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Exceptional Journals (in no order): [Eliwood] [Steve Healy] [Ravuya] [Mark the Artist] [Scet] [Ysaneya] [Mayan Obsidian]
My Personal Website
| Tuesday, December 26, 2006 |
  Merry Christmas! | 
Posted - 12/26/2006 3:19:25 PM | Merry (Belated) Christmas!
I hope you all had a very merry Christmas. And if you don't celebrate, then a very happy holiday. 
It was my original intent to post yesterday, but I was waiting to get a picture -- a nice shot with me and the family C-tree! -- taken with my digital camera, so I could get it up here. Unfortunately, the USB cable for it is nowhere to be found, so no beans. You'll have to settle for the GIF above and once-a-year green text. :P
And of course, what's Christmas without gloating about the loot I got? Santa was kind enough to part with:
- O'Reilly's Learning PHP and mySQL - Awesome. I've been dieing to get into PHP/mySQL for a while now. :)
- Loads of clothes 'n socks
- A new desktop - 2.4ghz, 512mb RAM (soon to be upgraded), and a decent harddrive. Nothing really fancy, but it'll be much much faster than the desktop I currently have at residence. I can't wait to get lost in Oblivion with some upped settings. ;)
- $150 - Acquired cumulatively by various relatives. To be promptly spent on stuff. :)
- $1000 - By my generous uncle, to go towards my education. :)
- A smorgasboard of candy - Far too many of the chocolate mint candies that I adore. I'll have to give some away at residence to prevent Steve->Fat++.
- Chainfire by Terry Goodkind
- Enchanter by Sara Douglass
All in all, I'm extremely happy with what I got, and I'm even happier that my family enjoyed the gifts that I got them. All of this wonder and joy has rekindled my gamedev motivation. :)
In addition to the 'space marine game' (codenamed Project Iris) I'm also developing another smaller project. Due to a little confusion, by space marines, I refer to the DooM variety.
Anyways, I hope everyone here had a great day full of giving, receiving, and seeing relatives. Let's not forget the turkey! 
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| Thursday, December 14, 2006 |
| Untitled | |
Posted - 12/14/2006 1:27:57 AM | Finals!
No really new news, aside from that I'm halfway through my finals. I'm so whipped after 24 hours of studying in the last 6 days, although there's still over 30 hours of studying to go. Arggh. When you're sitting there at home doing not-work, think about me. 
Next Project?
All I can say is that it may or may not involve space marines.
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| Sunday, December 10, 2006 |
| Picture["Words"] = 1000 | |
Posted - 12/10/2006 11:05:37 PM | Finally, the polish is paying off.
| |
| Go with the group.. | |
Posted - 12/8/2006 1:17:46 AM | Flocking
I figured that I was on a roll with my disgressions, so I read up a bit on flocking/herding, and wrote a fun little demo. This one's a bit more fun to play with. You can get some pretty cool flocks going on. Give it a whirl!
(Again with C# + SDL.NET, so .NET Framework 2.0 is required!)
Download Flocking AI Demo
As fun of an experiment it was, I've decided against adding this into Membrane Massacre. The cells are big, and the free space in a map is small. Enemies would just be bouncing around tight spaces more than truly 'flocking'. I think I'll leave it at the A* pathfinding as far as AI concepts go. But a fun adventure nonetheless!
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| Wednesday, December 6, 2006 |
| A*: The (shortest) path to happiness. | |
Posted - 12/6/2006 10:21:27 PM | A* Pathfinding
So while working on the new enemies and their respective AI, I realized that the current 'pathfinding' is quite bad. Enemies just literally point themselves directly at you and charge. Not too exciting. We definitely need to get some pathfinding going on here.
Unfortunately I've never done real pathfinding before, so I nabbed Patrick Lester's wonderful article and got to work on a prototype using the splended C#+SDL.NET combination. Mix and boil for 2.5 hours -- minus some laundry-work here and there -- and voila! I was shocked at how easy it was compared to how difficult I imagined it would be.
Since we all love demos, I added a bit more user-friendliness and packaged it up for anyone who wants to toy with it. It's not boringly instantaneous; it actually step-by-step builds the path so you can see what's really going on.
You will need the .NET Framework 2.0 to run it, of course.
Left-Click: Add/remove walls.
Right-Click: Set start point.
Middle-Click: Set end point. (You need a 3-button mouse, sorry! )
F: Calculate shortest path.
R: Reset map.
Download A* Pathfinding Demo
Now that I've got the concept under my belt, it's just a matter of reimplementing it in C++, and tuning it a whole bunch to work with a destructable environment. Should be interesting; both to write and test!
Maybe I'll play with flocking AI to see if I can build little sub-colonies of cells.
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| Free pizza! | |
Posted - 12/4/2006 11:54:22 PM | UW Game Development Club
Ah, today was the term's final meeting of the gamedev club at my Uni. We used our otherwise untouched club funds to buy several pizzas for all of us, which I can say was quite delicious. I can't wait until we get all fired up for the next term! This time around (the first time around for me) we had a total of maybe 20 members, but we plan on doubling this number by the end of May next year, since we now have the administrative powers needed to get some more beefy marketing going on.
The goal of the Beginner section that I was leading was to have everyone complete their own game based off the 'Space Infiltrators' sourcecode that I incremently produced throughout the term, using C# and SDL.NET. Unfortunately, only one member finished a game, but he did such a fantastic job that I think it cancels out the fact it was the only one. I'll get a download up for it as soon as he gets the files to me. A reporter from the MathSoc (Math society) newspaper dropped by our meeting to offer placement of his game in their paper, too. Woot woot for free plugs. :D
More Membranes, More Massacre
Shocked as I am, Membrane Massacre got another official review, this time in Polish! Looks like MM caters towards the European audience more than I had planned. ;) I asked the administrator who contacted me if he could send me a translation, so I could see what was being said about the game. Hopefully all good things!
Development on the final release for Membrane Massacre is still steadily underway, with more visual additions in the works, since I felt the visual realm was a neglected one during the first release. Enemies now sport a transcluent membrane around their bodies, whereas the thickness of the membrane indicates their current health. Additionally, upon respawning (or entering a level) a cool stream of particles will collect where the player is to respawn before actually placing him, indicating much more clearly to the user where his ship has started.
Additionally, the Game Settings system is pretty much done. Nothing terribly special, but just a simple text file (settings.cfg) containing lines like "Fullscreen=1" and "ParticleBlending=0" and "AbsoluteControl=0" and the ilk. I've never actually written a setting system for a game before -- believe it or not -- so it was a fun little task to perform. This should also hopefully ensure that people with lower-end computers will be able to still play the game smoothly by disabling the (somewhat) expensive blending routines.
Next on the list is a revamp of the enemies, which will include: better AI, enemy evolution, pathfinding, and more species of enemies. Which will, of course, likely lead into the implementation of a fun Survival mode (kindly thefted from Ravuya's Glow ). I can't wait!
EDIT: FRAPS won't record Allegro-based games (because it's not OGL/D3D) and I can't find any other movie recording software that doesn't absolutely stink. Looks like no movie. 
But I present a screenshot that does totally not do the transcluent membranes justice. :)
(Run away!)
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| Saturday, December 2, 2006 |
| The BLENDING! | |
Posted - 12/2/2006 1:23:37 AM | Alpha-tastic!
So today was all about implementing alpha and additive blending into Membrane Massacre. And I must say, it looks awesome. Virtually all particles make use of blending now, which adds a huge +1 to the game's overall feel. All weapons now use blending, as well as the LASER! Bzzzzzzt! (And gah, virtually no performance hit! )
EDIT: I'll see if I can whip up a gameplay video for my next entry.
(BZZZZZZZT! And new enemy-death-'gobs'! Much nicer than bland circles!)
Review ...sort of
Membrane Massacre has seen its first official review! Unfortunately, it's in Czech. D'oh. If anyone can read Czech and would be kind enough to translate it for me (none of the online translators work ), it would be vastly appreciated. Even if the words aren't nice, it's neat to see someone took the time to write up something about the game.
And gah, I can't belive MM is just about up to 1000 downloads! Insane! :D
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"Good night, Monster Land."
"Good night, brave warrior."
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