February 26, 2013
For giggles, today at work I implemented an over-the-shoulder camera and WASD movement, plus some camera controls to zoom the camera in and out and change the tilt. I'm not doing an LoD, so on my work computer it doesn't like it if you bring the camera out too far at too low an angle, although on m…
February 23, 2013
Spent a little while today learning the ins and outs of Urho3D's animation system, and worked more on the wiring to hook it all up. Here is GC out tooling around the wilderness:
The island generator was a simple drop-in with a bit of rewiring to instantiate the new hex tiles, but otherwise it went s…
The island generator was a simple drop-in with a bit of rewiring to instantiate the new hex tiles, but otherwise it went s…
February 22, 2013
Spent a little time at work tweaking things and getting a better feel for it:
A possible sticking point for me is trees. Well, vegetation in general. I've always had a hard-time with low-poly vegetation, which is why previously I would just use an L-system or other generator to generate high-poly ve…
A possible sticking point for me is trees. Well, vegetation in general. I've always had a hard-time with low-poly vegetation, which is why previously I would just use an L-system or other generator to generate high-poly ve…
February 20, 2013
Following up on the solid hex tiles in the last post, I've been doing a bit of fiddling with the generators.
All of these tiles came together pretty quickly. Procedurally generated using techniques I hashed out on GC and various other projects, these tiles are created as various randomly generated d…
All of these tiles came together pretty quickly. Procedurally generated using techniques I hashed out on GC and various other projects, these tiles are created as various randomly generated d…
February 18, 2013
Occasionally as I have worked on Goblinson Crusoe I've been struck by the need to simplify. As it stands, the engine underpinning things has quite a few limitations. Shadows, for example, as mentioned in my last post. Currently, only blob shadows are supported unless I bake shadowing directly into …
February 01, 2013
Been fleshing out the combat some more. I added a new damage type, Siege Damage, in anticipation of adding siege weaponry such as the above catapult. Catapults (or whatever types of siege machinery I eventually end up with) will be craftable minions that can be summoned onto the battlefield using K…
January 27, 2013
ApochPiQ's Dude, Just Chill Out entry made me feel bad and dirty. I've been neglecting GC lately, and I've been neglecting this blog as well.
Since the last time I updated about GC, I have gotten quite a bit done. However, so much of it has just been bookkeeping, general clean-up, some refactoring, …
Since the last time I updated about GC, I have gotten quite a bit done. However, so much of it has just been bookkeeping, general clean-up, some refactoring, …
December 23, 2012
I love Lua, that shouldn't be a surprise to anybody who reads this blog. I am possessed of a chaotic, ad-hoc personality, so the ad-hoc nature of Lua coding suits me just fine. I love the fluidity and flow of working with a dynamically typed language, and the ability that it gives me to rapidly pro…
November 07, 2012
I don't really like physics based games. I don't dislike them, mind, but I don't necessarily like them. I was born and raised and RPG man, and I remain an RPG man. The first "game" (and I use the term liberally) I ever made was an RPG. The last game I ever make will probably be an RPG. Unless I die…
October 19, 2012
There's a new official build of Blender up for download, and if you are one of those compulsive types like me who just has to play with new-feature builds on graphicall, then you already know that this release has some fun little goodies. Aside from the usual round of enhancements and tweaks to exi…
October 12, 2012
There is a sort of unofficial rule about save-game functionality that I learned once, long ago, but which I still have a hard time applying: from day one of coding on your game, try to maintain the ability to save and load your game at all stages.
It's a tough rule to follow because it takes discipl…
It's a tough rule to follow because it takes discipl…
October 10, 2012
When you make a game, you have to make compromises. Doesn't matter what kind of game you make, 2D, 3D, RTS, RPG, FPS, TBRPG.... you name it, there are compromises you have to make.
Goblinson Crusoe is a 2D hex-based game viewed from a 30-degree angle above the horizon with an orthographic projection…
Goblinson Crusoe is a 2D hex-based game viewed from a 30-degree angle above the horizon with an orthographic projection…
October 10, 2012
Spent a little time today working up some new procedural mountains for Goblinson Crusoe. Used Blender Cycles to render these, and it made a bit of a difference in the pipeline.
For reference, here are the old mountains:
The way I generated the original mountains was I wrote a script for the Accidenta…
October 07, 2012
Yikes. I hate that Steam is tracking my hours played, because it gives my wife ammunition to use against me...
Anyway, I'm 67 hours into Torchlight 2. I've played every class to at least L15, and I have something like 5 embermages, including the one I was playing only with my brother, the one I expe…
Anyway, I'm 67 hours into Torchlight 2. I've played every class to at least L15, and I have something like 5 embermages, including the one I was playing only with my brother, the one I expe…
September 13, 2012
August 28, 2012
In this simple, quick little one-off I was playing with grass. Given enough memory, you can do an astounding number of particles, which makes doing grass very simple, using the same exact particle trick as for forests. In this one-off, I spent the bulk of my time writing scripts to help with my wor…
August 26, 2012
Did up a new cliff texture, and added a feature to the background hill. I didn't like how it was just so there, but so plain. Also added a rock island because rock islands are cool, and all the cool kids have one. Next up, I'm going to do something with the hill on the right, since it seems to be t…
August 24, 2012
Second Edit:
Tweaked the texturing a bit (had some pretty weird scalings in the material I imported for the ground, that made the rock texture look strange in the last render) and did a bit more rock painting. I still need to do some rock and debris ground clutter, maybe some grass and reeds for the…
Tweaked the texturing a bit (had some pretty weird scalings in the material I imported for the ground, that made the rock texture look strange in the last render) and did a bit more rock painting. I still need to do some rock and debris ground clutter, maybe some grass and reeds for the…
August 22, 2012
Thought I wasn't going to have computer access for two weeks while in Cali, but the wife needed a new laptop so we picked one up for her and I've been breaking it in. I didn't bring any of my projects with me, though, so I've been just messing around. Above is a shot of a quick toy, just playing wi…
August 16, 2012
Now that I have a decent backdrop (see previous entry for more) it's time to work on the foreground. But first, I have to get set up. I start a new scene and add a plane to it. I also delete the camera and add a new one. I rotate both the plane and the new camera by 90 degrees on the X axis, then I…
August 11, 2012
Blender Cycles
Awhile ago, the Blender team started work on a new renderer for Blender, called Cycles, driven by the work being done on the next open movie project. The latest releases of Blender include this renderer, and if you haven't looked into it yet you're kind of missing out. Cycles is neat.…
Awhile ago, the Blender team started work on a new renderer for Blender, called Cycles, driven by the work being done on the next open movie project. The latest releases of Blender include this renderer, and if you haven't looked into it yet you're kind of missing out. Cycles is neat.…
August 11, 2012
What is that monstrosity, you ask? Why, I'm delighted you asked. That is a first stab at a material node tree for doing triplanar mapping in Blender's Cycles renderer. Until Cycles came along, I couldn't find any way at all of doing tri-planar mapping. The result:
Woot! No stretching. One of the big…
August 05, 2012
As I indicated in my last post, I've been playing with creating renderings of forests in Blender. In order that I not forget this process when I inevitably move on to something else, I'm going to write out what I'm doing here. It's actually pretty simple, but it's been a few hours of fiddling and w…
July 31, 2012
I've been on an art push lately. Today, I was fiddling around with the idea of using Blender's particle functionality to create large forests. It actually worked pretty well. The idea is that you create a terrain and attach a particle system to it. You can paint the terrain with vertex weights to c…
July 27, 2012
I am still alive. In case, you know... you care.
It's the busy season, though. Temps are high, weather is bone dry, perfect for getting projects done, so work is slammingly busy. And when I come home, there's a smelly kid to take off my frazzled wife's hands. So I haven't been able to do much. Gobli…
It's the busy season, though. Temps are high, weather is bone dry, perfect for getting projects done, so work is slammingly busy. And when I come home, there's a smelly kid to take off my frazzled wife's hands. So I haven't been able to do much. Gobli…
May 27, 2012
Now that I've uninstalled the game and have had a few days without playing to mull things over, I've been able to put my finger on a few of the reasons I was unimpressed and even upset with Diablo 3. I find that almost all of those reasons can be neatly summed up in a single idea: that the design o…
May 12, 2012
Today was a busier day at work, so I didn't get to do a whole lot. But I did excise the old chain-of-green-arrows path preview code in lieu of a preview mode that shows hexes you can walk to given your current number of movement points, as seen above. It's a quick hack, though, that doesn't cache t…
May 10, 2012
Obligatory nightly screenshot:
Today I implemented inventory views in the combat control panel interface. An inventory view acts as an observer, tracking an inventory full of items and presenting a grid layout of icon buttons. In the above shot, you can see the 3 button (currently) main menu with th…
Today I implemented inventory views in the combat control panel interface. An inventory view acts as an observer, tracking an inventory full of items and presenting a grid layout of icon buttons. In the above shot, you can see the 3 button (currently) main menu with th…
May 08, 2012
Pictured above: Travel mode using the ashlands graphic set. I am not in love with the mountains; I think tonight or tomorrow I'll tweak the noise modules that generate them a bit to add more "life" and texture to them. The trees turned out pretty okay.
I experimented with a different UI scheme today…
May 08, 2012
Did some more work on codifying the actions and skills system. I took out the old melee code, and implemented a more general structure for executing an action. All actions are now described by a table of data, and a combatant can be commanded to execute an action. For example, a melee attack curren…
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