Started working on the sub-areas…
One of the problems with building tools is that you then want to use them everywhere… Some weeks ago, I was content in generating all the maps with procedures (with the exception of the ship, so I did a XML-based system for that):
But it’s boring generating content this way, but only for the ship or some very specific story stuff it was enough… then I made the voxel editor, and I suddenly have a lot of fun creating small scenarios, so I’m pushing it further and further… Initially I just created one simple temple, now I wanted to add something special for the third temple, namely the idea of a sub-area… The player will go into a cave that will have a whole map inside, and that’s awesome!
But it required me to build a lot of new code to support this, but I think it will be worth it… I already have some ideas to add some longevity into the game based on this: exploration goals, which are special areas that might or might not be present in the galaxy… The player will be able to run around the galaxy searching for these (and maybe he’ll get something out of it, I’m not sure).
Anyway, today I finished the outside part of the temple and added the action node and logic to go into the cave (which doesn’t work yet, of course).
It’s much more interesting than the temples I constructed through code… 
Next step is building the temple, which will have some different gameplay (not too different, but different).
Now listening to “Elect the Dead” by “Serj Tankian”
Now playing “The Banner Saga”. I finished today “Halo: Spartan Assault” and it was a good experience, not ground breaking (has some similarities with Chrome Hunter, but the targeting is way simpler, since all of the gameplay takes place in a flat plane). “The Banner Saga” is a gorgeous tactical game. I’m just getting started, so nothing really to ‘review’ yet…
Link of the Day: I wasn’t very much into the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie (nor any Michael Bay movie after Transformers 3…), but this trailer got me excited about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwXFsrp6WBs&feature=youtu.be. Still skeptical, though!
I’ve made some more cutscenes in the game and advanced the major storyline a bit… Had to fix one million of small bugs (mostly because they were annoying me).
While I’m playing the game this way, I keep balancing small details… Some details I’ve found by playing is that with just the single-shot gun (the starting weapon), I manage to survive until about one third of the game easily, which I’m not sure is what I intend… Another issue is that some weapons are under-powered in the enemies’ hands (the shotgun for example, is deadly at short range, but the enemy won’t shoot it from a far, even if it deals a small amount of damage, so the player can chip away at the energy of the robot until it’s dead without ever being in danger). The drop rates of items was not very good… I decided to increase the cost of everything, but increase the drop rate (it’s always good to have drops, it motivates the player, even if it doesn’t make his life easier).
Next step is working on making an area inside another area (I want this third temple to be underground, so you need to go into a cave, which will open a new map).
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Now listening to “Death and Legacy” by “Serenity”
Link of the Day: Gaming in mobile devices aren’t my cup of tea… I don’t like the interface in most games (strategy could be a good match, but although I loved Star Command, the control is just not fine-grained enough to actually be an advantage over the mouse) and I prefer big monitors/TVs to play, but it’s impressive what they can do nowadays. Case in point, the latest Unreal Engine 4 demo running on nVidia mobile K1 chip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-tAZtbDZ8E
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Worked today on the new cutscene for the second temple in the game… This one was a whole lot of trouble (in the previous days) due to the immense amount of work required to get custom maps in.
The cutscene itself was pretty simple… Added some sweet 4-point bezier traversal for the camera movement, which is cool and leads to better camera movements (except the start and the finish, which are a bit jarring, probably should add a sigma function to that).
Now listening to “Arise” by “Sepultura”
Now playing “Halo: Spartan Assault”: quite an unexpected nice game… Hope they make more of these, but with better production values in the story department (cutscenes, a bit more linked to the actual Halo lore, instead of being just some “simulations”)
Link of the Day: This is how you do a TV ad… Ah, such fond memories of “Wacky Races” from when I was young! http://vimeo.com/64647462
Today I finally added the props into the custom voxel scene, which finally composed the scene. Also added the action nodes and in the case of the temple, makes a carving spawn there (if you haven’t picked it up yet).
Also fixed a bug that was nagging me for ages in the game sometimes… Sometimes, an enemy would walk around the scenario and then warp several meters above the scene.
There was a lot of reasons for this to happen… in the (reproducible) case, there was some invisible wall in that position (since it was invisible, I couldn’t see it). It was a thin column left over from the editor (probably remainders of the bounding box of a prop). I fixed that (with a new tool on the editor)… Of course, if you think about it, the fact that there was an invisible column should make the enemy walk around it, right? After all, it used to happen even in non-custom scenarios! As it turns out, I wasn’t filtering those invisible blocks from the pathfinding, so the bottom part of it was traversable,, which meant the enemy could indeed move that way. I reprogrammed the navigation mesh builder code (or more precisely, the code that gives the navigation mesh builder the valid quads, since I’m using Recast to generate the navmesh). Even so, there were some conditions in which the problem could occur… I solved these by doing better/more precise math on what the position of the enemy is (I basically nudge the current position by about 1% of the movement vector, so I don’t have limit cases in which I’m technically straddling two tiles)… I think this solves this issue, but playing will tell!
When taking this screenshot I found another bug… those colored voxels should be transparent, so I’ll need to take care of that…
Now listening to “Heavenly Bodies” by “Gene Loves Jezebel”
Link of the Day: Andy Serkis is a genius… I want him narrating my life! http://teamcoco.com/video/andy-serkis-caesar-gollum
Added the custom voxel object to the game today, which solves the problem I explained yesterday. The custom voxel object takes care of heightmap and of inserting the voxel map into the game.
I’m still missing the props and the action nodes, but that’s easy to add at this point.
Also added some functionality to the editor to change the lighting conditions (found out that I had some colored emissive objects in the scene that I couldn’t spot because of the color of the scenes), and some functions to change the color of the voxels “en-masse”. Also found a bug that caused the colors to be lost on the voxel maps when I added a prop (issue with the way I created the undo).
Now listening to “The Fourth Legacy” by “Kamelot”
Link of the Day: There’s a lot of impressive stuff being done in the demoscene. I used to do demos back in the 90’s, but since I didn’t have an internet connection nor friends in the field, I kind of didn’t know how far behind I was on that; but when I got my hands on some demos, they usually blew my mind and I spent weeks trying to figure out how to do the same effects! Here’s a couple of videos from modern demos for your viewing pleasure: http://timothylottes.blogspot.pt/2014/06/mid-2014-demo-tubes.html
Started work on merging the procedurally generated map with the custom stuff I make in the editor… and only when I started I saw the error of my ways!
The way I’m building the procedural world is that I build a heightmap for the world, and then convert that heightmap into voxels, with special cases for the “cave” prop (which burrows a hole).
So, when you try to merge an existing voxel representation with a map, you have to do it in two places: the map code (otherwise stuff like the map won’t display correctly, because it’s drawn from the heightmap), and then add a pass after the standard generation of the voxelscape to copy the voxel map on top of the existing map… So, much more work than I thought… The same thing happens with the props and action nodes in the map… They’re all setup at different times, so I’ll have to load the voxel map and store them until the time is right to use them…
Today I built the custom voxel map to heightmap stuff, as you can see in the above screenshot (the red stuff on top of it is my custom temple)… If I go there with my player character, I’d see a rough representation of the map, corresponding to generating the voxel world from this map… Very ugly stuff:
Hopefully soon I’ll have the voxel copy part working… Also found some bugs with the fog and alpha-blended objects (like the shield), so I have to fix it!
Now listening to “Passage” by “Samael”
Link of the Day: Didn’t see anything interesting in my feeds today, so here’s the link to one of my favorite webcomics… Really love the Warlock Richard on this one! It’s a story based comic, so it only makes sense when you read it from the start, though: http://www.lfgcomic.com/
Today I wasn’t feeling like tackling something big, so I decided to work on small stuff… After fixing some minor bugs, I looked at my task list and I saw something that shouldn’t be hard, but I was curious about: target prediction.
Up until now, the enemies would shot at the players current position, so unless the player shifted movement direction or stopped, the enemies wouldn’t hit with projectile weapons (beam weapons are immediate, so no problems there)… I added some target prediction, which takes the current movement vector, the distance from the target and the speed of the weapon and computes a probable target position which will be more accurate… And this is the result:
Dead… Over and over again… The game turns from a little easy to an absolute nightmare! Which, guessing by the success of games like “Super Meat Boy” or “Dark Souls”, fun for some people…
I’ve added an “accuracy” parameter to the enemies, which will make them a bit easier, but as soon as that value is set to about 60% or so, they go from Stormtroopers to Lucky Luke! So, now it’s a function of their difficulty factor (enemies in planets further away from the start are more difficult). Hopefully, this will make the player need to invest on gear before venturing to the harder edge planets, while keeping the game easy in the core planets.
Now listening to “Overture of the Wicked” by Iced Earth
Link of the Day: Found this ongoing collection of articles about particle system design, quite an interesting read, specially because it’s focused on the more architectural aspects, instead of the usual visual component. The link is for the first one in the series: http://www.bfilipek.com/2014/04/flexible-particle-system-start.html
Today I added some more functionality on the editor… Some tools are just workflow tools (for example, a “voxel picker”, which allow me to just click on a voxel and the system will set that as a brush, which is much better than cycling through all the materials… it also takes the color from the voxel, which is useful for exact matching.
Also added brush rotation, the ability to mirror an area through script, and the concept of “action nodes”, which allow me to place points in the scene so that in the game I can instruct the system to go there (instead of relying on fixed, hard-coded positions)…
Now listening to “New Era” by “Revolution Renaissance”
Link of the Day: Now this is how you do a nice trailer for an horror game: http://www.polygon.com/e3-2014/2014/6/20/5828760/the-evil-within-trailer-e3-2014
For the second temple in the game, I decided to just start voxel doodling and see where it got me… I got some nice ideas, and I combined that with the ideas I had regarding the combat itself (an open area where the player could run and hide from the enemies, since there will be two bosses here).
I’ll probably do some more work on it, adding more props, etc, but I’ll do that on a later stage, when I can play the game from start to finish (the balancing/polish phase).
It’s becoming more and more apparent that I need some way to increase the contrast of the tiles. There’s a lot of places where you can’t see the blocks… there’s several ways to achieve this:
For all of these except the fog, I’d need to work on the renderer to allow for the effects (add a pass for the shadows, add normal+depth rendering pass for the ambient occlusion and DoF, plus the effect pass). But again, I’d rather leave it to the the polish phase of the development.
Now listening to “Visions” by “RAMP”
Link of the Day:If you’re lazy like me, you’ll enjoy having the trailers from E3 all in one place so you can watch them at your leisure: http://www.polygon.com/2014/6/18/5820612/e3-2014-trailers-your-complete-trailer-guide-to-the-games-of-e3
Not much time today, due to being out late yesterday watching a great concert by Painted Black!
Anyway, finished the scripting part on the editor (which will be a big help, best of two worlds: the creativity of WYSIWYG tools, and the precision/work-saving power of programming!), and found a series of small bugs on the editor, especially in the handling of color copy, need to address that. If you want a casino gaming platform that emulates the easy life with online slots, Easyslots.com prides itself on bringing nothing but the best online slot games to the market. However, if you want to win real cash prizes all you have to do is to register an account with credible identity at nhacainaouytin. This site is highly advised for players near Asia.
Now listening to “Gambling with the Devil” by “Helloween”
Link of the day: Saw the trailer for this game “Dreadnough” and loved it… Didn’t had time to investigate it (don’t even know what kind of game it is or who’s making it), but I though it was really cool: You can also look for Best UK slots games from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teH5Oowj-J8
