So Seasonal Gift Giving Day has come and gone, and left in its wake utter and total destruction. Homes are ruined for miles in each direction and feral children walk the streets moaning "Wii. Wii. Wii. Wii." in quest for their electronics devices. As long as I can survive against their ravenous attacks, I will post about my struggles with independent game development.

Novarunner

Some pretty big improvements; I now have stuff bubbling up through the main loop and onto my screen (starfield) and will be putting the skybox and other models back in soon. After that, it's hooking the controls up to a player, and then locking the camera to that player to get back in the game. I'm confident that I'll have something really nice by the end of the week.

I've also added a bunch of flavour text to the game in preparation for using them on the loading screens, one of the things I really loved about Bioware games.

Here is a screenshot showing off the star field and temporary hud (sort of):
After I get models rendering properly again, I should probably start working on my AI state modification/utility functions (rotateTowards, flyTowards, etc) and perhaps do some more YouTube videos and a Windows prototype.

Propane Injector

I've started laying out the "new" class diagram, and starting to rewrite the shader classes so that they make a lot more sense. One of the things I'm most excited about, again, is the material system -- no longer will I have issues where I accidentally leave the texture unit off and then go on to create inaccurate renderings full of pain and misery. Taking intelligence out of the development process is awesome.

I'm also working on getting the new PI up and running with Mono; I'll probably write a guide for using Mono on Linux and OS X, although redistributing OS X Mono applications kind of sucks right now because of the dependency on X11 and many third-party dynamic libraries, which are hard to make bundle-portable.