Hi, everyone — sorry I’ve not posted in the last few days; been quite ill and have been taking time off to recover. Am finally beginning to feel better again.
During this illness, I finished playing/watching a bunch of things which were in my backlog. These included:
- Prince of Persia: Forgotten Sands
- Super Mario Galaxy 2
- Jolly Rover
- Paranoia Agent
- Half Life 2: Episode 2
I have also made repeated attempts at China Mieville’s The City & The City, but my brain isn’t quite functioning well enough to keep up with it, at the moment. Will try again, once I’m better. Instead, I’ve been on-and-off watching season two of “Merlin”, which appropriately matches my current level of brainlessness.
I do have some neat ideas for MMORPG Tycoon 2, but I’ve learned not to attempt to code anything when my brain’s not firing on all cylinders. I’ll talk about those over the next few days, hopefully.
Continue reading “Lack of updates”
So I’ve been doing a fair bit of work on MMORPG Tycoon 2 over the past few days. As I mentioned before, I’ve been prototyping up a “map mode”, which has been making promising progress. I imagine that people will usually want to be modifying terrain from the map mode, since it gives a much more stable interface. (That is, mountains rising don’t interfere with the positioning of the cursor, the way that they did in the MS1 build). I haven’t yet decided on the interface to enter map mode, whether it should be an “anytime, anywhere” feature, or whether it should only work when one is on the graveship, or what.
I’ve also spent a little time improving the general heightmap smoothness. I’ve fixed the annoying “crinkly edges” problem which would occur on the sides of some mountain ranges, for example (visible in the screenshot here).
I’ve been spending a lot of time on the terrain painting interface, trying to work out how to make it easier to get good results. The big problem with the current implementation is that it’s based on applying an effect over time. That is, brushes apply their effects repeatedly, until the user decides that they’ve got enough of the particular effect. For example, when you click and hold using the “Mountain” tool, whatever’s under the brush slowly fades from whatever it currently is into mountains. Which sounds okay, except that “whatever it currently is” is updated continuously. So if you just click and hold on one spot, even though I’m doing a very slow blend at the edge of the brush, the edges will eventually become mountains as well, forming an extremely sharp cliff instead of a nice slope. I’ve got a couple of ideas about how to fix this, but they all require using more memory, for remembering what the terrain was like before you started to draw on it.
Still plenty of stuff to do on this. And then I’ll get to think about implementing the new combat system, which should be good fun. :)
The cursor needs to be bigger when you’re up this high, and I should probably fade out the clouds. But it’s even nicer to paint the terrain from this view.
Warning: technical brain-dump post. I’ll try to have something more interesting to non-techies tomorrow. :)
So there’s a major VectorStorm engine update that’ll be happening sometime in the near future; it’s really needed for MMORPG Tycoon 2 (and any other 3D games I might feel like doing in the future).
Here’s the thing. VectorStorm was written to be a 2D game engine, and so some of the things in it aren’t exactly what you’d want for a full 3D engine. One example is its render management. VectorStorm organises a game into a series of “layers”. Each layer is drawn in front of the previous layer. Now, in a game like MMORPG Tycoon 1 where your game was entirely 2D, and you wanted to make sure that your UI was being drawn in front of your game map, and tooltips were being drawn in front of the UI, and the cursor was being drawn in front of the tooltips, “layers” is a really sensible way to arrange things. Within a layer, you couldn’t really predict how things would overlap. So if it was important that object “A” draw in front of object “B”, you need to put object A in a higher layer than B.
However, in the world of 3D, we have depth buffers which handle this whole “what goes in front of what” thing for us more or less automatically. Since MMORPG Tycoon 2 is a 3D game with a depth buffer, I mostly don’t need to draw things according to how they will overlap on screen; the video card handles that for me. Instead, I really want to draw according to whatever will allow the 3D card to render the game the most quickly.
Continue reading “Everywhere I look, Matrices!”
Latest engine stuff from MMORPG Tycoon 2 development has now been brought into the VectorStorm library development trunk, and the testbed games have been adjusted to work with those changes.
I’ve also uploaded the first new binary builds of those testbeds for the first time in ages. The last build was of version 164 — this new one is version 1175. The games themselves aren’t any different, but this now has the “ATI shader” fix which should have modern ATI cards able to use bloom and other shaders. If you want to have a look, the link is in the sidebar, under “VectorStorm testbed games.”
If you’re interested in seeing the source code for the game library that I’ve written and use for all my games on this site, the source is publicly available under the terms of the GPL. Details are on the page for the testbed games.
Now, back to MMORPG Tycoon 2 development!
