Oct 20
RasterStorm
So it was only a matter of time until I weakened, and added texture support to VectorStorm. I’d been thinking about doing it on the sly, and revealing it in a Game in a Week where your character was in search of some impossible artifact which turned out to be a textured object in a vector graphic world.. but that all seemed like too much work. And I’m going to need some basic texture support for the thing I’m thinking about for the Lovecraft compo over at TigSource, so I finally hooked all the pieces together.
In the screenshot, that’s the standard vector font, and a texture of a screenshot of the “Muncher” sprite (so technically, it’s being double-glowed), and a shot of my own ugly mug, all being affected by the standard glowy vector shaders.
Textures still aren’t going to be the norm in my games (as I’m certainly no artist), and I’m still calling the engine ‘VectorStorm’, but I wanted the ability to use a few textures where they’re needed, so here they are.
I’ve also migrated all the VectorStorm library improvements back from MMORPG Tycoon to the core VectorStorm testbeds repository, so if anyone’s really curious to see the various engine changes, that’s the place to look.
Hey, sorry if this is a stupid question, but… where is VectorStorm? The “About VectorStorm” page says, “Check the links in the sidebar to pre-built binaries of VectorStorm releases, to its public subversion repository, and to further news updates about its development.” but there is no link in the sidebar to VectorStorm itself (just games made with it), nor a link to the Subversion repository either.
Apologies! Even with all the games I’ve made with it, the “VectorStorm” library is still really in early development; its API hasn’t stabilised enough for me to really feel comfortable locking it down. And so in order to keep all the different games compiling, each one contains the source code for the VectorStorm library as it was at the time that the game was made.
Core development on VectorStorm is happening inside the “VectorStorm Test Games” repository; use a subversion client to grab the code from there and you should be good to go (or you can just browse the code directly in your web browser, using the subversion repository url, if you prefer).
VectorStorm is currently covered under the GPLv3, so be careful in how you use its code. If you want to do something non-GPL-compatible with it, send me an e-mail; I’m not at all opposed to that idea, but for the moment, I’d like to consider things like that on a case-by-case basis.