A rough calculation about a random distribution: from your picture, it looks like the distance between trees is about three times the width of a tree. Suppose the trees are distributed at random but still somewhat regularly (), and consider a line of sight. Each time the line passes by a tree, it has a 1/3 chance of being blocked. So after passing n trees, it has a (2/3)^n chance of not being blocked so far. For n=10, that's 0.017. So if you can accept about 2% of the horizon being visible (which should be okay in a 3d game - stick a painted forest image on it), visibility distances of around 10 trees are on the cards.

Edit: My hunch would be that a regular distribution won't do much better than this.

Automating some doodling.

Extrapolating today's useful skills forwards:

bureaucracy (filling in forms)
bureaucracy (dealing with organizations)
languages
retro technology (to use older things)
handwriting (rare future skill)
cookery (rather than pre-pared stuff)
driving (rather than robots doing it)
diagonalization (messing with AI logic through conversation)
bargain hunting
google-fu

Swift Swurd, a swashbuckling roguelike:



http://dl.dropbox.com/u/29654821/swurd.zip

Now for my own question;

I have a vehicle class that a Vector3 velocity. How could I figure out the velocity in it's forward direction? (forward as in front of the vehicle's rotation)

Dot product with a unit vector in the forward direction.

Hey guys I'm working on a perspective based puzzle game which takes place in the victorian era. Heres a possible logo I put together earlier:

...

What do you think. It's definitely better than
Once Upon a Time There was a Movable Forest...
our previous working title

"Newborn Bard" doesn't sound Victorian to me. It makes me think of the story of Taliesin, from medieval Wales ( http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Mabinogion/Taliesin )

I like the working title, although I can see that it's a bit long. What is the game about?

I don't get it; if everything in the game can change, why do you need to fix a name now, beyond a working title? Anyway: Blue Gemini.

Perhaps the effect of gravity should depend on the wavelength of the light.

Retromancer, Retropolis and Vade Retro are all already being used

I've had it with pirates. Set it in the Russian civil war or something.

Could you explain why? There are references to pirates in games of course, but unless I missed them I can't think of too many recent pirate games. It seems a bit like something that people are tired of but that hasn't actually been done that much, like zombies for example, zombie games are everywhere!

I can't think of many pirate games from the last couple of years, but there are lots and lots from, say, the last twenty years. There are too many pirate cliches and too much temptation for knowing references and in-jokes. There are so many fresh settings out there, why use something stale?

I've had it with pirates. Set it in the Russian civil war or something.

I kind of like the flat-shaded look of the original one, and the cell-shading doesn't do anything for me. I would love to see an Interstate 76, low-poly look to the landscape, or at least to the off-road parts.

Have you thought about putting in a transparent windshield with a guy behind it? I think this wouldn't be so hard, in Unity, and it might change the look of the car a lot, and give the game some extra character.

I would be very interested in something like this. I'm currently working on something in unity that is meant to become large, and I'm already getting slowdowns that I don't understand.

However 50 pages sounds like a lot of work. Shorter articles would be very useful too.

You need to explain more clearly what your problem is.

Just thinking about the algorithm for finding the straight-line paths, I realize that you would prefer to have a neat algorithm, but have you considered the non-neat, brutal ones?

For example, let's suppose that the formation you're moving into is always more-or-less in a line (rather than, say, a rectangular block). For simplicity we can always assume that the vector from the centre of the ships to the centre of the targets is horizontal. You could just order the ships and targets by their vertical positions, and then match each ship to the corresponding target.

Or you could take your current algorithm, and find all pairs of ships who might collide. Then randomly choose such a pair, and swap the ships over (as long as this doesn't make some overall metric much worse). Do this twenty times. I imagine that most of the time you will get a decent matching at the end.

It's malleable, my design
Things just bolt on here and there
Real clean scraped face
A new gasket fitted and...
Tightened and...
I'm done.

Close-hauled

Lit particle clouds in Tolroko

The screenshot isn't showing.

HMS Alpha, lying to

@Pishtaco,  I love this,the look, the theme everything about it.. it seems you'r going really in depth on the physics and command system. Really Really nice, would love to play it when its done..

Thanks! The graphics and UI are just for the prototype. The trick with the command system will be to make it feel like you're ordering a community of a couple of hundred men around, rather than twiddling knobs.