Development Blog #3

Friday, March 29 2013

Well, I guess I can announce the working title of our game. We have decided to call it Project: Dimension for the time being. Hopefully next week I will have some code snippets to share, as that is when the real development work will begin.

This week Matt and I worked on our file I/O system that is going to help us keep the processing time of the game down. What we are doing is storing all of the NPC, monster and item data in separate text files. At game initialization, the game reads in these files and creates objects with the data that is stored in the text files. These objects are the stored in different array lists that are a part of the InventoryManager class and the EntityManager class. We feel that this way is best as it allows us to create more items/monsters/npcs on the fly, without having to hard code anything in. We did, however, run into one major problem.

The problem is still persistent as I have not figured out how to fix it yet. The issue arises when I try to test this file I/O system with some dummy data. The data is read in fine and stored into the array before being passed the the portion where the object is created. Once it hits the creation step, the program crashes and gives me a "No OpenGL data in the current thread". I know that this means I am trying to use something from the OpenGL library before OpenGL is initialized in the program, but I cannot for the life of me figure out where the error stems from. I think it has something to do with the way we are handling textures in the code, but we are in the process of changing over to sprite sheets. Sprite sheets may help avoid this issue as there will not be a separate texture file for each object. The data passed from the text file will have to contain some data on where on the sprite sheet the texture for the object is located. I have a feeling the sprite sheets are going to make this a heck of a lot easier. I am not a graphics guy, so it is somewhat of a foreign language to me. However, I am confident that Matt will be able to walk me through it the next time we meet.