Hello Jobber Jockeys. When last we conversed, things got deep. We discussed life, motivation, and Java. While I had every intention of following through and continuing the game, it just took a backseat to my career, to having a daughter, and a bunch of other stuff. The code for Angular Velocity has now sat dormant for three years. Unfortunately, that will continue for a while longer. Momentum for Change With uncertainty in the Javasphere and my own development as a PHP programmer, a small thought has been creeping into my …
Congratulations to SpaceX
Falcon 9 has landed! I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge a true innovation in space travel and rocket design: The engineering behind landing the first stage of an orbital launch vehicle is staggering, and Elon Musk’s company SpaceX deserves a lot of credit for this accomplishment. Up until today, the first stages of orbital rockets could never be reused. This technology will significantly reduce the cost of launching payloads into space. The rocket was carrying a commercial payload: 11 small data-relay satellites for Orbcomm of Rochelle Park, N.J. These …
2015 State of the Game
Well hello! It’s been 751 days since my last post here, so I feel like I’ve got some explaining to do. If you just want the TL:DR TL:DR – Angular Velocity is not dead, but it was. When we last saw our hero… Back in November of 2013, I was committed to making Angular Velocity the success I envisioned. I tried to become active in Reddit’s /r/gamedev community, started participating in Screenshot Saturdays, etc. AV was progressing at a good pace for a single developer project and I was happy. Then one …
Weekly Progress Report
Hey kids! I’m going to try doing a better job of coming out with weekly devlog entries reporting on our progress. I apologize ahead of time because I doubt I’ll be able to keep it up every week. However that’s no reason not to try! Since our last update, I have worked on a number of different aspects of Angular Velocity: Fixed shader so that it works on Nvidia cards. It sucks to think that all this time I just had to change a simple 1 to a 0 to …
New Materials, Schematics, and Inventory Controls
Hey gang, Got some great work in on the game today. Let’s cover this thing bullet style. Yeah! Four new materials have been introduced into the world: Limestone, Silica Sand, Copper, and Nitrogen. The world generators have been updated to not only include these materials, but to also change the distribution of the materials we already had for a better looking topography. This is something I’m sure I’ll be tinkering with for some time to come. Added a new Schematic for… Circuitry! Circuitry is a basic building block that will …
Pre Alpha Demo Publicly Available Today
Hey folks, Starting today you can download a Pre Alpha demo build of Angular Velocity! Be advised that there is a lot of functionality missing. For example, you only have 1 schematic you can craft, there is no multiplayer yet, and limited weapons, ships, and resources. Having said all that, it’s important for us to start testing the core of the game across multiple systems, as well as working the bugs out of our custom update software. System Requirements Java 7 ( You can download it here ) OpenGL …
New Video Available
Hey folks, just wanted to direct you to a new video we just finished posting to Youtube.
Nibbling Away at the Corners
After having so many problems for so long, I feel like this week we’ve finally gotten back on track. I’ve done a lot of work on several little things that have been nagging me, and they all add up to get us closer to our first public Alpha. Since all these updates are rather eclectic and sometimes unrelated, I’m gonna go into bullet-time-mode. Woah. Radar system now emits a sonar ping when new hostile contacts are detected. This helps you keep you eyes on where you’re going rather than checking …
Onward Space Cowboy
Well, after some work on boring behind the scenes stuff ( ie. the update server ) I’ve had some time to work on the game itself. One of the first things I did was to improve the basic shadow techniques I implemented for something that looks much better. The Shader takes more samples ( 16 vs 4 ) which gives a much smoother, softer shadow. I’m still working on eliminating all of the moire pattern artifacts, but I have a good idea on how I’ll go about doing it so that should …
New Update Server
Hey folks, Sorry we disappeared, but there really hasn’t been much to tell except that my home server died. All the code was safe and backed up, as was all our art assets. So no, we didn’t pull a Project Zomboid. However, the server was being used as our Update Server that handed out copies of the Alpha build to all our good little Alpha testers. I had always intended to upgrade our infrastructure once we were ready for a wider release ( only a dozen have Alpha access at …