VectorStorm Blog

So I upgraded video drivers, and discovered that ATI had actually (apparently) removed much of the OpenGL functionality in those newer drivers.  Shaders, VBOs, and several other long-standard features are completely gone.

Granted, it was an old machine, and a not-very-powerful video card.  But removing features that used to be there..  well, that just seems kind of mean.

Anyhow, rather than struggle with that old beast any more (as it’s basically falling apart anyhow, even apart from the video driver issue), I’m setting up a newer Win32 development environment, in a virtual machine on my much newer computer.  Amusingly, running virtualised, it’s about the same speed as the old machine (and has considerably more hard disk space).  And hopefully it has all the shader support that I need, to debug the last big Win32 issues.

Long-term plan, of course, is to get a proper, real Win32 dev machine.  But for right now, with my old machine dying on me and a build that I really want to get out..  I’m just going to have to bite the bullet and do the thing virtualised.  Hopefully I should be up and coding again before the end of the day.

Update:  Am now up and running, and the rest of my Win32 crashes and glitches have completely vanished.  Either they were being caused by dodgy ancient hardware/drivers, or else I’ve got some code somewhere that works properly on my new machine’s NVidia card, but not on the old machine’s ATI.  I’m building and testing a Win32 release version now.  If all goes well, downloads should be up in about an hour.

So VectorStorm isn’t really happy on Win32 right now.  I’ve spent several hours, and finally have gotten it far enough to actually render.  Well, sorta.

First, I should note that my Win32 development machine is kind of old, and has a really slow 3D card.  It doesn’t support multisampling/antialiasing (which is a good thing;  it showed me that I had a bug in my handling of rendering on machines which didn’t support multisampling).

But there’s some worse stuff.

First, as you can see from the screenshot above, it doesn’t seem to be drawing my textures — anything which ought to have a texture (clouds, grass, text) is instead being drawn as a flat solid rectangle.  During game shutdown, it crashes when telling OpenGL to delete those textures.  But so far as I can tell, the textures are being created correctly.

Second, the whole shader-based rendering scheme isn’t working properly.  That is, my lighting shaders, which give nicer lighting (and particularly specular) on polygons.  The shaders used in the bloom effect still work fine.  No idea why that might be.  Anyhow, for this screenshot, I had to disable the lighting shaders entirely, and just use the fixed-function OpenGL rendering path.  I’ll start trying to figure out why my lighting shaders are failing once I get the textures working again — they did work for “Lord”!

Third, interleaved VBOs don’t seem to be working properly, and I can’t seem to figure out why.  It’s crashing deep inside OpenGL whenever I try to draw anything that uses an interleaved VBO.  For now, I’ve disabled VBOs and am rendering using interleaved element arrays (which is what VectorStorm does anyway, for folks with video cards that don’t support VBOs).

Update:  I now have the textures drawing correctly.  For whatever reason, at some point I changed my textures from being created as GL_RGBA8 to GL_RGBA.  And that was causing major problems under Win32, for reasons I don’t understand.  Next on my list, getting VBOs and shaders working again.  For your amusement, this is a screenshot of what it currently looks like running via my lighting shaders.  It’s rendering at about one frame every 20 seconds.  So not entirely playable, yet.

I thought I was going to get the M1 technology demo build out today, but I ran into a nasty crash bug occurring when PCs outlevel the starting region.  Took me about two hours to figure it out.  As a result, there’s not enough time left to get the build out, tonight.

The only tasks left now are to update the Win32 build, to set up the data files, and to package it all up for download.

But at this point, I want to repeat that unlike most of the stuff I offer for download, this M1 build is not a full game — it’s a technology preview, with some gameplay features implemented.  There’s a bunch of important data that isn’t being presented yet, virtually all of the graphics are placeholder, etc.  But I’m really, really interested to hear about how well it runs for people, on computers that aren’t mine.

More details tomorrow.

Spent today working on extending procedural geometry, toward creating a procedural graveyard.  Obviously it’s not really there yet, but I’ve now got support for randomised features, for automatically creating models inside a space, etc.  All of this geometry here is automatically created, when you place a single graveyard.  It all works together as a single “graveyard” building.  (todo:  thinking about putting the graveyard onto a plinth, to avoid the “cutting into the terrain” problems that you can see here)

I’ve also vastly improved PCs going to fight monsters;  the PCs and monsters now run up to each other to fight, they don’t run past each other any longer.  Yay.

I think I’m going to spend another day on graveyards, and then it’ll be on to the M1-specific features, cleaning up for that first milestone build.

The latest thing I’m playing:  Jolly Rover, by Andrew Goulding of Brawsome.  It’s totally bringing me back to the glory days of LucasArts and Sierra point-and-click adventures.  I was initially a bit doubtful about the whole “pirate dogs” setting, but I’d completely accepted it by about five minutes into the game.  As much as I love the guys over at Telltale, their “Tales of Monkey Island” games never really felt like they lived up to the Monkey Island lineage.  Jolly Rover, on the other hand, stands up beautifully even against romanticised memories of those classic old games.

As a developer, I’m totally blown away that this game has basically been pulled together by a single guy who designed, wrote, and programmed the whole thing across both platforms, and even wrangled voice acting and everything.  A stunningly awesome effort for a solo developer.

There are free demos available.  If you grew up with point-and-click adventures, or just wonder what you missed, then you really owe it to yourself to download and play one of those demos;  they’re easily long enough for you to decide whether or not you want to buy the full game and continue playing.

For those who like to use Steam, the link to the free demo download is here:  Mac/PC Steam Demo.

For those who prefer to avoid Steam, you can grab the demo for Windows, or the demo for Mac, either from those links or from any of the other online stores which carry Jolly Rover, including Greenhouse, Direct2Drive, and many others.  So if you have a particular favourite online store, it’s worth checking to see whether it’s available there as well.

I’ll post a development update on what I’m up to, tomorrow.  But until then, enjoy some piratey adventuring. :)