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 …
Motion Blur on Particles
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 …
A.I. – It’s Alive, Now with HUD
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 …
Multisampling FBOs, New Skybox, New Ship Skin
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 …
Menus, Bug Tracking, and Oxygen
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 …
Launchers and Gravity Bombs
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 …
November Gameplay Video
Hey guys, our video finally finished uploading to Youtube. All the relevant details about changes are in the last post, so without further ado, here’s the video:
These are Not the Updates We’re Looking For
In our last post I spoke of all the mundane behind the scenes changes I was about to do. Umm, yeah… I only did one. I fixed one minor bug here or there and before I knew it the entire terrain rendering codebase had been overhauled. Here’s a list of changes in no particular order: New Tile types: Resources Iron and Carbon, Decorative Rocks Tweaked perlin noise generators that created the terrain. Introduced terrain height variance. Where previously the whole map fit neatly with right angles, now the terrain shows variations in …
It’s Alive!
Hello everyone. We’re back in the saddle after a two month hiatus. A lot of other obligations came rushing at me at once and unfortunately Angular Velocity just had to take a back seat. While I have made a number of changes, none of them are particularly sexy. Here’s a breakdown of what I’ve done since we last spoke: Major changes to the sound system. Angular Velocity runs on top of lwjgl which provides OpenAL support. Unfortunately the code I had written to interface with this ( Foley ) was buggy and inefficient. …
We Have Destructible Terrain
Aww yeah! Finally pushed myself to work on some important code for the game. By refining the sections regarding multiple weapons per vessle ( which has been fully tested and vetted now ) I created a “Mining” class of weapon that shoots straight down and damages the terrain below you. Oh yeah, I also now assigned health to terrain. 🙂 So each different type of terrain will take different levels of dedication to break. All this means it’s now possible for you to destroy terrain. Next up is to grant …