Some friends put together a rapid prototyping contest, mainly for people who used to go to my old school. Due to time limits I had not the chance to do something decent but anyway I finished a Project.
I give you LASER INGVAR.
http://files.getdropbox.com/u/815606/Laser%20Ingvar.rar
Ps. It’s really bad.
I got collision feedback working the way it should. When two objects collide they get notified of each other, the function they end up in will tell them of the other objects, what current shape of that objects physical body that intersected with what shape of their physical body. All shapes does contain material data. So i will know if it’s just a sensor, metal, sword or chicken feather that collided with bone, mud, grass, ground, metal, skull, brain or ham.
This allow me to give the proper feedback and reaction from the objects, limiting me to doing jumps when the feet touch the ground, putting some tiny stars over the head of a character if the head collides with anything at high speed. See if the weapon collides with a shield or body. And the possibility to apply damage or particle effects suitable.
The material system will need to be added. It will contain more information for stuff like particles etc. Giving me the possibility to instantly feedback particle and other data as default and specify on specific events.
This system could be increased to handle bombs, since it’s just one big sensor with the bomb or explosion tag.
Interesting things could come out of this and so far it feels like a sensible stable system.
I started working on a retro terrain engine a while back, just before I got aproached by Thomas about Schnacken.
The Game itself would take influences from how the terrain worked in games like transport tycooon, populos, Sim City 2000 etc. I made some small trials to reach the current stage it’s in. Here are some images of the process.
Voils are just a made up short form for Volumetric Tiles. In theory it should work as a Voxel (Volumentric Pixel), it should be a 3D block blended with surrounding blocks. The diffrent blocks with textures should blend in with each other, kind of traditional tile transition but in full 3d.
This will require some work to align edge vertexes, working with clear defined sides and pieces of meshs, as well as aligning uv and normal between objects. The easiest aproach at the start level, is to add all of them to the same vertex buffer, building one giantmesh per materialtype, thus only preforming one render call per material type.
This allows more customizeability, a aproach to dynamic levels as well as easier tools to work with.
Got the physics up and running for real now as well as fix up some issues thee guy doing the art (Thomas) mentioned. He found out that changing the player mesh (changing file name in the xml) would crash the game due to the fact that the animation names where hard coded. That got fixed up and now that can be changed without that much work, the next xml extension/change will handle different physic body data of the player. Currently the ball the player is suposed to throw get the same material as the physical body of schnacken. This wouldn’t be a problem if the ball didn’t need to be very light and bouncy. The fun part is that the player bounce actually looks quite good when jumping from a high point. It should be a quite trival fix up in xml, might even go so far as to create material templates for the physics that you just set, like flesh, rubber, stone, metal etc.
Fun to make progress I hope it’ll keep up.
I usally don’t get error that trouble me, linker errors in c++ is a common thing that I usualy know how to handle. But this time a had my share of pain. It seemed like one of my libs had snucked in as a debug version, as some may know, debug and release doesn’t mix well under release mode. Since i am using quite a lot of libs, finding the problem took some while, but I finaly did it. I had built the lib for Box2D only in debug not released and used the same lib in both areas. Thats certainly something new that I will remember. It took a fair bit of time out of my planed project, but now the release version is at least up and running.
That will give me the possibility to send a playable version to other people ones the time arrives.
Just fixed up one of the high priority features in Schnacken. The player can now be moved and gravity is still working while we move. If we stand still for a while, moving will activate the object again so it will move (didn’t happen at first). Oh and the player is colliding with the world so I should be able to get a few good collision events out of that. So thats one feature off the list, only 4-5 remaining for my planed Pre-Alpha for March. Who knows it might be early. 
55£ later I own Rock Band 1 and Far Cry 2, there was a deal to get a preowned version of far cry 2 for only £20. I have had my doubts about Far Cry 2, specialy since it wasn’t made by Cry Tech, but to be honest in the end Far Cry 2 impressed me more then Crysis did when i played it. Sure crysis got nicer water and som nicer graphics, but Far Cry 2 seems like they tried something new, Crysis is essentialy the old far cry, with more soldiers, less mutants and a over powered armor system. At least FC2 gave you the chanse to fel a small bit more human.
Rock Band is great, been playing some songs with my GF in the tour mode, it’s going forward even if the songs get a bit harder, but thats where practice comes in to the picture. We just got the first Van and unlocked Berlin and Rome.
We’ll see where it goes from here.
Zombies are very dear to my brain, or rather my brain might be very dear to them.
I’ve played my fair share of Zombie Games, amongst them Left 4 Dead, all Resident Evil games, seen tons of zombies movies and I still think there is simply not enough of them. This is a zombie game with a bit of the twist! Ok, some of you are bound to be sad, no zombie game play is planned at the moment. Now over to the idea.
What we are seeing: A group of men, military types, equipped with high tech weapons and equipment, behind a temporary barricade, there is a map showing the layout of the current city or area. Important buildings are highlighted like gun shops, food stores, drug stores, and police stations. Each character details can be accessed by clicking on them. This will show their current health, hunger and ammo.
What we can do: Like in any RTS you can order your characters around setting up different defensive stands fire modes etc. You can right click a building with a character or group of characters and they will search through it. Searching will bring up a available set of possible resources, this will probably work with a value on how much obvious stuff you have found in the building. Clicking objects for pickup will even distribute the load between your men so they move in the same speed. You can also build barricades by using build-able materials or reinforce houses, it’s possible to unload resources in any house.
What we can gather: The planned resources are, building materials (wood, plastic and metal as one), electronic/mechanic equipment(all gadgets as one, Car engine to Computer), food source (water, booze, food and plants) Ammo (Ammo is just one resource but heavier weapon require more ammo per shot) and finnaly medicine (all kinds of pills some plants). Certainobjects give a bonus to multiple resources, alcohol gives a bonus to food and medicin since it can be used for cleaning wounds as well has a high concentration of energy. Survivors. Survivors might be one of the most important resources or an extra burden, zombiefication only happen upon death, so anyone hurt might still be saved by spending medicin and food and letting them rest with non or little movement.
What we can upgrade or change:
A survivor can become a soldier by spending ammo points for weapons and armor, builder by spending building materials, technician by spending electrical products, or a gatherer by spending food, this will give superior skills when searching for specific products or doing actions related to their expertize. Barricades can be updated and demolished. And unless a zombie hit them the amount of building material in a barricade won’t change. Weapons can be mounted for weapon points, and generators and lights can be created with the electronic skill. The only two really finite resources are food and ammo. Any building in the game can be updated to a safe house but that will require huge amounts of resources and time to set up and reclaim, also it requires a certain amount of people to keep it guarded.
What we are trying to accomplish:
We are trying to provide a safe route out of the danger zone for a number of survivors, or trying fulfill any other set of objectives that are not put into writing yet, this requires experimentation to see what is fun and what works.
I Borrowed Rock band from a friend at work with the opening to buy it if i liked it after the weekend, a bit cheaper then if I would buy it from the store.
Damn the box is heavy, after breaking my back and scaring my girlfriend with the fact that my arms won’t stop shaking when I lift anything with any weight to talk about, the absolut anti-climax came from putting the game disc into the 360, and get the message “The region of this disc is not suported on your 360″ looking at the disc, sure enough NTSC. Apperntly he had two discs and two sets of instruments, one set bought from US and didn’t think that the kit from US had a NTSC disc. I’ll probably head out and buy Rock Band 1 disc tomorrow, and hope I get a discount when buying the instruments due to the fact that the disc is kinda useless at least in this part of the world.
Hopefully it will be all fun and stuff when we get to play it tomorrow.
