I recently went and read every issue of X-Men from the beginning to the early 90s, when they unfortunately became all srs bzns and doomgloom. Repeated the process for Excalibur and New Mutants.

Why did the 90s have to ruin everything? Turning things 'dark and edgy' - especially with Excalibur, which was always light and fun - doesn't actually make it better.

I'm a big fan of retrofuturism - but what I'd like to see is some modern futurism that isn't all doomgloom and misery. The view of what the future would be in the 50s is fantastic - full of optimism and imagination. Today's vision of the future is basically 'yeah, kinda like now only with smaller ipods - but we won't be able to afford them, because the economy will have died, the cities will be underwater, those that aren't will be under martial law, and we'll all be sitting around being very unhappy'. Dystopia gets boring after a while.

If people took the 50s mindset and applied it to today's society and technology - that would be nice.


Though it doesn't seem to be up right now, http://www.palaceofculture.org/ has some fantastic art from the 50s on it (by Arthur Radebaugh(?) - the guy who drew the Closer Than We Think comics).

Hmm, no - usually those statements come across as pretentious and reading them can suck the enjoyment out of just playing the game. I don't play an art game (or any game, really) to think about what it means - thinking about that gets in the way of playing/experiencing it.

An exception I'll make is if you're being crucified because of how people see your game (e.g. Super Columbine Massacre RPG). That creator's statement exists with good reason.

Only if they're real deadlines. Self imposed ones without consequences are meaningless, and despite best efforts I tend to treat them that way.

There were two extremely old ladies sitting in font of me - they walked out of the cinema within half an hour. I have no idea what they thought they were seeing.

Anyway, it was good. The only thing that kind of bothered me was that the very-normal superheroes seemed to all have superspeed and strength when fighting, which missed the point by quite a bit. Hmm, and there was something kind of off about Rorschach's character, but it was good anyway, so meh. Properly capturing Watchmen as a movie is impossible, but it managed to capture enough to be better than all the other vacuous shit on at the movies.

Also, the second scene montage thingy was superfantastic.

I wish the local communist groups were less awful. I'm sure there's a lot of areas where I could agree with them - but they're just so damn obnoxious!

Cookies, however, are never obnoxious. Let's have more cookies.

Sure - why not? If it does what the developer wants it to do, there isn't really a problem. Better than never releasing a game because you don't have any art skill.

Despite what I said about updating every day regardless of progress, I thought it would be rather silly to bump it back up yesterday just to say 'No progress was made'.

Fortunately, thanks to a Mr. mcc, movement is now possible. Also, I have a spiral being drawn, which looks like this from directly behind it and like this from a bit to the side.

Tomorrow, I think I'll get the controls up and running. Then when you can move around good and proper, I'll see about making vast numbers of different spirals around the galaxy and moving between them.

Things are looking up. Asking for help rather than butting your head against it is unsurprisingly a good strategy, and I think I should use it more often.

Edit:
Ooooh - I think I need some of these in the game. Now I just need to think of something for them to do ... perhaps traveling to different sorts of areas? Or time travel? Hmm...

Edit2:
Progress today can best be described as 'pathetic'. All in all, I have managed to draw twelve lines.

Aha! Thank you!

I've been stuck on this since the first day of the cockpit compo, and thought I'd better ask for help before I end up having a screaming hissy fit.

Here is the program thus far. All it's meant to do at the moment is move the camera and the wannabe-cockpit along the x-axis when you press 'd'. As it is though, it looks like the cockpit turns towards the camera and moves faster than it. Also, the random triangle floating out in space falls off into oblivion, which I don't think should happen seeing that I'm only moving along the x-axis and it doesn't move at all.

I've prodded pretty much everything in my code numerous times, and have no idea what it might be that I've misunderstood or overlooked.

Given that I've no real idea where the problem is, here's all the methods that might have anything to do with it. The bottom two (moving and drawing the camera and cockpit) are where I've been focusing most of my attention.

Code:

void Game::updateShip()
{
    glLoadIdentity();
    cockpit->update(strEvent);
    cockpit->move();
}

Code:

void Game::render()
{
    glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT);

    cockpit->drawCockpit();

    SDL_GL_SwapBuffers();
}

Code:

void Cockpit::update(std::string event)
{
    if (event == "none")
    {
        xVel = 0;
        yVel = 0;
        zVel = 0;
    }
    else if (event == "right")
    {
        xVel = 0.2;
    }
    else if (event == "down")
    {
        yVel = -0.2;
    }
}

Code:

void Cockpit::move()
{
    x += xVel;
    y += yVel;
    z += zVel;

    gluLookAt(x, y, z, 0.0f, 0.0f, -100.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f);
}

Code:

void Cockpit::drawCockpit()
{
    //The view-window thingy
    glBegin(GL_LINE_STRIP);
        glVertex3f(1.0f+x, 3.0f+y, -8.0f+z);
        glVertex3f(4.0f+x, -1.0f+y, -8.0f+z);
        glVertex3f(-4.0f+x, -1.0f+y, -8.0f+z);
        glVertex3f(-1.0f+x, 3.0f+y, -8.0f+z);
        glVertex3f(1.0f+x, 3.0f+y, -8.0f+z);
    glEnd();

    //The control panel
    glBegin(GL_LINE_STRIP);
        glVertex3f(4.0f+x,-1.0f+y,-8.0f+z);
        glVertex3f(4.0f+x,-3.0f+y,-8.0f+z);
        glVertex3f(-4.0f+x,-3.0f+y,-8.0f+z);
        glVertex3f(-4.0f+x,-1.0f+y,-8.0f+z);
    glEnd();

    //random triangle floating in space
    glBegin(GL_TRIANGLES);
        glVertex3f(0.0f,0.0f,-76.0f);
        glVertex3f(0.8f,0.4f,-76.0f);
        glVertex3f(0.0f,0.8f,-76.0f);
    glEnd();
}

Sooo, help, please? I'd really like to get back to making progress.
 

Things are progressing - without any great speed, true, but hey - better than any of my other jaunts with OpenGL.

The screen currently looks much like this:



As promised; lines. The final cockpit design should look less awful, but until I can get it working so that it actually moves with the camera (seems to tilt into it at the moment. No idea why) I'll just use this as a test.

Regardless of progress, I think I'll keep a daily log of this here. After all, letting the thread slide off into the abyss would just be as bad motivation-wise as not making one at all. There shall be no silent failure this time!

An ambitious idea! I look forward to seeing where you take it.

I'm actually hoping it's less ambitious than it sounds. After all, once you look past the seemingly grand scope there isn't that much to it - just drawing lines in 3D space. Once I work out this '3D space' thing...

Not the first time I've started making a game for a compo, but certainly the first time I've started a thread for one. Hopefully it will spur me onwards to actually completing something.

Heavily inspired by the game Crystal Pixels, this will be a 3D wireframe abstract space explorer. I plan on having all the objects procedurally generated and continually growing (they probably won't make any kind of sense unlike in Crystal Pixels, but that's okay, so long as they're nice to look at).

Space will be vast in that Noctis-type way, and can be traversed in two ways - through spirals (which act as portals/wormholes) or by ramping up to some insane speed and powering off into the void - time dilation applies (probably not realistic time dilation, but still).

There may or may not be a goal, I haven't quite decided yet. Perhaps finding some special central spiral amidst the vastness of space. I've also pondered having a small number of enemies roaming the void, but I'm going to be realistic enough to not consider them very much. The game will probably end when things have grown to such an extent that the computer is having a meltdown displaying it (I'm hoping that things will get to a massive side before this, but I really don't have much idea how far I can go).

In reality: I will be quite happy if I get a spiral growing as time passes and the ship moving around.

I'll be using C++ with OpenGL/SDL - I haven't used OpenGL before except for a few tests, but given that the only thing I need to play with is the line drawing function, colours, and movement, I'm hoping not to get overwhelmed by new things. I'm not really sure how ambitious this is in reality, but I guess the best way of finding out is charging in and seeing.

(I'm also a teensy bit tempted to dump this idea and make something involving orbital military satellites firing nuclear weapons down to Earth - but I think having at least a little focus might be the best way to get something finished...)

So, that's the plan. Hopefully I'll have some colourful lines or something displaying by the end of tomorrow.

Cockpit game? Excellent - this gives me the excuse to make that semi-rip-off of Crystal Pixels I've always pondered making. Let's hope my nonexistent 3D programming skills are up to the task!

I have this problem with writing, but not so much with games. I give up on writing mostly because the ideas were more enjoyable to come up with than they are to implement. When it comes to games though, the implementation stage is as interesting as the cooking up ideas stage. Programming is fun

For IDEs I'm quite a fan of Code::Blocks - though I haven't used the Mac version, and I'll second Lazy Foo for tutorials (although you might want to get at least some of the basics down before heading there).

Every so often I'll make a halfheated attempt to learn how to use it - but egads - the controls! Who came up with the idea of using the right mouse button to select? Do they hate conventions?

I'm sure it would be easier if I wasn't used to using 3ds Max where everything seems sane and sensibly laid out. Meh - my latest project uses ASCII graphics, so I don't need to worry about this again for a while

I don't really see the point - while genetically it will be the same person, it won't actually *be* the same person. It wouldn't bring back a loved one or extend your life - it would just be someone who looks a great deal like you or that person. And - if there's no point to doing it, there's not much of a moral problem because it won't be done.

I'm under the belief that a cloned will never be 100% human like we are.

Um - why not...?

I don't see a moral problem - the idea that ideas (such as game mechanics) can be owned by someone is IMO ridiculous. Legally, given how cloning is a lot of people's main business model and they're getting away with it just fine, you'll probably be fine too.

I've just realised that the only time I've ever easily finished a program where it worked and didn't make my brain explode trying to trudge through the hell that was my code is when I sat down and planned it all out with lots of pseudocode and notes and suchlike.

Apparently I didn't learn from this positive experience, but I think I'm slowly getting the point - even if it has to be hammered in one failed project at a time. I may deliberately ignore everything my software engineering courses have to tell me (because I think I'd give up even faster if I had to actually use any of that shit) - but it's hard to argue with first hand experience.

So - to make this thread about something rather than my personal revelation - how do you plan out the code of your projects? How comprehensive does the plan have to be before actually coding?

I quite like the Geneforge text-dumps, which tell what happens after you've finished based on the choices you've made. Fallout's slideshow as well. It's nice to know that your actions have had an effect on the world once everything's over.