As for the car hunt, I've narrowed it down to a 2009 Lancer or a 2008/09 Impreza (used versions of both are completely open to purchase, provided I can find 'em). Anyone got any experience with either machine? I've talked to owners of both, and naturally they love their cars.
I'm also fully willing to wait it out for a few months, let my bank account grow a bit, and possibly upgrade to a Lancer GTS or Impreza WRX. The upgrade sounds pretty unlikely, though, as the insurance will soak me.
Just so it doesn't seem like I fell off the face of the planet, I added a second room to the Afterglow map and have been working on collision.
I'm really happy that it worked the first time I added another room! Usually when I go from "one of something" to more than one of something, it breaks. Not this time.
Screenshots tonight. Unless I forget. Also, a post about my car hunt.
So yesterday I wrote all of the code to finally finish the whole map loading, compiling and rendering step. It even does normals!
I don't have any textures set on it (though they work, I need to fix it a bit before I can get it the way I want), nor do I have the normals and lighting configured properly in that picture.
Car
I am still screwing up the courage to buy a new Impreza. I am worried that the 2009 models will be some wussified high-fuel-economy Toyota wannabe, so I'm tempering my love for horsepower with my love for being able to pay rent.
Working a bit on rebuilding my map stuff. I really should've never written it the way I did in the first place. Never fear, though -- once this is done, one of the major obstacles in the project plan will be out of the way and I can start generating sexy screenshots instead of tearing out the guts of the code. Very tempted to just go back to the old-school tilemaps, though; I dunno if the new polygonal maps will even look all that good. I'll let you be the judge of that after I kick out some screenshots.
I also picked up an 8GB Eee on Thursday and have been fiddling around with installing Ubuntu on it. It's an interesting little machine; certainly very eager to get going, and remarkably small. They could probably have picked a better hardware partner; Atheros are not exactly who I would go to first for Linux-friendly hardware.
I did a bit of work on the camera system to make it smoother, and also returned the sprite system to the way it was in Glow.
The next big task is to take the map editor's internal code and transfer it to the game; this means making the map serializable. Then I have to load it in the game into vertex buffers (instead of immediate mode, naturally) and then batch by material, which is something I've never done before.
I've also got to do a lot more work on the editor; namely, actual editing as opposed to just laying vertices.
So I'll be working on that tonight, instead of the mass of videogames in my backlog. I promise. Mostly because I beat Condemned and Vegas 2 over the weekend, and both of them have remarkably disappointing endings.
HEY! There's still time for Los Angeles GDNetters to register for the Grilled Cheese Invitational. BREAD. BUTTER. CHEESE. VICTORY.
Unfortunately, the camera isn't quite working at the time, and there seems to be some nasty sampling issues going on with that sprite, but it shows that my entire actor infrastructure is up and running, which means that it's only a matter of time before I make the little guy respond to my mouse and we're off to the races.
Also, check out how the OS X screenshot utility doesn't even wait for v-sync. Cheeky little bugger.
The seller, a stickler for the eBay Motors CAPS LOCK tradition, tells us "I GUESS I DON'T HAVE TO EXAGERATE WHEN I'M SAYING THAT THE CAR IS VERY FAST," and we tend to agree. In fact, we'd go a bit further and say that this setup wants to kill you, in one of those wrecks so grisly that the paramedics involved will be required to go on long-term psychological disability leave.
Quote:
I'm going with the Mazda 12A with the Honda Toupee. This guy must have been on some powerful psychotropics to try and mate such disparate animals. I'd recommend not drinking anything offered when going to view the car.
I'm still working on the rendering system, so that I can get something up on screen. Initially I assumed I would just write a series of nasty hacks, but then I decided I didn't want to unwind all of those hacks like I did with Novarunner and still end up with a lot of junk.
Probably by the end of the week you'll see a screenshot of a character animating. It won't be very impressive, but it will show the complete functional camera, animation and asset system, which is a huge part of the Game API underlying the game functionality.
I've also started planning out a few of the UI features and figuring out how the game will control by fiddling with my experimental branch of Glow. I'll probably have to drop gamepad support, since it will just make the UI too convoluted to deal with.
Right now, player control is roughly equivalent to Glow, but with a longer acceleration curve for the assault character and a shorter one for the saboteur character. I'm tempted to do away with the characters entirely and have the player do a CRPG "build out," but that would require menu screens before the game starts, and people hate doing that before they know what's going on. So we'll stick with the two main characters, and eventually I'll give them names to go along with their respective backgrounds.
I'm also juggling some ideas I had about puzzle-style minigames, like the ones in the original System Shock. I think it would slow down the gameplay, but I'll definitely try some prototypes to make sure. I've also decided I'm going to add a "Plot-Free" option which disables the storyline completely, as Afterglow has significantly more cheesy 90s-comic-book-panache plot than the original game.
In the interim, I highly suggest you guys amuse yourself by taking a spin through You Have to Burn the Rope.
I've been doing a bit of work on the animation system and the bugfix list to make sure everything is up to date. It seems that some spambots have registered on the bug tracker, so I temporarily disabled signups. If you want to report things that are wrong with my software, let me know and I'll rig up an account for you.
Right now I'm going to start working on the actor rendering component; it will take a vertex buffer and query the animation component for the proper frame to render, and off we go to the races. Hopefully I can get something rendering in the next few hours, so I'll have a screenshot for tomorrow.
This April Fool's was kind of lame. Did you guys all forget? The only thing that even came close to tricking me was the Zelda trailer. Cheers!
Posted - 4/28/2008 11:37:43 PM
Posted - 4/28/2008 10:16:35 AM
Posted - 4/22/2008 9:52:58 AM
Posted - 4/15/2008 11:37:15 AM
Yeah, so, I didn't actually get any real work done yesterday.
Posted - 4/7/2008 10:54:05 AM
Probably by the end of the week you'll see a screenshot of a character animating. It won't be very impressive, but it will show the complete functional camera, animation and asset system, which is a huge part of the Game API underlying the game functionality.
Posted - 4/2/2008 12:42:26 AM
