GP2X Mighty Mini Bug Blaster

[Dzz]

Hello everybody!

I was thinking it would be fun to play around with some graphics/game programming and it struck me that it would be particularly fun to build something for a handheld gaming device. The openness of the gp2x platform seemed attractive so I decided to play around with developing something for it.

I don't know much about 3D programming so I decided to do a 3D project since learning new stuff is half the fun of coding as a hobby. Mighty Mini Bug Blaster is the working title for this little game, which will likely take quite a while for me to program.

I didn't see any particularly useful 3D code that I could steal so I decided to build a 3D engine from scratch, which is very interesting and challenging.

Unfortunately, I do not yet have my gp2x (I'm sure it will arrive eventually) so I decided to start the development on Windows and port whatever I have over to the actual device when I get it. So I built a little SDL wrapper to emulate the gp2x screen memory. I'm not a big fan of big libraries so I won't use SDL for the gp2x version of the code, but it's a simple way to get stuff onto the screen for Windows.

So far I have some code to manage lists of vertices and triangles, and I think I understand the math well enough that my geometry transformation code works, although it will want some optimization eventually.

Besides the 3D engine, there's a bunch of other tasks that need doing:

• Sound and music. I plan to grab the code from MikMod and take what I need
• Fonts and text support. I plan to grab the SFont code for that
• Picture loading. I plan to grab the needed code from libpng
• 3d model importer. I'm planning to use the Milkshape 3D format

I'm playing with Milkshape, trying to learn to make simple 3D models.

As soon as I have something even mildly interesting working on the gp2x I'll start releasing binaries for people to play with, because I know I like to see what other people are up to. I'll release all the source too of course, though I doubt anybody will be too interested in using it for anything.

Anyway, just thought I'd introduce this project. I'll post new notes once in a while to chronicle my progress, unless that sort of thing is inappropriate for this forum, in which case somebody please tell me!

 

[judge0]

Are you using floating point?

 

[Dzz]

Are you using floating point?

​

I am for now, just to get stuff working. It's designed to use 16.16 fixed point though, but for now my code just has a

"typedef float fixed;"

and I'll switch it all after the algorithms are working correctly.

 

[murak]

I might not be the right person but, Welcome!

 

[timbobsteve]

Most impressive. You say you have a good grounding in math... where can a person who knows little abou math learn more so he too can develop 3D apps and better understand game mathamatics?

I never paid attention in maths... I really wish I did now though

Good Luck with the App. Hope it all goes well.

 

[Dzz]

Most impressive. You say you have a good grounding in math... where can a person who knows little abou math learn more so he too can develop 3D apps and better understand game mathamatics?

I never paid attention in maths... I really wish I did now though

Good Luck with the App. Hope it all goes well.

​

Thanks. I got the book "Essential Mathematics for Games" by Van Verth and Bishop, and I'm working from that. But I think there are a lot of books that describe this stuff and probably a bunch of web sites too.

 

[Dzz]

Got my gp2x in the mail and played with it a little bit. Nice unit.

Now I'm going to put Mighty Mini Bug Blaster on hold for a little while and try to desperately code a little something completely different and much simpler for the competition -- not to win obviously, but having a deadline will be a bit of a motivator to figure out how to write code for the gp2x. 11 days eh? How hard can it be?