Plan for David "FenrirWolf" Grace

I'm a baaaad boy. I haven't been keeping this updated. Why's that? Mainly because I got side tracked by a small project that was supposed to just be a neat little demo. But it turned into a full-fledged game, of sorts. That is, if you consider little 2D scrolling shooters to be fun. :)

Bit of a story behind that, too. I'll skip the long parts and just say the game started out as concept art for a cellphone game and then mutated into something else. If you like that sort of game, you can find the website for it right here.

Anyway, apart from that, I've also got a new look and feel for my website. Maybe a bit of overkill on the forums and such, but it's all template-aware and that makes updating it real easy to do.

I've been torn lately. Continue working on HalfLight: Crusade or move on to the next project? Crusade, I estimate, will take me around a year to complete. I've already finished writing the game engine, so all that is left is content creation. But it's also a scrolling shooter game, similiar to Adagio.

On the other hand, the other project is fully 3D, uses the Torque engine, and is a conversion of an old shareware game I made back in 1990 or so. I'm leaning towards this game, because it's new and exciting to me. Plus, I did an informal poll and most people wanted to see this secondary project finished instead of Crusade. I'll post more details about it once I get some more reference art and such. Right now, the game just exists in about a dozen or pages of loose paper...

I've been getting back into the swing of Torque, however. Here are some screenies from a rough-n-tough mini-game I am working on, just to learn Torque's scripting: (Clicky for higher-res.)







I've replaced most of the usual Torque textures with some of my own. The only thing I haven't replaced yet is one of the terrain textures and the reflection map for water blocks. While I could use the ones that come with Torque, I wanted to add a little variety. In those screenshots, you can see a beach scene I created. Very simple. The road is going to lead to a city, where hopefully soon you will be able to smash down some buildings as a giant robot. :)

Other preparations I have been doing is to test Torque's limits and then prepare a roadmap for what exactly needs to be changed/improved. John's Lighting Pack has already knocked off one major item from my list, and if Stefan releases his AI pathfinding as a resource (paid or not), that will knock off another. :) In the following screenshots, I am giving Melv's fxReplicators a major stress test... (Once again, you can click each for higher-res versions.)







I wasn't running the debug build at the time, so I can't give you exact FPS, but the game felt pretty zippy running around on the ground. I might see if there's a way to cull an fxReplicator's view distance a bit more aggressively for things like trees. Plus, I remember seeing a post on here about how Torque was optimized for faster terrain culling by the Thinktanks crew. Large forests are an integral part of my next game. I'd like to be able to have to player set tree detail, even. (Override auto-LOD for trees? Hmmm.)

Next up: AI stress tests.