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[negativeview]

Currently REALLY rough build of the initial city. The idea is that in the foreground is a large ramp. The city will be on a small peninsula (water hurts the enemy, so the only human civilizations that have lasted have been hastily created ones on places mostly/completely surrounded by water) and the ramp goes to a drawbridge to high ground over the water.

The other side is a large wall that is used as a lookout. The humans never cross over that wall, they use the ramp. I am going round and round thinking about the interior of the base, and the parts I know still need to be heavily tweaked. I am NOT an artist (part of the reason I was going random gen before), but I think that I can make something acceptable with large amounts of time.

[negativeview]

Finally learned at least the basics of GLSL and shading. I'm irrationally proud of the following image. I went back and edited the first "proof of concept" to have something interesting to shade. Cubes bouncing around just weren't doing it for me.

[KomradeJack]

That is a pretty cool image.

[negativeview]

I think the next thing to work on this weekend is:

1) Integrate the two tech demos into one slightly more designed code base. This will allow me to have FPS/physics + terrain.
2) Fix water up a bit. I have some ideas on how to make it work better with less custom code, but it requires having physics + terrain.
3) Get a shader for the water. Water used to be the coolest thing I had, but now with the fog actually working I dunno if that's true anymore.



That's the current state. The water just flowed down that large hill to the left. You can see some tiny water pools clinging to the bumpy hillside. The water isn't technically done flowing, but it's close enough. I'm hoping that the new code will reduce the tiny pools and make flowing more performant + more predictable (the water flow isn't at a constant rate right now. I've tried to fix that problem, and it's slight enough most people probably won't notice, but it bothers me.).

[negativeview]

Progress is slow, but still existent. That's what you get when you go the tech demo route at first.

The good news is that I'm starting to pull things together into a single code base. The bad news is that I'm being extra paranoid about the structure of the code (that was the entire point of the tech demo route, remember?) AND I also had an annoying amount of trouble getting the perlin stuff working. Well, to be fair, that's still not 100% working.

I wanted to have more control over pre-shaping the noise than a pre-built Perlin implementation wanted to give me. I'm also looking at evaluating a 3d+2d hybrid for perlin noise that has the potential to look awesome. Both of those heavily suggested that I write my own perlin with an extra amount of control in various points. I had a lot of very very stupid bugs in there that I am annoyed at myself for letting stay so long, but it's mostly working now.

The current considered-official code base consists of the following:
1) Game Modes. Right now these are menu and world. The important thing is that the structure supports switching between modes, where the core handles as much as it can, but hands off quite a lot to individual modes.
2) Main Menu. This is still very hackish. There's one main menu whose main job is to remind me of the menu options I want. One of the menus goes to a bogus submenu so I could figure out how to do that. Exit exits. New game goes to the game mode. There's no saving currently implemented, so continue does nothing.
3) Game mode generates a single block of land. I can change the size of the land (I am currently unsure what size blocks I will use in the final version). I can press enter to regenerate back at detail level 1 (what it starts on). I can press space to add another level of detail until I hit the maximum.

Next potential destinations:
1) Real shadowing of the generated land.
2) Making land generation generate more than one block.
3) Land simplification, as a precursor to LOD.
4) Material functions to determine what's rock, what's dirt, etc.
5) Add physics in so as to test my idea for physics-based water and see if it works (this is unlikely, as I will want more land to play with, so #2 is likely a required precursor).
6) Add mouse support to the menus to learn how I want to properly handle that and so I'm not accused of "consolifying" things.

[negativeview]

Finished the perlin block class. Mostly pulled the code for handling multiple blocks into a Sector class, and made memory management in that area a little better. Up next is either shadowing or making multiple sectors work together again. It mostly depends on which one unblocks more tasks.

I have also been thinking a LOT about the story and the powers that the players get. A lot has changed, and this will probably be its own entry shortly. I still need to finalize a few things in my head. The general feel though is reverse Metroid. You start as human and slowly become what is basically an unstoppable mech character bit by bit. Magic has been replaced by haphazard science. Well, really, solid science, but built using literally scrap materials. It should provide a pretty unique look.

[negativeview]

Typed up a real design document. Well, started one. I'm going to take the time to write up some of it here.

I don't know if I mentioned the magical element here, but that's gone and replaced with two crazy scientists.

The first crazy scientist accidentally created another life form that is composed of and consumes pollution and electricity. They spread via air and water and simultaneously attacked all of the major cities, being the most potent sources of pollution and electricity. Humans had a hard time figuring out how to stop them because if you shoot them with bullets they just dematerialize into smog, and reform almost immediately. No good.

Eventually, humans did figure out some things about fighting them, but by that point they had lost the major cities. Humans now live in small isolated camps in areas that were wilderness before. Having no sources of pollution and no electricity in large quantities, the monsters mostly leave them alone. But it's an uneasy peace. The humans now know of several ways to kill the monsters. BUT, cut off from all of the resources in the major cities, and unable to easily collect all of the survivors in one place (or even talk to the other survivors!) it's basically impossible to mount an offensive.

A crazy scientist living in the same makeshift civilization as you comes up with a way to make a very crude weapon for you to fight the monsters with. You use that weapon to retrieve more supplies for him to make bigger and better weapons. You eventually get a "mech suit" (metal bars along your limbs that have mount points) that allow you to mount various things there. These are your devices. You're limited to one per mount point, and many of them serve different purposes depending on where you mount them.

Finding the supplies for these weapons usually take you into bigger population centers, which means bigger dens of monsters.

The goal is hit a style somewhat similar to Dead Rising in having a combination of super awesome stuff combined with the absolutely absurd. The biggest challenge here I think will be content creation. That's one of the reasons why I want to have things multipurpose. I will only have to model the device once (though I may have to make multiple animations in some cases). I think it will be somewhat unique to have no magic, have some access to modern technology, but still be mostly primitive.

No new screenshots this time. It's mostly been thinking work, not a lot of coding work. I still have some holes in the story I have to fill yet.

Then again, look at the history of this project. It'll probably change yet again.

[negativeview]

Had a technological thinking breakthrough.

Right now progress is slow because I'm trying to do so many things at the exact same time:

1) Create the perlin code that has the modifications I need.
2) Optimize the drawing to be fast enough to draw large landscapes for me.
3) Figure out triangle reduction.

Numbers two and three are annoying and troublesome.

Instead of doing those now, I can do just #1 and have it write to .obj files. Those are super simple and then I can open it up/edit it in either Blender or Sculptris.

PLUS if I make that a stand-alone utility I could fairly easily make it an open-source tool available to all. Woot!

I expect this to be my new short-term focus.

[negativeview]

Made the code (currently the same code base, not split out for open sourcing yet) able to write .obj files. Found a bug in Sculptris. Also found out that Sculptris won't load my landscape when it gets to the ridiculously huge point. Apparently the .obj importer is kindof memory sloppy.

So now I do have to write some basic polygon reduction and/or the tiler. Figuring out which one. Probably won't get much if anything done non-mentally the next days as it's my anniversary.

[negativeview]

I've been making some progress on the world builder. I've been stuck on implementing the marching cubes algorithm. Newborns aren't good for concentration.

This morning my laptop refused to turn on. I DO have the code backed up. That's not the issue. The issue is that right now I only have a computer at work and my wifes laptop.

I needed to get a better computer anyway, I just didn't want to do it yet. For the near future, I'll only be contributing to the game mentally. I needed to work some things out mentally anyway.

[negativeview]

Worked quite a bit on trying to define a sensible control scheme. I'm currently leaning toward defaulting to the number pad. I know that the number pad is FAR from universal these days, and of course it will be remappable (it may even have a one-click switch to something non-number-pad), but the number pad makes far too much sense to ignore. Thoughts?

I have also put the new hardware into my online shopping cart, ready to hit buy as soon as my next paycheck hits (tomorrow night/day after morning). Expect much more updating then.

[negativeview]

Computer -- purchased!

Survey for anyone still reading this -- do you have a number pad on your primary keyboard?

[starsrift]

I'm still following this. I don't have a numpad. I had like a choice between a keyboard that glows and does rainbow patterns with backlighting, or like, a numpad and stuff.

My choice was obvious.

[JobLeonard]

My normal computer has (I wouldn't buy a keyboard without), my laptop doesn't. I even have a USB numpad gathering dust somewhere...

[negativeview]

FINALLY got my new machine mostly working. Started playing with PolyVox to see if it's any good and so far I'm quite liking it. I currently have a somewhat world builder where I can switch between blocky minecrafty mode in order to build, then switch to marching cubes mode to see what it'll look like in the actual game. I still have a LOT of work ahead of me, but as a proof of concept it's proving to be VERY nice.