Finally finished the text for the delivery mission…
Still have some issues, regarding the way phrases are constructed in English:
Not sure how to build a simple system to select the right pronoun, need to think about it…
Anyway, next step is to actually add the code to do the missions (spawn/modify the areas when mission is accepted, mini-cutscenes that might be required, all generated procedurally, cleanup), and also need to think how the reward system will work (should be a function of where to get it, where to drop it off, if it’s a government, a corporation or an individual asking for it).
Finally, still need to select planets that are near the player, instead of randomly from the universe…
So, a lot of work still ahead, but I think I’ll be able to reuse a lot of this code with the other mission types!
Now listening to “System of a Down” by “System of a Down”
Today I worked on the generation of packages (so that we have something to deliver). Since the game has a less-than-serious attitude, this was quite easy from a technical perspective: just associate an adjective with an object like this better review of phentermine.
The hard and time-consuming part was creating a dictionary of words to use.
So, the result are pearls such as these:
pricey bone
ancient lamp
experimental toy
scientific camera
contraband girdle
pretty cloth
exquisite calculator
untested drug
new document
novel gong
complex desert
contraband ink sample
expensive hat
illegal beast
illicit clock
pure diamond
untested bow
powerful oil sample
priceless map
package
genuine grain
lovely calculator
contraband game
polished equipment
sophisticated fish
banned orchid
genuine arrow
splendid gas sample
Some fun stuff there… 
“Splendid Gas Sample” or “Contraband Ink Sample”, for example… Think I need more adjectives, they repeat a lot, since the list only has 60 elements.
Now listening to “Emotive” by “A Perfect Circle”
Today I worked on generating names… That’s way more work than it seems…
I want the mission text to have some flavour to it, so I need to generate customer names, names for the objects to carry, in some cases, the reason to do something… This is generating natural text, which is not easy (and I’m kind of improvising as I go, instead of really thinking it through, but that’s my usual development process anyway!).
Anyway, thanks to people on the internet that compile lists of names, nouns, etc, I can generate names of governments, corporations and people such as:
Mrs. Monika Reth
Vangilder Investment
Arvizo Collective
Ogas Logistics
The Monarchy of Ertack
Lady Claudine Haynie
His Grace Nickolas Marcinka
States of Unetue
Flinn Confederacy
Miss America Schaeffler
Breakfast Consumer Products
Mrs. Pearlie Dagenais
Puothib Collective
Muscle Financial
Emess Republic
Louhu Alliance
Money Genetech
The Monarchy of Iless
Bressi Pharmaceuticals
Someone
Klebe Dominion
Ethiopia Company
Lute Healthcare
Wash Applied Sciences
Archon Monika Button
Catamaran Biological
An interested party
Lord Clifton Beaumier
Witness Media
Alliance of Trunent
Lord Lewis Barich
Miss Jayna Hollett
Coalition of Shaza
Holy Urtang
Isanoune Regency
Gray Systems
Route Holdings
Theater Financial
Archon Annamarie Chiasson
Open Telecommunications
Archon Ryan Hartwig
Her Grace Raelene Wieman
Talas Holdings
Chese Cooperative
Lady Micha Lovorn
This is just a sample, of course…
Next step is generating “package” names, for delivery missions… I wanted to have “reasons” behind the missions, but that seems really hard to achieve, I’ll see how it looks with the approach I’m currently following and see if it works out…
Now listening to “Isohyet” by “Oblique Rain”
Spend most of today working on the UI for the random missions… Of course, everything is temporary art, and everything is bound to change, but I need somewhere where I could see the descriptions, accept missions and play around with them in general… The UI isn’t even consistent with the other UIs in the game!
Anyway, tomorrow I’ll probably start adding the first mission type, which will be “Delivery”, I think, which might include a “Retrieval”. This can also generate enemies or not, so you see how this might become a fairly complex system…
Now listening to “Wish You Were Here” by “Pink Floyd”
Link of the Day: This is a very well made demo… A few cool effects, really good soundtrack and some good art direction:
Today I started the random side missions system… This will be a very large component, from a technical perspective, especially the generation itself…
The idea is that the player can go to a mission console aboard the Skydancer and get side missions, which will yield alloy when completed.
All the missions will be generated on the fly and take place in the vicinity of the ship’s position and will be of different types, like assassinations, deliveries, recovering documents, etc.
Yep, expect such awesome screenshots for the next days while I work on this! 
Now listening to “Beyond the Veil” by “Tristania”
Link of the Day: This needs to be an actual televised sport!
Yet again, I started writing weapon descriptions and get lost in something else midway…
In this case, the target was the machine gun, and while the visuals were good this time, the balance was completely off, so I had to work on that a bit. Still think the balance of the end-tier machine gun is a bit off (it’s a bit too powerful, I think), but I’ll have to take external feedback on that!
I’m not that annoyed by this… Phase Two was supposed to be to create the side missions and balance the game, so that’s ok!
Link of the Day: Really love some demoscene stuff! Although not technically impressive (think I can figure out how most of this was done), it shows a lot of good taste in choosing the music, the colors, etc:
Well, I was supposed to start working on the new random mission system (the main part of Phase Two), but I started by writing the shotgun descriptions for the shop, and then I started playing around with it, and decided to improve the visuals slightly:
The small “explosions” are very fast, and they show the shot hit a wall or the floor… Screenshots make it look worse than it is, but still it looks bad… The lines are also very jagged, with a lack of substance…
Now I’m using the 3d line feature of Cantrip, and I lessened the magnitude of the sparks effect:
It looks a bit better, in my opinion… Still some work to do… I’ll probably put (in the polish phase) some marks where projectile weapons hit the floors and walls (think it will work better than the sparks)… The sparks may also require some work (maybe use the 3d line effect as well).
Now listening to “Battering Ram” by “Iron Savior”
Link of the Day: The Amiga will always have a part of my heart… For me it really stirs up memories, of some of my first “good looking” games (before that I had a ZX Spectrum, and I didn’t know enough to make decent graphics there), of some amazing games, of breath-taking demos… Anyway, here’s a video about the Amiga and the FPS genre (which kind of put the final nail into the machine):
Today I’ve managed to put in a lot of work on the game! “Phase 2” is well underway!
First, I started with some writing… As I said before, I’m trying to write a bit every day, instead of tackling all the writing at once… Today it was the time of the “laser gun text”. Also finished the tutorial stuff for planets.
Then, I had a nice round of bug fixing, small stuff I broke with development of later parts of the game, mostly small details on the cutscenes… Also think I’ll have to improve the first cutscene of the game, since it kind of sets the tone, and it’s just a “he says, she says” cutscene currently… Thinking about using the first person view for that one…
Also finally closed the list of robot enemies for the artist to be able to get started on them, which would be great… current robots are terrible! Don’t expect updates on that soon, since he’s just been a father (yay, congratulations)!
For that, I had to refactor the way I build the robots equipment, etc, but it was just reorganizing code around…
Finally, I added fog to all planets (not just the swamp)… It’s just a light fog, but I think it helps flesh out things a bit in terms of look… at least until I get ambient occlusion the game!
It might not be very noticeable, but it makes the scene look better, in my opinion… Here’s a first person view, it shows the effect more clearly:
Tomorrow I’ll probably start building the random mission system, which will probably consume the next days of development time! This is the biggest task on the list for “Phase 2”, except for balancing and testing, of course…
Now listening to “The Path of Totality” by “Korn”
Link of the Day: Hair is tricky business in 3d graphics, still haven’t found a good way to do it in my 3d models with my extremely small budget… Anyway, here’s some stuff on how Bungie does hair on Destiny, has some interesting ideas: http://advances.realtimerendering.com/destiny/siggraph2014/heads/index.html
I was looking for a planet to test the “no oxygen” text, and I found an asteroid… I dropped down and… nothing happened… Just a blank screen for ages, until I gave up and closed the game…
Found out I was stuck in the navigation mesh generation… For those that don’t follow my blog often, I‘m using an awesome external library called “Recast”… This library is done by a dev working for Unity (and I think he worked on Crytek as well), and is a very good one, since it’s relatively isolated, easy to use and very powerful…
But apparentely, it was having problems generating the navigation mesh for a simple terrain like:
Even more strange, is that it wasn’t having any issue with a more complex terrain, like:
Even simplifying further the terrain yielded no results… The system was stuck simplifying the mesh…
In despair, I decided to upgrade my one-year old version of recast… Ah, progress! Now it generated something, it was just rubish:
So, maybe it’s just a display problem, some layout thing that changed… That would be weird, since the navigation mesh on the Skydancer was working properly, but yet…
So I went to see how enemies behaved… I got to some enemies, and they weren’t able to do any pathfinding… they’d just stand in their position, not moving at all!
After a bit of looking around, I remembered I did a “change” in the Recast code… I enabled a flag that allowed for “virtual query functions”, so that I can have different rules for movement, recompiled the code and now the enemies seemed to work properly, although the display of the mesh was still wacky…
So, I went to Recast’s code and copied his display code, and although it looked a bit better, it was still a jumble:
You can see no navigation mesh to the north, all the colors are a jumble…
After some minutes, I actually tracked the problem to my triangle renderer… This mesh has too many triangles for a single mesh, so it was overflowing the buffer!
The end result was this:
Way better!
So, problem fixed by upgrading Recast… That’s great, but it took me too long to get here, unfortunately! 
Oh well, there’s always tomorrow!
Now listening to “Reroute to Remain” by “In Flames”
Now playing: Just finished “Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag” yesterday (which I enjoyed very much, nothing too new for the series, but I liked the whole storyline thing, both real world and Animus, and the gameplay was as good as the series has used us to… I enjoyed it more than Assassin’s Creed III, in any case, which I thought was boring)… so I’m back playing Halfway, a turn-based pixel-art indie strategy title.
Link of the Day: I haven’t played “Planetary Annihilation” yet (bought it today on Steam), but the guys at Uber can really make amazing trailers that get you really pumped for their games! Here’s their new game’s trailer:
Not much time for game dev today, so I just tinkered with writing some additional tutorials, and some weapon descriptions…
I’ll have to avoid my usual way of approaching this kind of thing, which is to tackle a task (in this case “Write weapon/gear text”) all at once… This won’t work for the writing… The last couple of texts I wrote were completely derivative and very similar in tone/humor to the previous ones…
Maybe to a skill writer that doesn’t happen, but I feel that for me I need to recharge my writing batteries, so I’m going to try to write a bit of text every day! Hopefully it will lead to better and funnier text.
Now listening to “Ophidia” by “Neverland”
Link of the Day: I don’t know how good is “The Vanishing of Ethan Carter”, but the visuals are amazing, especially in screenshots taken in a good rig in glorious 8k: http://www.pcgamer.com/the-vanishing-of-ethan-carter-8k-screenshot-gallery/
