It's Win32 only at the moment, but that's because I need to get that platform inspected most clearly.
I appreciate your testing capabilities; if it explodes on you, please upload the stderr/stdout files. There's a BetaReadme.html that should explain a lot of the game.
Edit: A log.html file should be either generated in the same directory with the application, or with your save files in My Documents\My Games\Novarunner. If the game blows up and your stderr/stdout files are empty, see if the log file got created. If so, put that in the comments here. Thanks!
Edit 2: It appears no log file is being created. I fixed the problem and now I'm uploadingI've uploaded a fresh build. Hopefully this will produce some log files for you guys.
Edit 3: I fixed a bug in the particle system that the more-anal VCRT was tripping up on. That should fix some of your crash issues.
Edit 4: I fixed the crashes in the star map and the bar screens. Now I'm going to work on implementing the roll and inverse pitch controls, and figure out why "Go To" takes such crazy routes on Windows.
Edit 5: Some fixes for people who are having issues with the UI. Also, you roll instead of yaw now and there's an option on the prefs menu to invert your pitch.
In a strange twist of fate, I'm going to write about my day in this spot. I know you are all sick and tired of seeing people write about themselves, so I'll be brief.
Those of you in the know know that today was probably about -40'C with windchill. Despite what dcosborn says, today was not a good day.
It all starts in my driveway, resting place of my Cavalier. Today, my key wouldn't fit in my ignition. Why? Because the key was too hot from me holding it in my hand, and expanded. This should give you a pretty good idea of what's going on. I wisely decided that pushing the car further would result in cracking the block, as I had forgotten to plug the block heater in the night before.
So I took the bus.
The bus didn't come.
So I got a ride.
So I got on the train, which was pretty packed. Yeah, alright. Get to the downtown station to switch my train.
...30 minutes...
The wrong train appears, announces it is out of service, and dumps 70-odd passengers onto the platform. My fellow commuters begin using several expletives and physically assault the train. I decide, upon further reflection, to flee.
So I got on another bus, that would bring me closer to the office. Did it ever -- I don't think he dropped below 90km/h (55mph) the entire time, through icy streets and tight turns.
I finally stumbled off this bus, and walked to the office. Victory!
How I got home is of no consequence. I'm staying home tomorrow.
I'm doing a bit of work in preparation for pushing out something resembling a beta Windows version soon.
I want to try and tie down a lot of the loose-roaming issues with content, so I went kind of nuts and added a bunch of commodity items, a new class of NPC (merchants) and updated the readme file for beta users.
We're rapidly approaching the point where I decide whether to make the game a storied experience or just throw my hands up and get grinding on Afterglow. The prototype for that is already very awesome, and I should have screenshots within the month if I pick the latter option and start winding down on Novarunner. If I pick the former, it could be several months' worth of retooling for a game I still think is fundamentally broken. Ah, the tyranny of choice.
Beta probably tomorrow night, unless the first tester notices missing files/broken stuff from the port.
Doing a bit of small work here and there to clean off the remaining bugs list for Novarunner.
One thing I noted is that the "impulse thruster" totally didn't work out, for the player or the AI. So it's still in there, but it's not accessible from the front-end. I'll give instructions for enabling it from the console, but it's not going to be supported.
The second bit is that I tightened up targeting and scales again, so now you can get rushed by Pirate Dreadnoughts that are about four times the size of your ship. Luckily, that just makes them easier to shoot.
I'm gonna start getting the meshes together from the various contributions and then bolt them into the game so it might actually look playable soon. Then it's off to the races for Afterglow, now that I finished off most of its geometry editing and have picked up a copy of Alien Syndrome to figure out what not to do.
The star map now highlights those star systems where you have an outstanding quest; additionally, some of the little hinkiness with the star jump vignette is fixed now.
I actually got jumped by a pair of space pirates trying to debug the second issue. I really need to make some sort of smiting weapon that makes them pay for their insolence.
Make a mess, clean it up. Make a mess, clean it up
Posted - 1/21/2008 12:30:48 AM
Kudos to anyone who can get the reference.
Figured I'd pop in for an extra-short entry to point out that the Afterglow level editor can delete vertices and polygons, and also switch between "grid aligned" and "non-grid aligned" modes. Sweet.
Right now, it can only place vertices, but soon placing polygons will come.
Considering the wealth of savage weaponry available in the Novarunner universe, it's a huge surprise that death hasn't been better managed before now.
The player can now die and respawn (at a cost of 25% of your on-hand bucks for the tow).
Also, pirates are much more vicious now; they attack you from a much larger range, and actually know how to spec out the range of their weapons, mostly because I was being a retard when I wrote the guessWeaponRange function:
Their weapons also heat-seek now, which fixes a few of the mathy errors with my targeting code. Where before they were too easy, now they may in fact be too hard. I got cut up pretty nastily by a gang of four of them when I was going through an unpopulated system.
Also, I got Xbox Live Gold, and are thus going on a worldwide tour to find GDNet members and shoot them in the back. So far, I've shot ApochPIQ, Sir Sapo, Prinz Eugn, and Jonnyfish. If you also want me to shoot the hell out of you, please add the obvious gamertag to your friends list and then we can get to throwing cars at each other and/or achieving things.
So a few modifications to Novarunner last night: added some more content, fixed up a bug with the pirate response, and tightened the controls up.
I suspect I'm going to need to spend some more time taking care of edge cases; just blitting around from system to system exposed quite a few little nasty bits that I want to polish off before I release.
So today is Macworld. Hopefully Papa Jobs gives us some juicy razor-thin laptops. Edit: He did! But I won't buy one for awhile, if ever.
Some people appeared to worry about the previous entry; I'm still working on Novarunner and I'll try to make it better. Last night I was adding a bit of content.
Random link of the moment
Golden Gate suicide statistics. While morbid, it's curious to see the blank spots and the overwhelming majority direction.
It's kind of neat to have a domain and all. I feel like a first-class citizen of the Internets, although I suspect I should probably launch some misspelled Web 2.0 startup with software written in ineffectual, garbagey languages with minimal debugging capacity and highly permissive syntax.
Stuff might be screwed up as the DNS refreshes (especially using the realitybytes.tk subdomain), but hopefully it should all go smoothly.
The response to Glow 1.3 seems pretty positive so far. I think I'll probably update my website with the final release later this week, and then maybe go around to the places I've advertised and push the game on them. It's much closer to the game I wanted to make.
As for Afterglow, I'm still working on the map tools. The editor just has basic polygon delete and edit functionality right now -- it doesn't know anything about vertices yet, or creating polygons. After the map tools are a bit more solid, it's time to look at my drunken cocktail napkin sketches and start building the "core game" API. After that, I should be able to start feeding you guys some juicy screenshots.
Novarunner? Stalled, unfortunately. I've got to actually finish the front-end for the game, and make more content. After that, I should be able to push out playtest versions like the Glow 1.3 playtests, and get user feedback. Hopefully people like it.
Things that should be fixed in this version from the previous release candidate:
Guys with X1300-X1950 cards should be able to play again. I burned two days trying to make the texture_rectangle renderpath work, and it just didn't fly, so it's disabled and you guys get the old CopyTex support. Sorry.
Disabling grayscale mode works again.
I'm afraid I can't do much about the sound core, guys. Please let me know what kind of hardware you're running, since it runs fine on both my Mac and the crappy AC97 onboard sound on my Windows box's motherboard.
Here is the pre-release version of Glow 1.3. Before I go live with it, I'd like people to check stuff.
I've tested it on ATI on OS X and NVidia on Windows XP, so having people check that for me would be tops. I'd also like to see people playing their way through the game again (should be much easier) and then seeing if the HUD tag really does show up properly. It does for me, but I haven't had the chance to play completely through several times.
Ch-ch-changes
Better framebuffer. It's an FBO, so it supports arbitrary resolutions.
Moving the mouse scrolls, like in Soldat
Bug with the input binder fixed
If you reload from a saved game, you can actually continue to the next level now
Posted - 1/28/2008 10:56:09 PM
Posted - 1/28/2008 9:21:52 PM
Posted - 1/28/2008 1:19:53 AM
I'm doing a bit of work in preparation for pushing out something resembling a beta Windows version soon.
Posted - 1/27/2008 6:43:44 PM
Posted - 1/25/2008 9:42:54 AM
Posted - 1/21/2008 12:30:48 AM
Posted - 1/20/2008 5:38:52 PM
Posted - 1/18/2008 12:44:03 AM
Posted - 1/15/2008 11:24:47 AM
