Dev Log // Fun Times With Github Copilot, GPT and Solitaire

So I had this idea to build Solitaire using as much AI as I could. This was after reading a quote from an engineer in a github article who said that he tried to use Copilot to build the entire app. I found that concept interesting.

I started using Copilot in October and at first found it fascinating. The way it could almost read my mind and provide me the exact code I was about to type makes me feel like I'm in the future.

I started off by having ChatGPT generate the class declarations for the game (but specifically no code). I would then paste these declarations into Visual Studio as comments and wait for Copilot to generate the code based on the comment. Then, I would create the functions, place my cursor in the blank function and wait for it to generate that code as well.

It quickly got old and tedious. The code was not great. Copilot struggled on the more intricate parts of the game where classes started to really intertwine with each other and it would start making up variables or functions (even with all the relevant files open as tabs). It also struggled to create the graphical side of things, often suggesting code for SDL instead of SFML.

But most importantly; I had no idea what was going on. At all times, I felt like an engineer who had been hired to finish the game as the previous one who implemented everything had left abruptly. The further I got into the making the game, the harder it became to debug.

I ended up scrapping that version of the game and instead took the class declarations provided by GPT and started implementing them myself. I had a clear goal of what the finished game would look like and what I wanted to accomplish in each submit.

This is the way to use Copilot. I've never completed a game so quickly. When you know what you want to write and Copilot suggests it for you (or something very similar), it can shave hours off dev time. And that's not a hyperbole. The key though, is knowing what Copilot is suggesting you. If you can't read C++ or you're relying on it to know what it's suggesting is the right code for that particular section then you will quickly be led astray.

It's not the silver bullet, but it's pretty damn close and I highly recommend adding Copilot to your toolbelt.

As for Solitaire, I'm very happy to have finally created my version of it. It's one of those classic games I've dreamed of implementing since I started programming.

I used ChatGPT and Dall-e 3 to create the initial card designs and then edited them in PhotoShop to create a full deck spritesheet.

My favourite part of the whole process was figuring out how to do the classic "win animation" where the cards bounce down from the top of the screen, leaving a trail of the card behind them. This was the hardest part of the game and even GPT 4 couldn't help. Eventually, I asked some of the rendering wizards at work and they said the original solitaire used the mechanic of simply not clearing the screen after drawing so the previous frame was still there. This took some doing to get working in SFML as it has things in place to update the buffers anyway, even if you don't call explicitly call window.clear().

I ended up creating my own buffers when displaying the win animation, so only one buffer was ever drawn to and not cleared. Then that buffer would be turned into a render texture and displayed on the screen.

This was also my first time using the command pattern to implement the undo feature. 

And that's my adventure with AI and Solitaire! It's pretty much got everything that I wanted to implement; undo, right click add to foundation, drag and drop single and multiple, selected card highlight and a status bar.

Github: https://github.com/l-paz91/SolitaireSFML

What's wrong with it? A lot of hardcoded values. Good luck changing those card sizes or resizing the window and still expecting it to work...

Unreal Free For The Month Jam // September 2023 - Escape The Palace Hall

What is Free For The Month Jam?? I explain it all here in great detail:

https://lptcp.blogspot.com/p/free-for-month-jam.html

Basically, it's a game jam I made up where you have to use the current Unreal Free For The Month Assets to do, something.

It's called a jam instead of a game jam because you don't have to make a game. It can just be a simple mechanic. Whatever floats your boat.

This month I sat down and was actually able to complete my own jam for the first time since I started it almost year ago.

My entry this month came from ChatGPT which told me to create:

So that's what I did. And I made it into a video:

It's very basic, but I really struggle with finishing projects so I was proud I managed to get this to a packaged state and was happy to call it finished.

I ended up creating a very small game that requires you to find 2 items, pick them up and place them on pedestals to unlock the doors. If you don't do it within 60 seconds, you lose. It features a grab mechanic and a simple interact mechanic with the doors, as well as two trigger box events that cause spooky things to happen. I then added some sounds and music for ambience.

Keeping the scope small was really difficult and hopefully I'll be able to complete next months faster.

Dev Diary // FLTK & Tetris Part 2

A little while ago I had fun making Tetris in FLTK; a library not meant for games.

https://lptcp.blogspot.com/2023/03/dev-diary-adventures-with-tetris-c.html

It worked perfectly except for the bad flickering that I thought was down to the fact that FLTK just wasn't designed to handle games.

Then today I was working (as usual), and I saw a some code in Unreal Engine called double buffer and a light bulb went off in my head. When using something like Direct X, you usually set up a swap chain, and a buffer and a second buffer and all that jazz because the whole point is to draw your next frame to an unseen buffer, then you swap the unseen buffer with the one currently being displayed; ad infinitum. 

I wondered if this was the actual issue and the flickering was being caused by screen tearing. Turns out, it was. I had a look at the FLTK documentation and they have a solution for this!

https://www.fltk.org/doc-1.3/classFl__Double__Window.html

Fl_Double_Window is a type of Fl_Window, so seeing as how my Window wrapper is a wrapper around Fl_Window, I just inherited from Fl_Double_Window instead and voila! No more flickering; it just works™.

This made me very happy. It's very smooth now and it's actually got me excited for my planned Game Engine: Blink. What can I create now? I could do anything.

Dev Diary // Adventures with Tetris (C++ Console Window & FLTK)

A colleague introduced me to the YouTube channel javidx9 the other day with the video:

Code-It-Yourself! Tetris - Programming From Scratch (Quick and Simple C++)

I sat down after a gym session one dreary monday night and the 36 minute video took me about 90 minutes but javid had delivered and there was Tetris in the console window in about 300 lines of code. I also really enjoyed the little maths trick he employed to rotate the tetromino pieces. I found the video to be a bit rushed in places and some things cut out so I had to refer to the github repo quite a bit. Some things also went unexplained and me from a few years ago would be quite confused but on the whole; a solid tutorial.

Tetris was on my list of games to clone as it's a classic, easy-ish to implement and rife for tinkering. And tinkered with that initial small program I have.

Console Window

Here is the repo for my "all-in-main" version that I wrote whilst following along with the video. It's not exactly as his code but close enough:

https://github.com/l-paz91/Tetris/tree/main/Console%20Window

++Console Window

I then set about taking this apart and creating a more generic Tetris that could eventually be run using any library. This one still runs in the console window but the input options, rendering, tetromino mechanics have been abstracted to work regardless of what library you're using....in theory.

https://github.com/l-paz91/Tetris/tree/main/Console%20Window%20Modified

FLTK

This is a small lightweight API  that I was introduced to whilst working my way through Principles & Practice. I actually really like it due to it's simplicity and Windows 95 looking graphics. This was the first test to see how portable I'd made my code in the previous exercise.

I started off modifying the wrapper code given in the book Programming: Principles & Practice by Bjarne Stroustrup. I've been meaning to do this for a while; it's not a perfect wrapper but it makes iteration in FLTK a bit faster.

Here's the repo:

https://github.com/l-paz91/TetrisFLTK/tree/main/TetrisFLTK

With that done, I then found a free Tetris block png off the internet:

https://www.kindpng.com/imgv/iwmJJhT_tetris-blocks-png-transparent-png/

I used GIMP to change the hue of it to create 6 other colours.

I then created a simple window with a quit button.

Now I needed to find a way to display the Tetris Board on the window. At this point I already had all of the code needed from the console versions so I created a grey block and wherever '#' is drawn, I told it to draw a grey block instead.

Next was to draw the current piece. This required some tweaking but after some trial and error I managed to get it working without having to expressly tell the individual blocks to draw to make up the shapes (it used the text created in the console versions).

I then started copying over all the update logic to move and rotate the pieces. I was extremely surprised that this "just worked". FLTK does have it's own Keyboard event handling system however, the default windows one worked just fine with it so I stuck to that instead of changing it.

To create the "game loop", I used FLTK's timing system and registered a "tick" function with it. The tick function updates the Tetris board then redraws it. The tick function also handles updating the game tick counter to regulate tetromino speeds and locking them in place:

Please ignore the flickering; FLTK and my screen recorder don't get along.

The only thing left after all this was to print out the score:

And with that I got bored and got the itch to do something else. I will come back to this though as I'd like to do it in SFML next, add sounds and such. I was happy I managed to get a "game" of sorts working in FLTK though as that library is not built for games....and it really shows. It was fun creating helper classes though. I'd like to know why it's flickering so much once the screen gets really full. I think it'd be a good task to delve into Visual Studios performance profiling and debugging options.

EDIT 25/07/2023

I fixed the screen flickering:

https://lptcp.blogspot.com/2023/07/dev-diary-fltk-tetris-part-2.html

[Dev Log] Generic Slenderman Clone Part 2 // UE5 & Blueprint

So after part 1, I had the bare bones of a slenderman game. In this part I wanted to flesh out the mechanics a little more and make it start to look more like a "game". My Goals for part 2 were:

1. Replace the cubes with actual "notes"
2. Create random spawn points for the notes
3. Create a sprint mechanic + realistic jump
4. Add sprint and notes to HUD widget
5. Change it to night time
6. Create a flashlight
7. Create a battery mechanic
8. Executable

1. Replace the cubes with actual "notes"

2. Create random spawn points for the notes

For this I opened up blender and made the shittest piece of paper. Took about 1 minute. Made sure to resize the plane to A4, curled the edges slightly and gave it a material slot for the front and back and then exported it to Unreal.

I downloaded the note textures used in one of the slenderman games off google images and created materials from them. Then created a way for the notes to pick one of the materials at runtime. There are 8 different textures and each note is unique:

I created a new blueprint which now handles the spawning of the notes and what material they get. This blueprint contains 16 locations where the notes could spawn. More can be added but only 8 locations will be picked at runtime. You can change the number of locations in the details panel in the editor.

3. Create a sprint mechanic and realistic jump

Default unreal man jumps like Princess Peach; in fact it's more floating than jumping and greatly annoys me. Fixing it is quite simple though by just changing the Z Jump Velocity in the Character Movement.

The sprint mechanic is also relatively simple. When shift is held, it reduces the sprint each second and when it reaches 0 (from 100), you can no longer sprint. It takes 10 seconds to replenish fully. I achieved this by using timers instead of ticking. That way, we're not constantly checking to see if we're sprinting (or replenishing sprint value) every frame; only when we need to.

4. Add sprint and notes collected to the HUD widget

Using icons from the Android library (they're free to use) I added a progress bar and text to the HUD:

The progress bar does use a binding to update itself which is expensive but barely anything is ticking in this game so I didn't really care. In UE5, the progress bars now come with a default animation as well which is snazzy. The notes text is updated when a note is destroyed and the blueprint sends a message to the HUD.

5. Change to night time

This was one of the most difficult parts as lighting in Unreal Engine is unbelievably difficult. You need to change colours determined by sun, override sky colours, change the post process volume and exponential height fog....it's never ending. Also, as the scene is so dark afterwards; I duplicated BP_Sky_Sphere so I could add a tick box which would allow me to switch between day and night in real time.

In the construction script I added this mess:

Which toggles between "soft day" and night:

6. Adding a flashlight

For this I simply add a spot light to the character and attached it to the head socket so it moves with the character. I thought about a doing a torch you hold in your hand but couldn't be bothered with the hand animations as this is true first person so instead, the player is wearing a head torch. I added some nodes to allow the player to toggle the flashlight on and off with F.

The flashlight is its own blueprint and spawns on the player as a child component. I gave it a light profile as well using one of the default UE ones so it's softer when far away from objects; but then the cone shape starts to appear when you get closer. It always annoys me in games when the flashlight is just a circle in the centre of the screen.

7. Adding a battery mechanic

This didn't take long as it was almost copy and paste on the sprint mechanic. I added some timers to the flashlight so when it's in use it begins to lose power and it updates the HUD with the new power level. I added a cylinder to game which acts as a "battery". When you pick it up it replenishes the battery power; regardless of how much power you have left. So batteries should be used wisely as you can't store them in an inventory.

8. Executable

In the gif, "slenderman" is motionless as I disabled it's "AI" for the moment whilst testing (and I forgot to remove the debug output from sprinting) but it's starting to look more like a spooky game now!

In part 3, I'll actually create the forest map, add sounds like footsteps, cracking twigs and some story elements. By the end of part 3 it will look like a proper slenderman game but it still won't act like one.