to be re-written. It doesn't have to 100% perfect and complete either, but it needs to be written in a way that can expanded without needing to be refactored. In getting the first phase of Lil'T running it became obvious that the infrastructure to support LUA needed to be in before going further. That took another few weeks and you've likely read about some of that in the past couple of updates. During that work we spent a lot of time profiling, testing, and tweaking things and it became pretty obvious that being able to do some of that while the game was running would save us a bunch of time so I set to task on the debug UI.
With the dev UI in a good spot we're shifting back to gameplay again. We're likely going to do this 1-2 combo of sprinting on gameplay for a bit then stepping back to improve the infrastructure supporting it a few more times. Often we can't really tell what the scaffolding needs to look like until we have concrete gameplay as a guide. We spent a couple of days talking through how we wanted to simulate entities. Since they have one-to-many parent-child relationships (a ship is the parent of it's turrets), the game objects form a tree structure. We compared hierarchical updates using depth first and breadth first traversal. We compared job-based (run on all entities) and event-based (build a list of entities that need to be updated). Ultimately we settled on event-based updates with the ability to create jobs within that framework.
Input vs Simulation
Once we nailed down how we wanted updates to be processed, input became the next target. We ended up with a lot of code that looks like this:
Code: Select all
function onUpdate (dt, hasFocus)
if hasFocus then
if PHX.Mouse.Pressed(PHX.MouseButton.Left) then
self:fire()
end
if PHX.Mouse.Pressed(PHX.MouseButton.Right) then
self.camera:setTarget(self:getPick())
end
end
end
This isn't great. Having to manually track, pass, and handle focus in every single location that processes input is going to lead to a lot of mistakes and unnecessarily obtuse code flow. We knew this wasn't going to last long as it was being written and it needed to be addressed soon, before enough incorrect code built up that refactoring it would be a big task.
Josh and I talked through this quite a bit and his idea was to treat the game window as a fairly standard UI. The GameView would just be a UI widget that displays the final, rendered view of the simulation. The simulation becomes an autonomous thing that marches through time, updating its own state without any concept of a camera, a player, or input. UI widgets will provide visible controls and input handling that inform the simulation of requested state changes. The GameView decides how it should render the view of the simulation.
It took me a bit of time to understand the implications of this approach. It sounded a bit odd at first, but the more I worked through it, the more I was able to see the large number of subtle benefits.
- The GameView gets the full benefit of the automatic layout functionality of the UI. Debug and gameplay UI elements can push the GameView out of the way in addition to just overlapping it. If you've noticed how the debug UI overlaps gameplay that's actually quite annoying. It's nicer if the debug window is able to make the gameplay view narrower and slide it to the right so they are side by side instead. In general it means we can allow the game view to be resized, moved, snapped, etc very easily and naturally. We can iterate on UI layout faster, allow players to customize their UI easily, and handle window resizes without any added work.
- Multiple GameViews can exist (think radar, scanning, minimap, whole-system views, etc).
- Input focus is already handled cleanly. The UI tracks what your mouse is over, which widget has focus, is being dragged, etc. It's trivial to extend this to have separate mouse and keyboard focus, hard and soft focus, separate onInput functions for letting only the focused widget handle input, and whatever else might be needed.
- The amount of branching in gameplay code drops significantly. We don't have to check for focus or input because that gets hoisted to the highest level and doesn't need to be repeated all over the place. Even with our tiny system, the amount of code and complexity immediately dropped.
- The simulation takes on more of a client-server model. Input is handled in the 'client' which then requests state changes on the 'server'. Validation in the simulation all happens in one place. We end up being forced to build a clean API in some sense.
- Concepts like control schemes become much easier to think about and implement. Since each form of input is going to be a separate UI widget completely changing how the game controls just means creating a new widget and adding it to the UI hierarchy.
Of course, making this change meant a decent amount of refactoring. I had to pull all of our input handling out, decide where it went and reimplement it in the new system. I ended up with 3 new widgets: GameView, DebugWindow, and DebugPicker. I also reimplemented the data inspectors Josh added a while back so we can actually walk through the entire game state from UI windows. I also took the time to add a bit more UI polish: added stretch weights to grid columns/rows, fixed subtle positioning errors in labels, added alignment to labels.
This is mostly under-the-hood work, but I figure I can at least drop a gif of the GameView being animated smoothly: https://i.imgur.com/EkASTsN.mp4
This update is a bit higher level than I'm aiming for in general, but it's not a very involved or probably interesting topic and it's only a few days worth of work. Let me know what you guys want to hear more/less about so I know where to focus in the future posts.
Cheers