Promised (Media)update
Posted on July 27, 2008
| Sascha
A week too late, but better now than never. So here is the promised update on the progress of “Phase 2”. A lot of stuff has happened (not everything will be visible to the player) so this post will be a bit longer than usual.
Let’s start off with the global projects. As already mentioned several times, these are one (if not the) biggest addition to “Phase 2” and will change gameplay a lot.
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Big performance jump for "Phase 2"
Posted on July 12, 2008
| Sascha
While working on different parts of the source for “Phase 2” I also took a look at the rendering method for the 3D models and decided to totally rewrite those functions. They now (together with other changes) render models sorted by materials, which gives a huge performance improvements (texture changes are very expensive, and rendering sorted by materials removes a lot of them) that will be included with “Phase 2”.
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Quick check-in
Posted on July 9, 2008
| Sascha
Just a quick note to let you know that there will be bigger media update sometime next week. Sadly I’m not having as much time for coding as I’d like to have, but I’m still trying to work on “Phase 2” every minute I can spare, so there have been a lot of smaller and some bigger changes/additions towards the road to “Phase 2”.
Right now I started implementing the “global Projects”, mighty projects that need a lot of effort and ressources to finish, but that can, if used right, change the whole game.
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Hex battles evolved
Posted on June 11, 2008
| Sascha
While working on the remaining settings for the battlefields in “Phase 2” (in total, there will be eight different settings, including snow, deserts, lush and dry scenarios and so on) I felt that the look of the hex battles didn’t match the rest of the games visuals. They were too flat, no shadows and nothing surrounding them except the skybox. It just felt bland and urged me to change something about it, and I did.
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100k visitors and some Projekt "W"
Posted on May 30, 2008
| Sascha
Since relaunching my page with Wordpress back in march 2007, there have been over 100,000 visitors to my page. Although this does not sound much at first, I guess it’s pretty good for a personal page (together with the fact that there were roughly 75,000 visitors to my page before that relaunch) and I hope that all those visitors enjoyed my projects, demos, applications and tutorials. And for those interested in numbers, I just saw that the** traffic generated by my page for the first five months of 2008** (including views and downloads) has topped 1.
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New feature for "Phase 2"
Posted on May 26, 2008
| Sascha
While doing some miscellaneous coding and design-related stuff for “Phase 2” of Project “W”, I had a sudden inspiration for a new feature in order to get more dynamics into the gameplay. The new feature I therefore implemented is a stock market. Nothing revolutionary (I guess most games similar to Project “W” have that feature too) but it’s bringing much more dynamics into the game’s flow. In “Phase 1”, you can only make resources with the regions themselves, but the new stock market will allow you to make a lot of resources (or loose a lot) within a short amount of time, but with a lot of risk.
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Resuming work on "Phase 2" of Projekt "W"
Posted on May 16, 2008
| Sascha
The last news concerning “Phase 2” of Projekt “W” dates back to february, but I recently decided to resume work on “Phase 2” again (after playing a lot of Guild Wars in a new guild) and over the last couple of days I finished a new part of the GUI that you’ll see when you attack a region. If you’ve followed my postings on “Phase 2” you should know that the player will be able to either simulate the battles or to fight it out himself on a turn-based hex battlefield.
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Guild Wars (and a little break)
Posted on April 18, 2008
| Sascha
I already mentioned this a long time ago. I’m an avid Guild Wars player, and right now I’m taking a little programming break and spent most of my online time playing GW. If you’re interested in seeing some screenshots, I’ve created a gallery showcasing some of my Guild Wars moments over here.
Note that I haven’t lost interested in coding, it’s just that I need to take a break from it sometimes (it’s not the first break).
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Newton tracked tank proof-of-concept demo released
Posted on March 16, 2008
| Sascha
Finally, here it is : The demo of my proof-of-concept for realizing tracked vehicles (tanks) using only Newton’s material callback system. Head over here to download it (~3,6 MBytes) and please refer to the readme.txt before playing around with it. Also note that it’s possible that not all gamepads will work, if that’s the case just use the keyboard controls.
New tracked tank video
Posted on March 14, 2008
| Sascha
I have uploaded a new video (wmv-format, ~60 MBytes, ~5:40 mins) of the tracked tank vehicle implemented in newton. This video shows a more advanced, and almost finished version that allows you to control each track separate (using two analog sticks on my gamepad), as well as rotating the turret, which is implemented with a derived custom joint (and controlled using two neck buttons on the pad). It also allows for realistic turning when the tank is moving, something that wasn’t working in the version that the first video showed.
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