I've done a bit more work on the GUI but nothing impressive (buttons, etc). It'll be more impressive when I hook up some kind of code to handle docking, which requires the autopilot code which the 'vignettes' also require.
Perhaps I should draw myself a dependency graph of some kind. Then I'd make some kind of traction on this bastard.
P.S. I was amazed to see GDNet works great on the Wii. Just another way Opera is the superior browser and all you other browser users will one day bow before its might. Bow, mortal!
I've been drinking Mountain Dew for the vitamin C and it actually seems to be helping.
Anyway, exam #3 went well. Exam #4 tomorrow and then I'm gonna get cracking on my deferred shading example. I got MRT working this afternoon in Propane Injector so it shouldn't be too long now!
Exams tomorrow, Tuesday and Wednesday. Then I'm free and I will begin the deferred-shading component of the Novarunner engine.
Once this is done, hopefully I'll start on some gameplay. The UI stuff is coming a bit slow; I have to think about how I'm going to do the ship menus and whatnot so it's easy for the end user to trade with the station and then blast off into space.
I might just rip off EV Nova, but I desperately want a ship screen like Sunrise had, only with drag & drop.
Most of today's entry is posted in my own weblog, which isn't always related to game development.
What is related to game development is that I'm spending some time getting the FBO system working exactly properly in Novarunner; this has stuck in my craw for quite some time and I'm going to be happy to get a system that works.
At the moment, I'm going to implement two FBO maps; standard and distortion. They'll be combined in a post-processing step using an additional shader, and I'll have to make it easy to add another FBO map later, because inevitably I'll think of another effect I want (such as bloom).
Anyway, the distortion map will be used for things like black holes and diffraction effects (such as the stealth ship upgrade -- oops, maybe wasn't supposed to talk about that).
This is effectively the start of a deferred shading system, a concept which simultaneously elates and terrifies me -- it's time to start counting megabytes on the GPU and all that other bullshit that I see big commercial game developers moaning about.
I don't know. I've only finished one so far (1/4) and it didn't go so well. Ask me again in a week's time.
Novarunner
The radar is gradually unsucking, but it'll still take a lot of time to get it up where I want it.
I want to start implementing the front-end menu for the game, which means I need to finish off my button and radio-button UI object classes. This I will do soon, possibly as a study break.
Propane Injector
I've been speaking to a lot of people who are looking for a game API that's just about in PI's niche, but PI needs a lot more polish before it can be a "real" competitor. Later I'll have to rethink the future of PI and potentially embark on a redesign; one of the things I'm thinking of doing is rejiggering the Game2D and Game3D namespaces to be more complete, including a 3D actor class.
One nice thing I'm working on now: generative textures. I've written a whole set of texture generators for PI and are working on an open source tool to build them using a Lisp-like scripting syntax.
What's next? A loader for the free Torque Constructor (OS X, Windows) map editor format. I do so enjoy this tool.
After that is rejigging the Model class to take more than just md2; I have a nice Lightwave OBJ importer that I wrote the other day and want to do an ms3d loader as well.
_
Not much else is going on. My internship starts May 1 so I'm hoping to make some serious progress in the few days I have off before it starts, and dedicate more time to game development than I have thus far these last two busy semesters.
So I put on my beret and started trying to develop game art. I've been making various crappy models, uv-unwrapping them and trying to texture them, like this:
Clearly texturing isn't my strong suit, but I guess that's why I'm practicing the unwrapping.
This one actually came out pretty well; I'm starting to understand my unwrapping tool much better though I have to learn to resist its automatic features and try to make everything the same size, so it's easy to paint across faces.
Once I get better here, I'll try making a proper high-polygon model and unwrapping that. Thrills!
Assignment ran a bit long. I got the radar though.
Yes, it looks rather ugly right now but it works out quite well. I'm happy with it.
Currently it only tells bases (blue) apart from everything else (white). Advanced versions of the radar (on some ships) can tell debris and enemy ships.
GUI Control a Day was probably a bad idea. I partially implemented a button, but one of my big projects this week foulled up, so I'll make some more posts this weekend to make up for it.
ravuya starts to vibrate, and then his head explodes
Today's update will be a little later tonight than normal, and it won't be a data grid because I'm still wrestling with the internal representation. Instead, I will give you a list box.
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