Tools and Content
Posted on August 25, 2006
| Sascha
Small note : I now put the abbreviation for the working-title of my current project before postings dealing with it, so you can directly see what the post refers to.
The last days I spent on coding the tool needed for putting content into my current project. I already had some tools from the old prototype, but they were neither finished nor what I really wanted to quickly create content. So I made one single application (although not totally finished yet) where I can create all the content for my game, like region-settings, unit-info and buildings and export (and also import from) to XML.
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Animated skinned UI-control
Posted on August 23, 2006
| Sascha
I already wrote (and posted screenshots) about the skinned controls in the GUI of my current project. And this time you can even see it in motion, as I attached a small video I captured of that control which you can see here (it’s a flash movie, about 500 KBytes big). Due to the fact that swf is not the best format for videos it doesn’t look as good as in “reality”, but you should see that I also added a fade-in and fade-out to the controls, so that the buttons slowly fade in and seem to kind of glow out when you leave their mouse area.
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GUI - Coding and some Hex(es)
Posted on August 20, 2006
| Sascha
After having done the layout for the GUI, I started to implement a new skinned control into the already existing GUI-part of the project. Basically it’s a control consisting of different parts and every part has it’s own texture (overlay, the whole control has it’s own background) and is activated (rendered) as soon as the mouse cursor enters it’s polygonal area. The area itself is specified as a polygon, so you can recreate every complex shape that such a control can have.
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More on the GUI
Posted on August 18, 2006
| Sascha
Did some more work on the GUI and I guess what I’ve got now is going to make it into the final game (the screenshot already comes from within the game). It has the control center with all important buttons (still not named on the screenshot) and also plenty of space for the information the player needs to know about.
And, most important, it (at least in my opionion) perfectly fits the theme of the game.
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Some GUI-Work
Posted on August 17, 2006
| Sascha
I spent some hours doing the basic layout for the control center of the game I already posted about. After doing some drawings (by hand) to get a hang on how it should look, I fired up photoshop and after several hours (and several designs) I came up with the skeleton you can see in the screenshot (click for bigger view) on the left. Right now it misses captions and symbols, so you can’t see what the buttons (the globe in the middle is, maybe as you already guessed, for ending the current round) are done, but that’ll be added.
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Refining the game design
Posted on August 15, 2006
| Sascha
Well, I’m still working at refining the design of my game project mentioned in my last entry. And since back then, alone the document in which I wrote down changes and additions to the initial gamedesign is already 10 pages long. So the ideas are flowing and everything is coming together. And this also is the first time that I ever invested so much time in writing a game-design document. Up until now I usually just wrote down outlines of my idea and implemented the details while coding, which works fine for arcade-like games (see e.
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Back again
Posted on August 8, 2006
| Sascha
Well, after a bigger break I’m back at coding again (at least hobby-coding, already did some “serious” coding during the last months) and I have started to work on something new that’s actually rather old : Back in 2003 I started on a roundbased strategy-game and wrote a rather big design document and also made a working prototype (but with no actual gameplay in it). But soon I realised that the design of this game was too complex (both in terms of gameplay and in terms of content I had to create), so I dropped it.
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NewtonPlayGround 1.51
Posted on February 11, 2006
| Sascha
As already announced I worked on fixing bugs and problems that users (mostly the users over at the newton boards, so kudos to them) discovered in release 1.5 of the NewtonPlayGround. Sadly there were more bugs and problems than I suspected, but none of them was very serious.
So I now (hopefully) present you release 1.51 of the NewtonPlayGround, which can be obtained here. It also includes a new feature, namely dampers, for slider and hinge joints.
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The day(s) after
Posted on February 7, 2006
| Sascha
The launch of NewtonPlayGround turned out to be more or less smooth. Though the people that downloaded it already found some bugs, none of them were real showstoppers (which are actually a coders nightmare). Up until now there have been 8 bugs/problems reported, with none of them being something really serious and so I already fixed all those bugs and found two more by myself (also just really small ones).
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Newton 1.51 out
Posted on January 31, 2006
| Sascha
Already released yesterday (had no time to update my blog), Version 1.51 of the Newton Game Dynamics Engine is out!
So grab it while it’s hot. Besides some minor fixes, the vehicle container got a lot of attention in terms of bugfixing and is now a real beauty and fun to use. Note that there were no changes in the headers, so the pascal headers (link) for Newton 1.5 are still working with the 1.
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