Understanding CryEngine 3 code: The camera

After having looked at how the player moves, I was interested in looking at how the camera's position is updated.

Using the information collected from my previous investigations, I followed a lead that seemed obvious. I was in for a surprise.

Understanding CryEngine 3 code: Moving the player

Let's have a look at how player input gets turned into character movement. But first, we need to talk about game actions.

Understanding CryEngine 3 code: player character

Now, I want to know about the player character, especially about the way it's set up code-wise.

Understanding CryEngine 3 code: loading a level

Last time I took a look at the startup sequence of a CryEngine 3 game. Now, it's time to investigate what happens when loading a level, up to the spawning of the player's character. This will eventually lead us to the Lua side of the engine.

The investigation will start from when the player selects a level from the main menu.

Understanding CryEngine 3 code: Starting the game

I'm starting to look at the programming side of the CryEngine 3 Free SDK. I've been quite surprised to see that the official documentation gives little to no information on the overarching concepts and systems that are present in the engine. I then decided go down the brutal path to understand the system, which is putting breakpoints (almost) everywhere, and see what happens, in which order.

As usual when I do that kind of self-teaching, I find that writing up the results of my investigation helps me making sure I know what I'm talking about. And it might as well be useful to other people.

Processing: the language

Another discovery today, Processing is an open source programming language designed to teach the basics of programming.

I haven't looked too deep into this, but it looks very interesting for beginners, as it's less abstract than algorithms. The tutorials all look pretty well organised and detailed. I'd recommend reading those to anyone who wants to learn programming for the first time.

http://processing.org/