Hi, guys. This is going to be an extremely quick update, since I’m pretty much wiped out after a long day.
First thing: Yes, I finally have my Internet access back (yay!), and it’s faster and nicer than ever. Imagine my surprise to find that in my absence, this web site had successfully weathered a storm of traffic caused by a mention on rockpapershotgun. Also imagine my surprise to find that spambots seem to have become more devious over the past week, and after attempting to post spam comments, they then proceeded to post irate and abusive complaints about how their spam comments weren’t being posted. (Yes, even the irate complaints were automatically flagged as spam. And no, I didn’t click on the SEO links that they were peddling).
Second thing: As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been doing a fair amount of development over this period without Internet access. This development included both work on MMORPG Tycoon, and some design and development on another game. This second game is intended to act as a bit of a safety net; it’s a much smaller and more well-defined game than MT2, and is targeted at the iPhone/iPod market. The hope is that if I do run into employment difficulties in the future (and I want to reiterate that I’m still doing just fine at the moment), then I could quickly transition into app store sales to hopefully continue to make ends meet for a while.
Third thing: During this time, I also completed the single player campaign of StarCraft 2. I don’t know that I enjoyed it, really, but I did finish it. Which makes StarCraft 2 only the second RTS game which I’ve played all the way through in single player.
Just a couple quick comments. I’m typing this from my iPad on a 3G cellular network, as I’ve apparently gone over my limit of 20 gigabytes usage out of the advertised-as-60-gigabyte, also-advertised-as-”unlimited” broadband plan, which means that my ISP throttles my internet access to the point where even basic DNS lookups fail nine times out of ten. Basically means that I’m mostly Internetless until the end of the month, when stuff resets (and I’m moving to a substantially better data plan, which has much higher data limits, is substantially faster, and is half the price).
On the plus side, this current lack of network means that I’m not being tempted to browse the web or play StarCraft 2 instead of coding, and so I’ve been getting rather more than usual accomplished over the last few days. Not going to talk about it too much here; touchscreens really aren’t great for blogging. But once September rolls around and I can post more normally, I’ll have plenty to drone on and on about. And I might have a few more little updates between now and then. But no screenshots until I’ve got the internet back.
In other news, paying work is still rolling along, despite my last post. It’s looking a lot less bleak now than it did last week, so don’t worry about me too much; While we’re not completely out of the woods yet, I’m beginning to think that it’s all going to work out in the end. Further news if/when it’s warranted.
First, sincere apologies for having been so quiet for so long. Real life stuff came up, and I’ve been working to ensure that I can keep creating fun projects here in the future. I expect that my posts are going to be pretty scarce for the next few weeks as I continue to sort out plans for the future. But there’s no reason to panic; I’m positive that things will work out fine in the long run. And for the record, I have nothing but good things to say about my employers, even under current circumstances, and I’m crossing my fingers that I get to keep working for them for a good long time.
But enough of that gloomy topic — time for a unicorn chaser. Look, it’s VectorStorm running on an iPad! (And also on the iPhone, not pictured here) Long-time readers may recognise this as the “Testbed” program from the main VectorStorm library (with the orbiting lights moved closer in, to be easier to see). There’s still a lot of work to be done on this port (which I’ll eventually do), mostly for supporting textures and audio. But I was really pleased with just how easy it was to do the bulk of the port. It was a lot simpler than the last time I did this, back when VectorStorm only drew lines, and rendered everything using OpenGL’s “immediate mode” rendering.
Also unlike last time, this time I did the port without obliterating the PC and Mac version of the code, so it should actually be possible to commit this back into trunk and have games just automatically be able to run on all three platforms. Of course, there’s a lot of work that would need to be done to actually release a game on iPhone/iPad, both technical (it’d have to support changing screen orientation, the iPhone 4 retina display, iOS4 multitasking, multitouch input, etc), and legal/organisational (setting up a company to use for publishing, etc).
No, there’s no chance that MMORPG Tycoon 2 would run acceptably on any of these devices (although you’d better believe that I’m going to compile and run it once, just to giggle at the terrible frame rate), but I might eventually compile up some of my older games, or potentially future “Game in a Week” titles, and put them up on the App Store just to see what happens.
So today I’ve made a few changes:
- vsMeshMaker no longer needs to specify the number of triangles in a model, before you start specifying those triangles. Means that it’s really easy to just toss triangles in without thought, and have it come up with an optimised model at the end.
- vsMesh can now output vsFragments, instead of outputting vsDisplayLists. If it outputs vsFragments, then the vsMesh may be deleted — all data storage is left in the vsFragments.
- MMORPG Tycoon 2′s procedural geometry algorithms now all use vsFragments, instead of vsDisplayLists. However, they keep the vsMesh objects around, for ease of editing and ease of collision detection.
The next bit that I need is probably a way to merge two vsFragments together (with an optional transform applied). This change would allow me to accumulate all of the geometry in a model into a single object, for rapid rendering.
For example, the trees in the earlier screenshots were each composed of about 30-40 objects, one for each branch and sub-branch. While this is great for a lot of things, it’s an awfully slow way to render the trees — really, I need to bake all of those vertices down into a single object, and then just render that.
I’m sure other people doodle sensible things. Me, I doodle GUI interfaces. (And then obsess over whether the initial “click-drag” should start from a corner of the shape, or from the middle of the shape)
Anyhow. I’ve been thinking a lot more about how best to set up MMORPG Tycoon 2′s world building. The more I think about it, the more I’m starting to realise that thinking about “buildings” is probably too large-scale; that really, the player shouldn’t be placing “inns” and “taverns”, but should instead be placing “innkeepers” and “barkeeps”. The buildings themselves are kind of immaterial; the important thing is the NPC who provides a service.
Or to put it another way: There’s nothing special about the auction house in Stormwind, except that that’s where the auctioneers are.
Yes, the buildings do need to be there for graphical reasons.. but maybe there shouldn’t be distinctions between “Inn” and “Tavern” and “Weapon Shop” — there should just be a variety of buildings to pick from, and instead you’d have Innkeepers and Shopkeeper NPCs, and the PCs would seek out those NPCs the same way that they currently seek out particular types of building.
Pro: More like real MMORPGs. Means that different parts of the world can look very different, since we’re not forced to have the same model for an “inn” everywhere. Makes it less damaging to the game to let players build their own buildings in some sort of editor, which would really let players be extra-creative in their world-building.
Con: Makes it much harder to see how services are laid out in a town or city, since the functional pieces would be very small (and probably difficult to distinguish) NPCs, instead of being very large and iconic buildings. Probably means that I’d need to model building interiors, so there’d be somewhere to place the NPCs. After all, it would probably be weird for a shopkeeper to stand around and do business just outside his shop. On the other hand, there are plenty of real MMORPGs where vendors just stand around on plinths; shops aren’t always (or even usually) located inside buildings.
