Exporting Usable Mesh Files

Posted on July 3, 2017 by Eric DeBrosse

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why I couldn’t export mesh files with the new 64-bit UNICODE version of the 3ds Max Orion Engine exporter.  All of the vertices were coming out all zeros!  I thought for sure it was a problem with the recent 64-bit conversion. So, I’ve been chasing around pointers and checking data type sizes, etc.

Well, I finally stepped through the HUGE exporter routine and discovered that the problem was with an attribute sort optimization.  In fact the debugger stepped me right up to the very line of code I was working on when I had to stop working on the engine!  I remember that small detail now, LOL.  That’s why the exporter wasn’t working!  It was just hitting some unfinished code is all.  By disabling that particular optimization for now, everything seems to be working great again!

Posted in Engine Development | Leave a comment

Bounding Volumes, Server Hardware, etc.

Posted on June 15, 2017 by Eric DeBrosse

I’ve been working on a glitch in the engine that caused the root level bounding volume not to be created, if the node didn’t have any vertices.  When merging the bounding volumes in a hierarchy, the top-level node should represent the entire object.

I decided to split the current game databases into two separate servers.  I want to make sure we have great performance with all of the constant data that the game servers will be generating.

I’ve also been documenting the network topology that I currently have implemented.  It’s a pretty interesting setup that I believe will work quite well.  I like the way more servers can be easily added, as demand increases.

I’m going to continue working on the code for the servers this weekend.  I want to get my multi-threading ideas in place before I actually bring the game back online.  This, along with all the new re-purposed server hardware I’ve been collecting, should make the application run very smooth!

Posted in Engine Development, Hardware | Leave a comment

Memory Manager and CPUID

Posted on June 2, 2017 by Eric DeBrosse

I’ve been going through my notes on the engine this week.  There were many little small issues that I was able to mark off the list!  The code is running pretty nice.  Things are certainly headed in the right direction.

Fixed an issue with the Memory Manager when running on a 64-bit processor.  I thought the problem was with some static variables being de-allocated before trying to access them on program exit.  You see, this code is one of the last things to run on program exit in a debug build; that way we can report any memory leaks, etc.  Turns out I spent a lot of time looking in the wrong place for the problem.  The problem ended up being a string that was not initialized with a terminating character.  Lol.  The 32-bit string functions didn’t care, but the 64-bit versions sure did.  Definitely not where I thought I would find the problem.  So happy that this issue can be marked off the list now!

I also made the CPUID class in the system driver compatible with 64-bit.  This code is a lot cleaner now, and the interface is more generic.  I removed the inline x86 ASM code, in favor of the intrinsic __cpuid() and __cpuidex() functions.

Posted in Engine Development | Leave a comment

Team Foundation Server 2017

Posted on May 25, 2017 by Eric DeBrosse

My Team Foundation Server has been online for a few weeks now.  However, I wasn’t ready to put the source code under revision control just yet.  I’ve been doing a lot of restructuring and refactoring of the code base that I wanted to finish first.  It could have gotten really messy, very quickly.  Now that I’m finished with the changes, all of the solutions and projects have been added to source control.  It was kind of a pain to get everything where I wanted it to be.  There was a little bit of a learning curve.  The engine has been under several different source control packages over the years, such as the old Visual SourceSafe tool.  However, they just seem to keep getting more and more complicated!  That’s what happens when they just keep on adding more and more functionality to the software!

Posted in Engine Development | Leave a comment

Booting Up The Old Hard Drives

Posted on May 8, 2017 by Eric DeBrosse

Finally have everything updated and running in 64-bit.  I ran into some rather interesting scenarios where what worked in 32-bit, didn’t fly at all in 64-bit.  Anyway, it’s too hard and boring to explain here (lol).  The good thing is, all of the fixes that I came up with actually still work with Win32/x86.  So, I didn’t have to scatter a bunch of conditional compilation logic throughout the code.  Actually, all in all we did a pretty good job of writing code that was ready for the 64-bit transition.

OK, so this should have been done years ago.  But this was a major undertaking, because the Orion Engine codebase is huge!  Heck, just Orion Script alone is a pretty large SDK itself.  Orion Genesis is starting to become pretty deep too.

Oh yeah, I finally found my texture library on an old server/computer that was stored in the basement.  I’m pretty stoked.  Because I spent many years putting that library together, mostly from photos that I had taken over the years.  I’ve got some pretty nice tiles in there!

Posted in Announcements, Engine Development, Hardware | Leave a comment

Win64 and my ENTIRE weekend!

Posted on May 1, 2017 by Eric DeBrosse

Well, I got the engine SDK, and all of the tools and applications running again under Visual Studio 2017.  Now, I’m trying to convert everything from the older Win32 (x86) architecture, over to the Win64 (x64) architecture.  Actually, I’m making it so you can build either 32-bit and/or 64-bit Windows applications.  All of the MDK drivers now have 64-bit versions as well.  All of the codecs (jpeg, tiff, png, exr, zlib, etc.) are the latest versions and successfully build as 64-bit.  The 3ds Max exporter is fully 64-bit UNICODE now, built against the 2017 Max SDK.

I spent the whole weekend updating the SDK and the MDK.  Now I just need to update all of the Been There servers and applications to 64-bit.  I’ll need some rest soon too, lol.  All of this upgrading has my head spinning!

Posted in Announcements, Engine Development | Leave a comment

Visual Studio 2017 from Visual Studio 2010

Posted on April 23, 2017 by Eric DeBrosse

I have several computers ready to be servers for the game.  Now I’m upgrading all of the projects that make up the Orion Engine SDK libraries and applications to Visual Studio 2017.  I knew there would be some minor changes.  Actually, the new C++ compiler is picking up some bugs that previous compilers didn’t even notice.  It’s all good.  I’m working out some DirectX issues, then all should be well.  I need to give some deep thought as to which DirectX version I should create a driver for next, and how it will effect the current engine structure moving forward.

Posted in Announcements | Leave a comment

Account Management System

Posted on April 10, 2017 by Eric DeBrosse

I finally got all of my PHP code working. In fact, everything on the new web server appears to be working now!  I just finished all of the database code changes in the Account Management System today.  The new database server appears to be working well!  Now, I want to see if I can bring up/upgrade all of the game servers. Been There Game is starting to come back alive!

Posted in Announcements, Web Site Updates | Leave a comment

Database Server

Posted on April 5, 2017 by Eric DeBrosse

The database server (SQL Server 2016 SP1 Express) is on newer hardware, and back up and running again!  All of the databases were successfully restored.  It amazes me how many technologies that have to come back together to make all of this work again!  I have to be a DB Administrator, Linux Administrator, Windows Server Administrator, Multi-Platform Programmer, Web Developer, Repair Technician, etc.!

I’m trying to get my old PHP code to connect to the new MSSQL server.  Looks like PHP7 doesn’t include support for my current method anymore.  So, I’ll have to re-design the account management system.  I hope the game servers don’t have any trouble connecting!

Posted in Announcements, Hardware, Web Site Updates | Leave a comment

Current Status

Posted on March 27, 2017 by Eric DeBrosse

The web server is obviously back up now. It’s been upgraded to Fedora 25 Linux with the latest Apache.  The Gatekeeper server is back up as well.  I’m currently working on bringing the Team Foundation Server source code repository back up.  The hardware is pretty old, so I think I’m going to upgrade to a newer server, with SQL 2016 and TFS 2017.

Once I have all of this working, I’ll start on a new server for the game’s SQL database.  Then finally, I’ll start bringing up the game servers again.

Posted in Hardware, Web Site Updates | Leave a comment