What I've been up to.

Time just seems to fly by when you're doing interesting things. And I've been doing quite a bit of interesting things, revolving around two little projects of mine, one of them Torque Related (Micro Packs) and the other, Engine Related (My Game Engine).

I'd like to share some of my new stuff today with you guys. So, I don't know how many people take a peek around my website here and there, but it looks like my little "sale" was missed, at least, judging by the figures on website hits over the past 3 weeks. But hey, I'm a nice guy, I left the image there on the site still if anyone just missed it and would like to take advantage of it, just shoot me an email regarding it and I'll be glad to work with you on giving you my stuff at the mentioned sale price (At least for another week or two), either way, I'd be glad to give that to you if interested.

So, let's talk new stuff! One of the things I have been working on lately is a set of "micro" packs, which are taking my concept from AFPSK that actually worked out very well (splitting the pack and selling the individual items) and made it into it's own little micro pack series. Yesterday, I completed the next addition to the pack series, which in my opinion, gave me the most "troubles", but still, it was quite fun, especially when my thread sits idle and unanswered at the point where I could have finished it. (Oh well ;p) Anyways, I set out with the goal of re-introducing the Tribes 2 ELF Projectile type, which allowed you to fire a continual beam of energy as long as the fire button was held down. Creating this projectile introduced a few sets of "new" concepts that needed to be done for the projectile.

First, the projectile had to be able to capture the state of the source during its processing. Next, I needed to ensure that the projectile's positions were always available to the function set to allow the calculations to be effectively accomplished. And lastly, I had to pull out some mathematics that I haven't worked with in about 3-4 years or so now to actually handle the drawing of a bezier curve. All in all, I put it all together, and after 2 weeks of hair pulling trying to solve just outlandish errors and bugs, I get this:


Afterwards, I added in some final adjustments to make it work more like a projectile, and now it's all set and ready to go! So that's now obtainable on my website for those interested folks. Also, I think some of you were waiting for this one. That projectile completes the "Projectile Pack" which contains all four projectile addons. You can grab that from this page if you're interested.

According to my little micro page, that now leaves the re-creation of the Force Field as the final addon (for now). So, I'll be working on that for a bit and starting some much needed patch work on some of my other packs as well, if you've got any more bugs or problems to report on them, send them my way via my forums or my email.

Last thing I'm going to talk about today is how things have been going in engine-dev world for me. And surprisingly, very well! I've knocked out some of that boring stuff in terms of getting some of those "core mechanics" also known as the lovely behind-the-scenes coding in terms of stuff everything else will need pretty much wrapped up. I've also picked out a few libraries to integrate into my engine tech. I'm hoping that once I get the last of these core things done, I can switch gears into getting OpenGL up and running and starting showing off some screenshots instead of large blocks of text, alas, time will tell in terms of that.

So for now, I hope you guys enjoy what I've sent out! See you next time!