Indie Now

OGL3So in the end, it took me three weeks of vacation, rather than two, to get set to start on independent development.  So after those three weeks of rest, I’ve finally started full-time development on MMORPG Tycoon 2 this week.  For better or worse, this is now what I’m doing with my time until the game is complete.

I’m easing my way in (sort of) by doing further work on my underlying rendering technology, upgrading the VectorStorm engine from using an OpenGL 2.1 compatibility profile to an OpenGL 3.2 core profile.  The image to the left is what MMORPG 2 looked like, after having fixed the first batch of bugs in the OpenGL 3 rendering system.

(I’m still, obviously, in the process of fixing many more bugs)

Most notably, a lot of old VectorStorm rendering features are no longer supported in OpenGL 3.2, so a lot of things (clouds, buttons, etc) are entirely failing to draw. My next task is to set up compatibility layers for those old VectorStorm interfaces, so they can draw in a way which OpenGL 3.2 will accept.

My original plan was to release the next Milestone build of MMORPG Tycoon 2 as the end of May.  But since I started a week late, that milestone probably has also slipped by a week.  But I’m also hoping to have another, interim public technology build before that — probably about a week from now — to get verification that everything still works for everyone, using the new rendering technology.  Most notably, I’m hoping to have the bloom effect working for everyone — even the people whose machines couldn’t cope with it before.  I’m crossing my fingers, and we’ll see how that works out.

Also, now that I’m full time on the game, I’m going to try to update the blog a lot more regularly.  It’s not quite interfering with limited development time the way that it did back when the game was a side-project which was already being squeezed into the odd hour here or there, so watch this space!