What's Everyone Up To? (Oct 2012 Edition)

#1 I'm still honing my skills in lightwave 10.
Discovering new ways to do Bone setup and Animations.
Currently working on 10k poly Model of a woman, the usual way of modeling.
Hope to grasp the Spline Drawing method that's demonstrated by Splinegod.

Halloween?..Working that night 4:00pm to 12:30am ... going to miss my kids Halloween fun this year.

#2 Just completed setup of five new "alpha" servers this last weekend.

This morning I'm enwrapped in debugging a socket error which has been plaguing me for a long time--I was hoping it had hand-wavily to do with the network setup I was previously working on, but that's now been eliminated as a cause.

What do I hope to accomplish this month? I'd like to figure out how to get a patcher in place and working Very Soon Now. Also have a website rewrite due, and would like to take another pass through all the maps, though that may be more than a month's worth right there.

#3 Slowly porting the CE to make it MIT compatible -- I keep meaning to blog about that...

The Kilnwars team is still struggling with networking... occasionally I'll point out the Torque version that "just works" ;)

Inspiration struck and I've been adding squad based controls to Troopers. Currently it uses quick-chat style menu commands -- Tribes players may remember how the quick-chat system worked (for canned voice commands) -- but I'm also considering some point and click interaction as well.

All quiet in the studio this month... but I've recently gotten a new 100watt modelling amp, and it gets loud!

Also some part-time work at one of the local haunted houses again this year.

#4 This month has been pretty busy for me. Creating terrains might not sound terribly exciting, but you might be surprised by just how much work goes into a complex terrain.

I've been helping out over at Winter Leaf Entertainment with some terrain work, which I can't talk about unfortunately. Suffice it to say that this is probably the biggest terrain job I've yet involved myself in. I've had to try some new ideas, implement some old ones, and find creative solutions to problems that only come up when working with massive terrains.

I've also started working with Ron Kapaun on a project that's just in its infancy, so no details on that yet, except to say that it should raise a few eyebrows when the project is revealed (by Ron, hopefully!).

I'm quite comfortable with my art pipeline for terrain creation, and I've decided to start work on making a Terrain Art Pack, which may be sold, but probably more likely to be a freebie. I'll post news on that prior to release, but I wanted to show a quick screen capture of a test terrain, as I think it looks good, and it'll show what can be done with a few basic tools and Torque.

No, it's not Skyrim. :)

#5 @Dan,
That is absolutely stunning!

Still working on exploring generating fractals. I can now generate massive fractals with high iterations in fractions of a second. Stuff that took 120 seconds is now 0.4 seconds.

I need to finish up my fractal explorer app to make it a useful tool. I have some more equation seed data to examine as possible inputs. I am going to wait until I have experimented with that data before I spill the beans on it. It is so cool I hope it pans out.

I made a lot of progress ironing out how to properly calculate things and keep the data consistent between equation forms. I want people to still be able to use the explorer even if they don't have OpenCL compatible equipment in their computer. It will be slow, but the equations need to produce similar things.

To be done this month:

1. Finish up the fractal explorer interface to make it a useable program.
2. Get my terrain gen code working using data mining from fractal explorer.
3. Implement image editing features to control bitmaps used for terrain generation.

Those will be a lot of work all together, but should get me in good shape for having dynamic environments.

#6 That terrain looks great. I can't seem to make terrain in Torque that looks even remotely competent compared to what I've made in other game engines. Would you be willing to share your workflow?

#7 @Frank - Thanks mate. By the way, I haven't gotten around to using your Frankals on some test terrains yet. Been way too busy lately!

@Dashiva - The workflow I use at any time will be dictated largely by the type of map I'm creating. However, there are a few principles I generally stick to no matter the terrain, so I'll just go over those.

I tend to start in World Machine to design the basic layout that I'll be working with. I'll export this basic layout into L3DT so that I can use the Sapphire plugin to sculpt the layout somewhat, so that I have some basic features on the terrain, before bringing that back into World Machine so that I can start on the fine work.

So basically it's World Machine > L3DT > World Machine > T3D

Sometimes I'll bring the finished terrain into L3DT to create a texture which I'll blend with my World Machine generated diffuse map (within World Machine!) to create the right look.

#8 The last month has been a bust on personal game development between moving, unpacking, and a nice anniversary trip to Disneyland and Cars Land.

I actually did a little coding on the train this morning and I think I have my game's serialization to the point where I want it. I will need to do some testing (and bug fixing I'm sure) and then I will be ready to move onto making the "actions" you take in the game undoable.

I still have a lot of unpacking left (my office is *full* of boxes) which will continue to slow things down but I am glad to be getting back to it =)

#9 I have been trying to get my game ready for testers. It still has a more to go and it isn't totally fantabulous but it's my first game so I even have to give myself some slack.

IF you want to give it a quick try here is a link gamejolt.com/games/arcade/cat-on-a-wire-screen/9274/

Development is painful at times since I figured "Why bother plan anything?It's too simple to fail!".

#10 Still banging my head trying to come up with a decision.

1. Morrowind style free-roaming medieval fantasy RPG with first person view, aimed melee, and aimed spell combat.

2. Unreal Classic style Sci-Fi linear FPS RPG with large group multiplayer support.

3. Ditch common sense completely and build a Matrix'ish cyberpunk urban environment that doesn't have interesting gameplay other than roleplaying hackers / guardians and maybe some open world PVP.

Argh! I'll probably still be at this point next month too. I don't know what I want :-(

#11 @ Dan, that is one epic scenic! Amazing given the 2k x 2k diffuse map limitation.

#12 @Kenneth,
Cyberpunk RPG = Dragons and Lasers

#13 Dan: really nice work! Stunning.

Kenneth: mix some Dishonored into that Morrowind and I'd be all over it :D. Actually, mixing Dishonored into anything sounds like a great idea at this point.

Alpha-Kand: love the concept. Our cat used to do that to curtains :P.

I've been buried under uni work for a while - we had to build a water rocket, which actually took a lot more work than it sounds like. Especially when you take into account a 20-page report and SolidWorks drawings of every part. Lucky I had awesome group members to work with.

Though I did manage to find time to release Walkabout somehow. Super-excited, also worried that letting people see my code will break everything. Time will tell, I guess. Now to start working on updates. Oh yeah, and maybe my own game or something.

Speaking of which, I've started a script project based on MIT3D, all up on Github. It's called Moment as a pun on Torque. At the moment, I'm working on adding interaction - jumping in vehicles, picking up items, etc. It's a bit cumbersome to work with, since it requires a compiled binary from my own eightyeight branch in my fork of T3D, where I basically conglomerate all the changes I make to the engine.

Coming soon: porting the Recast Resource to MIT3D. Have been meaning to do that for ages now!

#14

Quote:"I will need to do some testing... and then I will be ready to move onto making the "actions" you take in the game undoable"

This is sexy. Sexy and very, very confusing. +1

@Alpha-Kand - Congrats on getting to QA at all. And good luck with the game.

@Kenneth - Morrowind styled anything would be a bit mainstream, but I'd wager still popular. I'm with Frank on the dragons and lasers. I think robots crawling through arena battlegrounds and looting chests filled with credit chips would be cool too.

Daniel, thank you kindly. How's the bow tie coming along?

#15 2012 has been busy for us at WinterLeaf Entertainment. We are about to release DotNetTorque 1.0 with 2.0 and 3.0 already planned. We have 2 other products in developement atm, which will be officially announced at a later date. Thats BESIDES everything on the game side of the house where we have Dan, Tim, David and way too many other artist to mention all working together to create our MMO - Dawn of Ascension.