New user interface in motion
Posted on July 20, 2010
| Sascha
As promised some weeks ago I finally got around capturing a video of the totally new user interface that I decided to put into “Phase 2”. As mentioned earlier it’s not only a visual “upgrade”, making the UI more sleek and futuristic but also adds a lot of information to the default view and also brings in lot more usability. As you can see in the video most parts are already done, though there is still some work to be done before I can call it finished.
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"Phase 2" running on Linux (using WINE)
Posted on July 8, 2010
| Sascha
After releasing “Phase 1” (which was actually quite some long time ago) several people were asking for Linux support, but actually I wasn’t keen of having to port the game over to Linux (and I haven’t changed on that since then), so there never was (and never will be) a port for Linux. And as it seems it was also not possible to get the game running using WINE due to the fact that it used GDI+ for doing several imaging related things.
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Quick interception
Posted on July 5, 2010
| Sascha
Time flies by, and so the last posting is already collecting dust. As usual I’m not getting much time to work on “Phase 2”, but I’m making steady (though little) progress on an (almost daily) base. So the new user interface I’ve been talking about in my last posting is in (with a few minor things to be done and sorted) and it looks stunning, adding a lot to the game, both in terms of visual style and usability.
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The old GUI is history
Posted on May 5, 2010
| Sascha
Yes, you read that right. In a “shocking” turn of events I decided to scrap almost the whole old GUI for “Phase 2” in favour of a new and better one. Most of you might now ask if I went insane or so, but to counter this I’ll elaborate on why I scrapped the old GUI and decided to put a new one in : When I’m not in front of my PC and working on “Phase 2” (that’s actually the only thing I’m doing in front of the PC nowadays, no more gaming or such, spare time is rare for me) I always have pen and paper in close range so I can put down and work on new ideas anytime they hit me.
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Some words about "Phase 2"
Posted on April 13, 2010
| Sascha
My first posting on “Phase 2” for Projekt “W” in three months does not mean that I haven’t been working on it. Actually although my spare time is very limited (it gets worse and worse almost every month) I still try to squeeze out some spare time each day to do at least minor things related to “Phase 2”. And since event small steps sum up I got several things done towards a first release of “Phase 2” and so I decided to upload some screenshots and talk about what I’ve been doing.
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Omni-directional lights using cubemap shadows
Posted on March 4, 2010
| Sascha
It looks like my dungeon crawler prototype isn’t actually evolving into a game, but much more into a personal testbed for more-or-less current rendering techniques (due to Projekt “W” I’ve been lacking in the field of recent rendering techniques a bit). And so one of the things I always wanted to implement were shadows for omni-directional light sources. I’ve been doing that with stencil shadows years ago, but stencil shadows aren’t the preferred way of doing this nowadays due to their limitations, including sharp edges (yes, there are ways to get around this, but they’re expensive in terms of computing) and a high demand for fillrate.
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First dungeon crawler prototype (HD Video)
Posted on February 26, 2010
| Sascha
Although it took me longer than expected I recently got a first prototype of a dungeon crawler, based on my recenlty published random dungeon article, polished up far enough to show it to the public. Actually one of the biggest issue holding it back were the textures. It uses parallax (bump) mapping for giving flat surfaces a realsitic 3D look (it’s pretty much an extension to bump mapping), and for that technique you not only need a color map and a normal map but also a heightmap for each texture.
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Random Dungeon Generation
Posted on February 7, 2010
| Sascha
Javascript Demo If you want to see this in action, you can find a javascript version of the algorithm described in here that runs in your browser over here.
Introduction Ever since playing my first dungeon crawler (which must have been “Eye of the Beholder” if I remember correct, but there have been a lot of them in my early gaming days) I wanted to do something similar. And in my first years of coding I even started several dungeon crawlers (using Turbo Pascal under DOS), but none of them really took off due to several reasons.
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Newton SDL demos updated to 2.16
Posted on January 31, 2010
| Sascha
After several requests and after updating the headers, I decided to release updated sources for the SDL developer demos showcasing some of Newton’s features. Those updated demos (including sources) should be useful to both starters (to see how Newton 2.00 works) and people that already used 1.53, as there haven been some changes.
So the following demos now also have sources for Newton 2.00 : “Demo 01 - Basic demo”, “Demo 02 - Joints” and “Demo 03 - Buoyancy”.
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New staff / transfer market window and more on staff experience
Posted on January 14, 2010
| Sascha
After a long time without updates on “Phase 2” of Projekt “W” (due to the fact that I just haven’t had time to work on it), I got around doing some work on it in the recent days and** finished the overhaul of the staff / transfer market window**. As mentioned in my recent postings on “Phase 2”, all the windows will be revamped to make them look more like they’re in a game rather than in some kind of office application for windows.
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