Category Archive

Hey gang, got a few more cool improvements done the last few days: Audio resources have traditional been loaded dynamically as needed. While this has made resource management easier, it meant that there was a huge pause of a few seconds when a large file, like a song, was loaded. I’ve moved all that into another thread now, which means loading a song will not pause the game anymore. It also means that the first time a sound effect is played, like an explosion, it is delayed. This effect however …

Just a few quickie updates today: Of the few people who have helped play test our pre-Alpha version, ~50% said they wished there was an option to perform a full stop. In some ways this feels like cheating because you don’t have to learn and work to counteract the physics system. On the other hand, having that option would help lower the barrier to play-ability. Plus, it’s hard to argue that any kind of spaceship technology wouldn’t have the capability of a computer controlled burn to stabilize motion. So I added …

Nothing makes me feel better than to work on tangible parts of the game, by which I mean graphics, sounds, etc. Today’s update is chock full of exactly that. Finally, I feel like the player can actually do something. You can kill other ships. Oh, I’ve already had that? Well did it include a full on explosion with dynamic particles and sound? Because now it does. Boo-ya! Each explosion has a random number of particles, some of which are Fireballs ( bigger, slower, fire texture ) and some of which are tracers ( …

Seriously. I’ve known about a bug in my collision detection routine for some time now. Once in a while, for no particular reason, instead of bouncing off of a tower, the ship will get stuck. It didn’t happen all the time. In fact it only came up maybe one out of every 50 collisions. But it was there. And I knew I had to tackle it. I will spare you all the boring details of every single tiny little thing that I tested. Really… they make me want to pull …

Well I’ve finally got a working EntityForce. This entity can either act as a gravity well, or as the force of an explosion. It’s uses in the game will be many and I’m happy to have this part finished. Originally I intended to make the physics of Angular Velocity as realistic as possible. But the further I’ve gone along, and especially after creating the EntityForce, I realize that there is a limit to realisim in games. Sometimes it’s more fun to be unrealistic. In this particular case, I was trying …

( Stick through until the end, it will be worth it ) Hey gang, I decided to take a day off. ( Shocking I know ) but that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been some news. I’ve been working on two areas of the game since my last update. The first is what I call the EntityForce. This little baby will be responsible for anything that influences other entities like ships and bullets. An example of an EntityForce would be an explosion. Not only would it have to display a fireball …

Sorry about the late update, but I’ve been trying to make the most of my programming time. Here’s a laundry list of updates since my list post: Finished implementing textures for my tiles. You may recall that the new Vertex Array drawing method required my placing all tile textures into one. This now works beautifully. Fixed a timing issue that changed your ship’s speeds based on the frame rate. Now you’ll travel the same distance and turn just as quickly no matter how many FPS you get. Created a camera …

Another day, another long session trying to get something mundane finished. Despite getting decent FPS ( ~300-400 ) I knew that was partially to do with the fact that everything was so simple right now. Once we have more complicated geometry with more entities flying around I expect it will drop like a rock. And so it was with that in mind that I began converting my terrain rendering from Immediate mode OpenGL commands to Vertex Arrays. For those of you who do not know, Immediate mode is where, every frame, I …

Whew. I had every intention of spending the entire night developing a kickass modular entity collision reaction scheme, but sadly I got a late start on that. You see, organizing a project this size is important to do from the beginning. If you have hundreds of classes all laying in the same directory it can become a nightmare to find anything. I wasn’t there yet, but at 39 classes I figured I had better start now rather than later. Thing is… Java is very picky about Class Paths and file locations…. much more …

So after an exhausting day at work I came home and had an exhausting night of programming. At least there is symmetry. The highlight of the night was porting over my basic audio subsystem from the past and implementing LWJGL’s OpenAL implementation, complete with Ogg Vorbis support. What does having OpenAL mean? It means realistic 3D positional sounds, with panning, fading, and a Doppler effect. I would be incredibly excited if I were not completely exhausted. In addition to all that, I also began working on the game launcher. Like all good AAA games, Angular …