Although there hasn’t been much updates in the blog, work has been very productive lately… First of all, Rincewind has started modeling the new “Grey” character, based on this concept I may have posted this before, but there you go… He has a more “wildman” streak to it, which is a bit more different than [...]
One of the main problems in my games is the GUI (Graphic User Interface)… I never really found a good way to build controls and iterate different GUIs, which led me to hating GUI work and usually doing a terrible job at it! On Grey, the GUI is very important, and as such I don’t [...]
I’m on vacation, but since I don’t have much access to technology (since I’m visiting neglected friends, etc), I haven’t had much time to work on Grey. Anyway, my latest development was that I built a “formatted text” control… The idea was to use some XML-based language (similar to HTML) and use it to describe [...]
Finally, after almost 57 hours of work, I’ve finished the refactoring of the resource system and adaptation of the SurgePlayer to use those changes! It’s a bit frustrating to be honest, to put in so many hours in a single task and the end result is everything looking exactly the same, but internally the system [...]
The highway to hell is full of good intentions! I wanted to focus on the development of the game itself, and I was creating a new enemy type (“Frost Touch”, a skeleton that slows down attacks when it hits). Visually, Frost Touch is different from the other skeletons because of a particle system: The effect [...]
We haven’t had much time lately, been too tired after work to be productive. Anyway, we’ve added effect instancing to the editor… It’s still not complete, but although the effects have to be authored “by hand” in XML, we can now create and use them in the editor: That’s the frost bones effect, which is [...]
There’s always regrets while coding, specially when we’re talking about a 10+ year codebase (with lots of refactoring, etc)… One of my main mistakes for ages was not to use matrix calculation. Of course, I used matrixes when it was time to deliver things to the graphics card, etc, but other than that, I ran [...]
RealJob™ has been kicking my butt lately, and I’m waiting on the GUI work so I’ll be able to progress more in the development of the game itself; but none of these reasons has stopped me from work! Lately, most of what I’ve been doing is backend system coding, stuff like refactoring the collision/intersection system, [...]
In my test arena, I had some performance issues in same places, where about 9 lights were shinning in a greater or smaller degree… Considering that in a deferred renderer, the main issue is bandwidth (each shaded pixel needs at least 64 bytes of data to come in from texture memory – the G-Buffer), I [...]
As I stated on the previous post, I didn’t have time to work on Grey this weekend, since I was participating in Ludum Dare’s 48-Hour Game Development Competition… Before you ask, it didn’t go that well, since I couldn’t come up with a decent idea; I just ended up doing a Voxel World editor… If [...]