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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Shadow Mapping in GLSL
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 …
GUI From The Ground Up
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 …
We have an Inventory
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 …
A More Persistent World
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 …