I am not a web designer « VectorStorm Forums

VectorStorm Forums » General Chatter

I am not a web designer

(11 posts) (3 voices)

Started 9 months ago by trevor
Latest reply from wickedgenius

Tags:

No tags yet.

trevor
admin

You all know that the look and feel of the forums has been annoying me for an awfully long time; how they didn't provide a link back to the main site, how they looked kind of cheap.. things like that.

I'd been considering moving over to a different software with integrated forum support (Drupal), but that seemed like too much ongoing hard work. And I've looked at a number of different Wordpress-integrated forums, but they were all either ugly or slow.

So in the end, I bit the bullet and spent far too many hours today learning CSS and brushing up my HTML skills by working on the existing bbpress-based forums, and I think I've managed a pretty big improvement. The look is tied in much more closely to the main site now, complete with links back. It's close enough that I suspect most casual visitors wouldn't even realised they've switched into an entirely different website software when they visit the forums.

If you notice anything that looks weird and/or incorrect, please let me know so that I can sort it out. But I'm generally pleased, at the moment. :)

Posted 9 months ago #
Kris015
Member

Looks great! :)

It's funny i always reply one hour after you :P

Posted 9 months ago #
wickedgenius
Member

Very nice.

Posted 9 months ago #
Kris015
Member

wow man!!! Epic sky :D :D :D

Posted 9 months ago #
trevor
admin

Thanks, Kris! I'm really pleased with how it came out!

Posted 9 months ago #
Kris015
Member

haha 2 hours ago :P
Oh well, when are you planning the release?

Posted 9 months ago #
trevor
admin

Well, the game isn't playable at all, yet; it's really just a tech demo at this stage (although most of the gameplay code from version 1.1 is now in the new codebase, most of it isn't yet being used). And the next couple of big features I need to add are also tech demo sorts of features (procedural buildings and plants, and then more customisation to the world). The gameplay will come after all that.

So the release won't be for several months, although I am planning to put together a basic tech demo once I have procedural buildings working, to see how well it runs for everyone.

On my (reasonably fast) laptop, it currently takes about five seconds to build the world on startup. But that's because it's currently generating perlin noise to set up the heightmap. In the end, I'm expecting to have the user (or his simulated designers) place terrain features into the world ("mountain here, put a lake there, a forest over here, etc"), and use those placements to generate the heightmap. That should be substantially cheaper to calculate than perlin noise, I expect! Also, it'll result in terrains much more appropriate to place an MMORPG in.

Posted 9 months ago #
Kris015
Member

Kewl, i wonder why no one has ever thought about making this before you...
You know the "professional". Not that you aren't, but you know what i mean... Like Blizzard and Valve.

Posted 9 months ago #
trevor
admin

Well.. I know that Squidi had a similar idea (although he designed it very differently and never actually started development on it), but I think that the main reason why there aren't any games like this already out there is that it's actually really difficult to make a game about making a game without either becoming hugely abstract (see Petri Purho's "The Truth About Game Development" for an example of making it extremely abstract), or becoming unwieldy and non-fun.

I mean, I've been working on this concept on and off for well over a year now, and I still haven't really nailed down how to make the game fun.. though I think I'm getting a lot closer, and have been being heavily inspired by things like Dwarf Fortress (which I wrote about earlier) and Minecraft and The Sims.

Posted 9 months ago #
Kris015
Member

How about games like Spore and Oblivion? You know with the procedural generation of stuff from Spore and the RPG from oblivion

Posted 9 months ago #
wickedgenius
Member

Spore's procedural generation isn't worth looking at. To sum it up reasonably well it's pretty naff. I think trevor is doing really well anyway. He doesn't need to be Sporing it up at all.

Posted 9 months ago #

RSS feed for this topic

Reply

You must log in to post.