Long time no post.

Ok. Here is a update on whats been happening in the world of schnacken.

Leveldata can now be changed and reloaded during runtime. Thomas have supplied me with new meshs, materials and textures. I have a created a BooleanCollisionTrigger, that can be set to react on collision from certain materials. I have also decided to add a AI pong Level to the game to try some of the logic of saving and loading data between levels since they are recreated/destroy on entry/exits.

The next plan once the trigger is working is to set up a level where the sound can be turned on or off. I also need to implement doors, that can be opened or closed, used to move between levels in the game.

Physics physics physics.

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.

Retro Terrain Engine.

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: Basic idea.

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.

Bouncing Schnacken.

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.

The Jetpack Ninja?!?

Like I said in my previous post, moving around and colliding with the world works nice. Tried to add a temporary jump function for debug purposes, but forgot to add a check if they player is touching ground, so instead we got  jet pack function. Simulating the actual jump just by adding a upward force works great, and the rest of the movement keep it all platformy in the feeling. you can change direction at any point in the air.

I looked for a way to actually get good feed back when touching the ground, being used from PhysX that there are different types of classes for everything, I totaly missed the obvious solution. Each shape has a isSensor value, by turning that true I get the effect i want. Thank you Flink for telling me.

Time to get to work and get this friday done with, so there is only weekend to focus on.

The next step is to temporarly add a bmp reader to the levelparsing. At the moment only a “if currentPixel != 0″ add block at pixel.position since there isn’t any detailed block types. just blocks or not.

unresolved external symbol

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.

Controllable player.

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.

Tell’us: A story about Earth

Back in School (www.sofe.se) me and my friends decided to do a project together. We worked with a name that could seem futuristic, yet not overhyped and weird, we also wanted Earth to be the focus. For those who doesn’t know (I can’t understand how?) Tellus is one of Earths many names. Tell’us is thus a play on word, and to be even more obvious, the under title makes sure none miss what the game is about.

Time Era: This is a game slightly into the future, not star trek, not star wars or anything like that, probably at most a couple of hundreds or max a 1000 years from now. It is a story about a ordinary woman who got entwined in the very fate of Earth itself.

Historical/political background: Humanity haven’t united in a big happy family, but resources are better planed, better shared and distributed, sure there is always political agendas and strive for power, but over all there are very few wars and the borders between countries are different from what we are accustomed too. Artificially grown meat, plants, fabrics remove the need for large farms, even though some still prefer the natural taste and feel of things, the price of natural products are a lot higher and limited to special events or privileged people. More people have gathered in large cities as large areas have been set to wild reserves or natural protected areas where building or exploiting the land is limited or forbidden after previous ecological disasters.

Who we are playing: Our heroine is part of a repair team who are mainly responsible to maintain and support automatic facilities all over the globe like power stations, communication hubs, deep space telemetry, mining and automated production facilities.

What we are doing: It’s a ordinary job with slightly different work hours and places and it contains the use of ordinary everyday skills like welding, patching of cables, fixing electronic equipment, computer operations and simple  Exo* assisted tasks like heavy lifts, climbing and jumping.

Where we will start our story: Our story starts in the HQ, where our heroine is going to a basic physical and item check, to make sure everything is up to specs. This is basically a part for the player to learn the moves in the game, climbing, running, rolling, pulling themselves up ledges, activating buttons and basic combat.

Where do we go from here: Ones the the basic tutorial is done, the player is guided towards the briefing room, where the current objective is set out. Apparently, a large rockslide has disabled one of the major communication centres in (name), the team is to go there, assess the damage, call in necessary replacement parts and get everything up and running again.

And this is here the real story starts.

*Exo stands for Exoskeleton, a simple metallic framework connected along the users body to flexible but tough parts of the users clothes. Its common amongst young kids to exaggerate the strength of the Exo a lot. While it can assist the user with lifting or moving objects up to a 100 kg, the real strength of the Exo is to remove the strain from the user with the help of lockable joints and weight balancing.

About the unspecified strategy game!

Since both me and my girlfriend are gamers, we often look for games that we can play together, there has been a lot of castle crashers and left 4 dead, and I guess Resident Evil 5 will be well received as well once it’s out there.

But the thing we realised is during all this time there has been a few (non sport) games thats not about killing or beating the living crap out of each other. Being a programmer I decided to try to do something about this in a not to distance future.

On of the the main ideas of te game, beside possibility to play in coop, is a randomly generated world kinda like dwarf fortress world generation (www.bay12games.com/dwarves), the main difference will be the distance to the world. Cities will be many tiles large, forests and mountains as well, in DF a city or sight is only one tile large in the over all world view. During game-play you will probably never see any actual people running around, but you will be able to get stats for areas, how people are feeling, what they are missing etc.

The game play:
The game is not focused on armies or battles, they will happen but they will not involve you directly, your goal is to make the world thrive by manipulating resources in the world. You may make cities grow by adding gold in the nearby mountains, may guard forests by adding monsters and horrors, this combination might result in noble adventurers looking for adventure and treasure for defeating the evil monsters. The cities will grow based on distance to resources, some resources makes the city shrink if it doesn’t have other resources to balance it out.

For instance if we take the monster/gold scenario again, the access to gold will make the city grow, but a growing town is expensive and requires resources, to prevent the city from cutting down all the forest the player add a monster resource too the forest, gold must now go into defending the forest from monsters as well as trying to make it expand. If the city can’t be defended the town will move back tile after tile, leaving nothing but ruin tiles behind, or until enough funds can be diverted from the blocked expansion into military. This will make the resources work in a symbiotic relationship to each other, monsters can attack growing stronger, city shrinks, and thus get more funds , military grows stronger, both resources are used and the player archive more points for building more resources. Other “resources” might be a dragon with treasure, a wizard tower, forest spirits, good soil for farms etc etc.

The players will never be in direct conflict with one another but their resources placed might work agains each other, thus allowing the players to challenge each other in a arena using a avatar of their choosing, this battle won’t be player controlled either, only the skills/equipment of the avatar can be chosen, then rand() or “faith” decide the winner. To set up a duel, one player must choose a resource with in a certain distance from at least one of their own resources, this is the price to claim if they win, the other side may choose one resource within the area as their price if they win.

The dual system will work like rock, paper scissor, lizard, Spock. Where opposing elements do more damage or block better as armour, the avatars will have mana, physical attacks and hit points.

That’s it for now, the game will use a tile based engine will tile transition making a multi tile city stick together with a nice wall pointed outwards,  same thing for forests, water and mountains.

There will probably be a cliché like good and evil, and that you can influnce the world differently based on who you are. A thing like a volcano that might seem destructive might increase the health in a nerby city due to the frequent use of hot water springs, and something like gold without any threats might turn the city into a greaypower hungry military state. One turn with all the updates will happen at mostly ones every 30 or 60 minutes, partly to make the engine calculate whats happening and reacreate buffers, but also to allow the players to react to a possible resource threatening situation quickly.