Next feature plus some debugging and cheating
Posted on December 16, 2006
| Sascha
Now that the regional building feature so far has been finished (I also did two more buildings since the last posting, both for research) I went on to implement the next feature, this time it’s research.
I already told you that discovering new technologies would be a part of the game, though it won’t be as complex like e.g. the technology tree in the Civilization series of game, but a lot more simple.
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More content creation
Posted on December 13, 2006
| Sascha
This is kind of a continuation to my last posting. I still spent most of the time for the project on doing content. That’s the thing about creating games that I really like, as it doesn’t only mean to write code but also to do a lot of differen things like creating graphics, models, writing a stroy and stuff. So right now I’m more in a mood to create content and that’s exactly what I’m doing.
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Full Sail
Posted on December 9, 2006
| Sascha
I would have updated my blog earlier, but work on PjW has been very fluent since the last updates, and I really got a lot of stuff done over the last weeks, though much of it was behind the scenes and can’t be really shown via screenshots. But let’s begin with the things I did that I can actually show with some nice pictures!
Number one : I pushed myself to finally start modelling some of the buildings (after finishing the list of buildings to be in the game, except for some special/military buildings).
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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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