Regional 3D view updated
Posted on December 4, 2006
| Sascha
The detail window for a player’s region has had a 3D preview of the building you’ve built from the very start of the game’s developement, but it was utterly boring and didn’t fit the rest of the game. So I gave it a spin yesterday and wrote a prototype to try out some new ideas on how to change that 3D preview. After some hours of fiddling with different perspectives and rendering styles I came up with an isometric view that I’m rather content with, though it’s still a wip and everything (especially the 3D models of the buildings) will change, tough the view will stay like this.
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Tidbits
Posted on December 1, 2006
| Sascha
After the design change, I started to fix/change some smaller things that were still open (although not really annoying) mainly with the UI itself. First I made it a bit transparent, so that the newly designed 3D view now shines through the windows which makes up for a nice effect. For that I also had to change rendering of the windows in such a way that they’re rendered from back-to-front (due to the nature of OpenGL’s alpha blending), but since you usually have no more than five windows open at the same time a cheesy bubble-sort does the job.
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New style for the main 3D view
Posted on November 26, 2006
| Sascha
As already hinted at in the last post I decided to change the visual style of PjW towards a different look, which gives the player the feeling of actually having the earth between his fingers, rather than just feeling like floating around it in space. So the last days I spent on changing the visuals of the main 3D view (where you’ll spent most of your time) like I did with the nation selection screen.
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Back on the road again
Posted on November 22, 2006
| Sascha
After putting a many hours into the latest Guild Wars Chapter (and still enjoying it) I returned to work on PjW again.
One of the parts back from the old version still in the current build was the nation selection screen, and I really disliked this one. So after having the initial idea on how the new one had to look, I did a quick drawing of my new ideas and spent the last few hours on creating a new one.
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(OT) What I'm up to
Posted on November 7, 2006
| Sascha
As you can guess by the lack of recent updates since releasing the updated NewtonPlayGround, I’m not working on some game/project at the moment.
Mainly that’s due to the release of chapter 3 of Guild Wars (aka “Nightfall”), and since I’ve been a Guild Wars player from the first day on when Prophecies was released I couldn’t resist the third chapter (since chapter 2, “Factions” already was awesome). So I bought myself the collector’s edition back on October 27th, and been playing the game since for about 100 hours (I finished it with my Necro from factions and also almost finished it with a Dervish).
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(NPG) Newtonplayground 1.53 released
Posted on October 22, 2006
| Sascha
Better late then never, and so I finally got around finishing and releasing the new version of my Newtonplayground, namely version 1.53 (to accompany the version of NGD used in this NPG release).
If you have followed my blog over the last few days/weeks you’ll already know the biggest changes, namely support for skinned ragdolls and magnetic bodies. Other than that there were some bugfixes and I also changed the context user interface for objects from text based buttons to a graphical one (like the main UI).
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(NPG) Magnetic objects
Posted on October 10, 2006
| Sascha
Yesterday deep into the night I decided to give another feature I wanted to have in NPG for a long time a try and implemented it. This time it’s magnet objects, which cause magnetic forces applied to all bodies within their range. This makes up for some great stuff, as you can see in the following video (5 MBytes, WMV encoded).
The feature was simple to implement since I already had implemented springs a long time ago, and basically the only difference between a spring between two bodies and the magnetic force between two bodies is the calculation of the resulting force (which is actually very simple for a magnetic object).
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(NPG) Final skinned ragdoll video
Posted on October 7, 2006
| Sascha
After finishing the implementation of the new skinned ragdoll-feature in NewtonPlayGround I just started to create some sample scenes for the final release. Throughout the last days I finished this feature (adding shadows, possibility to attach springs and joints and matierlas) and also tested it very hard to see if there were any problems or bugs left. And since everything works the way it should, and since I also finished the improvments to the spring implementation I had planed (you can now attach any kind of object to any other kind of object, which didn’t work on the last release) I’m preparing for the final release.
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(NPG) Preparing Newtonplayground 1.53
Posted on October 4, 2006
| Sascha
So after playing some newer games with my new rig (which runs like a charm), I started to do some coding again. And I decided to pause developement on PjW for one or two weaks so that I can finally finish up version 1.53 of the [Newtonplayground]((/creations/newtonplayground/).
This was something sitting on my neck for too long now, as I already stated in the newton forums that a new version of NPG was almost finished but somehow I always got distracted and just forgot about that.
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(OT) New System
Posted on September 27, 2006
| Sascha
Ordered sunday evening, the new parts for my dualcore-system arrived tuesday morning and everything went smooth. Assembling went easy as suspected and the system did it’s first boot and Windows XP installed without any problems.
But what I’m most happy with is the noiselevel of my new PC. My old parts already were rather silent, but this time it’s so quiet that you almost can’t hear it, no matter if it’s just plain working or under full load when e.
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