In Afterglow, I got the homing bullet implant working after harassing SHilbert with math so simple I have literally solved it before.
On the plus side, you can now use a heat seeking shotgun. Yeah.
edit: I also did a test release build in order to break in AnonymousPosterChild's new Macbook Pro; unfortunately it looks like the PPC build won't link for some reason. I will investigate; it would be too bad if PPC players couldn't also play (though I doubt there are really many left ).
You can compare this to my previous Afterglow video to see just how far the game has come. I will be working tonight on adding more 'flair' such as scorch marks from explosions, better blood effects and bullet holes in the walls.
There is some progress coming; I've fixed a bunch of hinky bugs with the blood spraying and I'm adding UI tooltips to the inventory panel as well as "implant effects" to visually inform the player of what's going on with their implant loadout.
Nothing is pretty enough yet to show pictures of, but we'll see how it turns out. One thing I did do that makes the game awesome is crank up the bullet speed in air; now it feels more like Glow and is actually pretty fun to shoot at dudes in.
I still have to implement player death/respawn and then I can get started tuning actual gameplay instead of nonvisible features.
As an apology for being a complete goober as far as updating goes, I present to you
As promised, I'm starting to implement blood. This means I've done a bunch of hacking to my decal manager and actually have some pretty clever stuff going on in blood decal creation.
I worked on a bit of user-interface tweaking; you can hover over stuff like the implant bar and the character statistics panel, and I'm working on finalizing the last few implants.
It's actually pretty cool; I realized last night that I actually have most of the game implemented and I just need some content. I'm going to go try and make a test level and populate it with enemies to start working on the 'feel' of gameplay and make sure it feels good like the original. Expect some gameplay videos of me shooting people in the mouth.
Also, since I have decals working now I should probably work on blood spray. Which would my journal denizens prefer - blood-drenched screenshots or more test videos of me shooting zombies? I guess I could do both.
Yeah, I lied to you about wall decals. I implemented them tonight.
They're implemented using the stencil buffer because clipping made my head hurt. Hopefully this does the trick!
There are also floor decals, but I didn't think to show those off.
You can also see the implant bar in the top right, with my (awful) placeholder implant art in there. SHilbert has promised to help me work on UI consistency. This is a good idea because I rikey rikey the full-intensity RGB colours, and I'm told that isn't what artists actually do.
I just had an excellent long weekend in which I didn't think about my day job at all.
Implemented this weekend:
Functional implants (for now, only healing and speed boost - later, shield, targeting boost, homing bullets and security domination).
Minor AI improvements, making them slightly stupider/more myopic.
Plants vs. Zombies
I hope to implement more implants soon - I just have a few architectural decisions to make about how to add features.
After that, I will be working on stuff like decals (for blood and gore). It's a harder problem than I initially thought and I've aborted three or four attempts so far.
I have Afterglow running on the Great Satan's operating system now. Porting is quite annoying, even with a cross-platform setup.
This week, I also worked on implants; your character can hold onto a set of them and you can activate or deactivate them using the keyboard and mouse. The only implant hooked up right now is the healing implant, which heals your character once per second.
Due to the demise of my current host, it's possible that within a few hours my hosting will probably expire and a ton of links on this journal and elsewhere will shatter. When that happens, I will try and get my site up and running again as fast as possible.
Sorry in advance, guys.
Update #1: DNS is transferred over to my new host. I haven't brought back the database yet so the main page is inoperable and links will probably shatter.
Update #2: Database is back up but the website isn't talking to it properly yet. Working on it.
Update #3: Success. The site should be operational again, but rav.efbnet.com links will be broken until I talk to Run_The_Shadows and get them redirected.
Today is my last final exam, and then it's just on to finishing off my rendering project (which hasn't made much visible progress, but stuff is getting done behind the scenes).
As for Afterglow, I'm still working on it, but I haven't had much of a chance. I start my summer job on Monday and hopefully when I get settled I will have some free time to work on it again. My plan is to start implementing "mission" entities (conversations, triggers, etc) and revise the editor to be able to place and define entities and NPCs.
I got stalled out on decals; there are a bunch of corner cases with decals that I kind of hate, but I really really want to implement them. I'll spend some more time with that.
I also want to implement the implants - I just need to spend more time defining the internal code interface (base type, etc) and figuring out exactly which implants I want and how the user will trigger them. I want to try and avoid the clunky "hunt for the f-key" keyboard interface that made me avoid the use of most biomods in Deus Ex.
After that's done, I need to implement the store, various kinds of enemies and then start building game content in earnest.
Anyway, the deadline has hit for my games class project and it ended up looking pretty good. The camera is massively broken which is why everything looks like you're filming it from Mexico, the car-car collision detection really sucks and there are a lot of sound bugs.
I haven't yet gotten far enough away from this project to have any kind of perspective on what I learned. When I do my own racing game it will be a lot different, that's for sure.
I'm not sure I'm going to do a release quite yet (or ever); I have to think about fixing some things.
I've got finals this week (my first one is in about 2.25 hours), and then hopefully work on Afterglow can resume. I'm looking at starting to implement the important story components of the game, such as conversation entities.
You might be interested in my rendering class project, which is still ongoing and will complete in May. We are implementing this double-sided refraction method, and so far we have these two videos (and this one too).
It's the last week of lectures, so hopefully things will go a bit smoother once this week is over. The final release of my games class project is due on Monday, but first I have a major paper and rendering assignment left to do.
Once I get free, some actual work on Afterglow might happen - I haven't been making updates but a large amount of the game is there and needs some editor fixes before it can really start to get used.
Posted - 6/29/2009 10:12:52 AM
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