Hi Folks, I haven’t updated things here in a while, and despite not feeling as if I have anything finished and polished enough to show off, we have made enough progress that I decided to throw caution to the wind. Or into the shadows, as it were. I’ve spent almost this entire weekend learning GLSL ( OpenGL Shading Language ), implementing it in the engine, and then writing my first Shader to implement shadow mapping. Let me just say… I haven’t found a single tutorial on the web that takes …
With the advent of the inventory system in our last update, it was time to finally take a serious look at constructing a proper GUI system. You see, despite having a few menus with buttons you could click to end the game or continue, anyone with access to this early build of the game understood that the implementation was very buggy. Not only did I have to manually position each GUI element on the screen, but the kludgy implementation also meant that sometimes you have to click half a screen above the actual button to get it to …
Hey gang, I’ve finally tackled a part of the game that I’ve kept on the back burner for too long… the Inventory system. The inventory has always been an ethereal concept in my mind because there are so many different ways to approach it. Do we go the Minecraft route where you literally carry tons of rock on your back, or should we go for a more realistic approach like Eve Online? At long last, the decision was made to go with something akin to Eve’s approach. A lot of disbelief has to be suspended to play …
Sorry, no flashy new screenshots today. I’ve been hard at work under the hood today. While I have a graphical engine that is well along, much of the actual business of running a game is lacking and so I’ll be concentrating on that for a while. In particular, I’ve separated out the Chunk generating code into it’s own class. This will open the door to multiple Chunk generating algorithms in the future to give each world even more variety. Of more immediate concern, I have completely moved NPC spawning into the Chunk generator. Up …
Hey all! After taking a month off for the holidays, I’ve jumped back in the saddle to get this thing rocking again. I decided to start off with something that has been plaguing me for months… the sound system. Internally named Foley, my audio class frankly wasn’t working well. It simply wasn’t reliable. Sometimes a sound would play, sometimes it wouldn’t. And after adding the menu system, in game music was gone completely. So I think I finally have these issues licked. ( I know, I’ve though this before. ) I think my biggest …
Hey gang! Haven’t had much to report this week as I’ve been crushing bugs introduced with the AI update. However, I have added one cool new feature to the rendering engine: motion blur on particles! So how does it work? First, we set up a Frame Buffer Object with the same dimensions as the window buffer. Be sure to bind a Texture Image for the color buffer, not a Render Buffer! We’ll need to be able to bind the texture later on. Next, you’ll need a way to distinguish those particles that …
This weekend has been great all around. After all the updates in our last post, I set to work bringing the enemy to life. Despite our Multiplayer focus, someone correctly reminded me that if there were no NPCs to encounter then this would get pretty stale. Our new AI isn’t terribly smart. However he can follow you and shoot at you, which really is enough to make the game dangerous. Like, sometimes dead in 5 seconds dangerous. Of course, when they start shooting back, you have to take damage. And when you …
Hope everyone is having a great weekend! Mine has been awesome, because I’ve finally solved some some minor catastrophes behind the scenes at AV HQ, and also because I’m listening to Knife Party’s new album. 🙂 I’ve rewritten about 50% of the rendering engine to make it more flexable going forward. We’ve compartmentalized a number of our OpenGL commands so that it’s easier to draw scenes outside the scope of the main game scene, and also to make it easier to render to an FBO instead of the Window provided buffer. This …
Sorry about the lack of updates over the holidays. Aside from stuffing myself with plenty of turkey and dressing with the family, I’ve also been feeding myself a steady diet of GUI programming. Yes… it is every bit as dry, tedious, and boring as you would expect it to be. What I didn’t expect was how difficult it would be to troubleshoot. Many of us take for granted just how smoothly everything comes together with a windowed GUI, but there are tons of tiny little calculations going on behind the …
Couple of quick updates before I head in to my day job. I created a new weapon as I was getting tired of just having the noisy cricket so the screenshot above introduces you to the gravity bomb! It’s big, slow, powerful, and pulls your enemies toward it. One bomb causes 80% damage to a ship’s hull. I also played around in Audacity and created an awesome sound effect for the bomb: While active it emits a low, throbbing drone sound that can be pretty eerie. I’m still working on the sound it makes …
