Ceres Dawn Blog

2010-11-23T23:44:00.000-08:00

Continuing to work on the "Consequences" mission. This mission is stressing some of the final code paths (like AI operated drone ships). I also spent some time improving the renderer. Currently I'm doing to work to make the data editor more usable (help text, corpus link fields auto-completing, and showing multiple data objects at once - for comparison). Consequences should be done shortly which may one of the two or three most complicated missions in the game. So it's a great stress test.

2010-07-14T13:29:00.000-07:00

I'm adding a lot of model content because you are going into a Clan base for the first time in the current level. So I have to make a way of high-lighting model parts and correctly deleting and moving parts and their sub-parts. High-lighting actually ended up being a lot harder then I thought it would be. Because I bake my models into one render call (which makes them much faster to render), I really don't have a good way of displaying them. So what I did was add an object that could be passed into the baking process that could alter the baking process. Then I made an object that changes the color if it is the selected part. Then I modified the rendered object so it could select which baked object to use. Then in the editor I just toggle between the two baked models and the high-light flashes back and forth.

2010-07-09T14:39:00.000-07:00

Finished the optimization work and started on the next portion of Consequences. This is the first time you encounter enemy drones and man were they busted. But I managed to get that all fixed, so now you can use you drones to stop a set of enemy drones while another set of drones attack them. It's all good.

The next steps was to do some more model creation, which has gotten me to a tipping point where I need to modify model editor so I can see which part I'm actually working on. This is actually substantially harder then you would think. Since I always bake my models into one single draw call, I need to make two models. One normal, and the other with a hi-lighted set of faces for the part that is currently selected and then switch between the two. This will show us which part is currently selected.

2010-06-24T16:28:00.001-07:00

Played my most complicated level to date, Remember, on the xbox today. Man is it slow! The main difference comes from the addition of all of the environment objects. What I would give for pix!

Built my own in game profiler and started tracking it down. Eventually I found out that every frame my 40 odd ships were evaluating every asteroid to see if they were a viable target! A little list maintenance and that problem is solved.

It's still crazy how different that piece of non-optimal code effects the pc vs xbox versions. Pc=0.6 ms, xbox=20ms!

Profile markup is still a pain. I'm going to try figure out an easier way to do it.

2010-05-18T18:04:00.000-07:00

Finishing up one of the bigger missions in the game. Add escape pods to the ships and did some major work on the animation systems. Now just need to add some environment extras to fill out the level.

2010-03-07T19:55:00.001-08:00

DBP is over and now I'm starting to work on some of the risky improvements that are needed. I had a good spatial representation system but I was not doing ship v ship collisions. Got it working today but it definitely broke some things. But I think I've got them all fixed now. I'm thinking I'm going to release it play test to get se feedback. I was pretty disapointed that no one called it out in the post DBP thread.

2010-03-03T18:50:00.000-08:00

My DBP 2010 video entry.

2010-02-18T22:55:00.000-08:00

Finished "Fork in the road", and "Man on the run". I'm now working on the "Remember..." mission. This should be the first really large scale fight in the game. I went to a lot of effort to make my ship drawing system as fast as possible (each ship is one draw call), so I hope I don't have any performance issues. It seems like the game is running real well except for two cases:

Nebula's - The overdraw is out of control. But I think I can fix it pretty easily. My Nebula billboards are so transparent that I have to draw a half dozen for you to even see them. This makes the nebulas look great, but I bet I could double the alpha on the billboard, draw half as many and no on would notice the difference.

Creating Asteroids - I do a bunch of math to procedurally create the asteroids (I do a perlin noise on a big grid and then wrap that around a sphere of points). I only do it once per asteroid at creation time, but when you look at level start-up, it's a huge percentage of the time. I could probably spend sometime optimizing it. But I heard that there is a new xna math library coming on line which might be a lot faster and if not, I could always offload asteroid creation to another thread. And, again it is just a start-up cost. After the asteroid is created it's one draw call.

I'd show some video of these missions, but they are starting to get far enough along in the story that they will spoil some of it. So other then demo movies, probably not going to show any more scenes from the game.

Finally, I'm trying to get this level done and some polish for the next dream build play in two weeks. I'm guessing my chances aren't that great, I didn't even make the final 20 last time and I suspect the same thing will happen again this time. As far along as I am, I still have almost 20 missions to go. I'm getting to a point where I can start really making missions quickly, but I'm still very far from done, and I think that's a big part of the criteria.

2010-01-15T00:03:00.000-08:00

The "Fork in the Road" mission is basically done. Just need to add the trigger to end the mission when all the clan ships are destroyed. I also need to make the missile ship more powerful. It's suppose to be the big bad of the mission, and I just destroyed it in about 10 seconds using my drone wings.

I think I still need to go to some effort to slow down all of the combat. It's still too quick to destroy other ships.

Also I need to make the nanopods target random locations on the ship. Heading toward the center they all bunch up, which does not look good.

Oh and here's the save screen:

2010-01-09T11:18:00.001-08:00

Finished the save system and the credits last night. Back to working on the "fork in the road" mission. I'm not really happy with the way the clan missile ship is firing. I want it to fire more but smaller missiles. Then I just need to add the win/lose conditions.

I'll need to make a new union ship and a station for "man on the run" after that.

2010-01-06T16:50:00.000-08:00

I'm about half way done with the save game system. I finished the interface page, and got most of the actual save file stuff in. Should be done with it tonight. Not exactly useful for dream build play, but a big step in reducing the items on the to do list. I'll post a picture tomorrow when I'm done.

2009-12-22T22:04:00.001-08:00

Got the nebula system all working. Including it's effects on ship visibility. Mission number 4 "Fork in the Road" gently introduces this as the big bad emerges from a nebula in the start. The next mission "Man on the Run" takes place completely in a nebula. Here's the intro showing some of the cinematic effects I get from having another "terrain" type.

I've gone through the previous environments and added nebulas to help with the look. I also added a system for to allow you to skip cut scenes (my kids were demanding it!)

2009-11-05T13:26:00.000-08:00

Added a new nebula system. This is my second attempt and looks a lot better then the first.

Still needs a little polish (need some color variance in the clouds). I think in the end I'll need to combine this with the first approach (which was basically a set of shells that had increasing transparency). Doing a large area with the billboard clouds will be too fill intensive (this example is 800 billboards). So I'm thinking the final solution will be the shell with billboards along the edge.

Plus, I need to finally add to my general pixel shader to fade out at a distance so I can bring it in and color it when you are inside a nebula.

2009-10-28T09:34:00.000-07:00

The next mission "Fork in road" needs a dust cloud as part of the mission. Dust clouds and nebulas are an important part of the game graphically and gameplay wise. So I am developing three things: 1) The actual cloud appearance itself (looking at it from the outside). 2) Reworking the background sphere to show the dust cloud when you are inside (including a fade when ships are far away in the cloud). 3) Some kind of emerging effect when a ship comes out of a cloud (some particles off the exterior of the ship when you move out of the cloud).

2009-10-20T21:05:00.000-07:00

The intro cut scene is finally done. Great excuse to get a lot of foundation work done. Here is the video:

Now it's onto the nebulas and dust fields for the next mission "Fork in the road".

2009-09-17T01:30:00.001-07:00

Spent a lot of time working on tasks that I had put off to meet the dream build play deadline. Now I'm finishing up the intro cinematic for the game. Added a number of features to the rendered to get it looking good. Next up is some kind of nebula/dust cloud rendering for the third mission.

2009-08-08T23:49:00.000-07:00

Submitted to DBP 2009. Let's see what kind of feedback I get. Here's the submission video:

2009-07-06T21:34:00.001-07:00

Lots more progress. I really need to post a video, but time's a wasting, so I've got to spend every moment on geting the game as ready as possible for dream build play. I finished the data editor, all of the nanite effects, the first round of nanite costs, the ship ai (the movement and targetting portion) and the collision around the stationary objects. Now I'm working on weapon selection by the enemy ai's (should they fire their nano pods or their cannons). I need to add the collision data for the ships (right now you can't move through an asteroid, but you can move through another ship. I also finished almost all of the drone portion of the tutorial. After the ai firing code I'll need to build the rest of the clan ships. I have designs for 6 clan ships at this point, which should be enough for the all the clan missions I can make. Then I need to make some more missions like mad for dream build play. Back to work!

2009-06-16T00:56:00.001-07:00

Finished all of the nanite effects (both visually and gameplay wise). Now I'm working on the enemy ship AI. I'm just going to go with the simplest thing I can right now. I already wrote a path planner a while ago, so ships will follow you and try to get within a certain range. I'm finishing us a general data editor so that I can add AI profiles to ships and describe their abilities better. I had been doing it by manually editting the files (yuck). Now I have a general data sheet system. I'll put up a video of combat and nanites in the next week.

2009-06-03T21:49:00.000-07:00

Got all of the visual effects in for the nano pods. Now onto implementing the gameplay elements.

2009-06-03T00:25:00.001-07:00

Been implementing all of the effects for the nano programs. I'm almost done (just another few days). I'm growing a little concerned over how much worse the game looks on the xbox compared to the pc. On the xbox colors seemed really washed out and darker in general. Part of this might have to do with my TV which was a fairly early (and in hind-sight) bad hd television. I'll have to lug my xbox over to another TV sometimeand check it out.

My schedule says that next up is finishing off the tutorial mission. I was blocked by the drones not being done, so all I should need to do is make a few new script actions and that should be done.

Then onto a real combat mission, "Supply run"

2009-05-26T00:16:00.000-07:00

Over the past several weeks I've implemented a majority of the drone systems for the game. You can now launch drones, and give them the complex commands that the player will be able to accomkplish once they progress in the game (Stopping and harrasing enemies, defending and assiting friendlies). The main idea with the drones is to make them you front-line fighters in combat. They are fairly resilient to attack so you can order them to take on a ship and not have to manage them moment to moment. And they are capable of being buffed by the Chicago's nanopods. As much as possible I'm trying to build an analogy to the wizard with two fighters from a fantasy rpg. The two drone wings are the fighters, they can take and deliever a pounding, and the chicago is the wizard. Taking a more strategic view of the battle and delivering devastating blows where required.

I also made number of very useful utility functions for performing geometry operations on objects in the game, so I'm going to use those to create the visual effects for all of the nano-pods over the next few weeks.

Now that the drones are in I can finish the last part of the tutorial mission and start on the main missions. I'm going to try and get at least three and hopefully more in time for the dream build play competition.

2009-05-05T19:36:00.000-07:00

More work on the Shakedown cruise mission. Adding script actions as I need them to get the tutorial up and running. It is nearly complete. I now need to show how to control the drones and then the tutorial will be complete. So now I'm going to spend a period of time working on the drone controls instead of scripting. I have about a half dozen drone commands I need to implement (attack, stop, move to, dock, launch, etc...) Once that is done I can finish up the tutorial mission and start the first combat mission. Time to start making the clan ships!

2009-04-21T22:48:00.000-07:00

Been busy adding a lot of features. I added a level selection screen:

I had a good conversation with a friend of mine and decided that it really is all about maximizing fun and letter people decide their own difficulty. One of the great things about rpg's is if a quest is too hard, you can go do some other quests, level up and then have a better shot as the quest you failed at. Also, isn't it terrible if you've finished a game, want to show someone a level you loved and you can't do it. So to that end I made two decisions. You can always go back and replay old levels. Beating a level the first time will give you 5 points to spend on improving your ship, replaying a level will give you 2 additional points (you can do that 4 more times, for a total of 13 points. You can play more then that,but you don't get any more points after the 5th time). I think that will solve both of these issues, and I don't have to worry about people being blocked by a level.

I added the ability for AI control ships to fire their weapons (which is needed for the tutorial - my test case for now). Finally got to actually use the trigger system (which was nice). And added the ability to add triggers in script (in this case, detecting if the chicago has sucessfully gotten to the marker).

I also did a little bit of ground work for the drones. When the drones are done, the player will be able to do everything they can do in the full game. It will need a bunch of polish, but the full feature set will be there.

2009-04-08T22:55:00.000-07:00

Added two new modes to the game. The first is the all-important title-screen. The purpose of this is simply to listen for an a button press so we can determine which controller is in charge for the game. I didn't spend a ton of time on in, but I wanted it to be at least slightly animated, so it just shows the Chicago going past the random asteroid.

The second mode that was added is the levelling system for the game. The player will get 5 points at the end of each mission to spend on one of 10 systems. It should give the player the ability to customize the parts of gameplay that they like the best, and will hopefully provide a bit of replayability to the game.

The only mode left is the save/load mode, which shouldn't be too hard, but I need to figure out how to do the save game (but since the state of the save game is 10 numbers plus the level, it should at least not be too big!). Which means I'll need to figure out the whole who is logged in thing, which I guess has a bunch of edge cases.

I'm not sure if I mentioned this, but I decided that I'm going to submit my game to the Dream Build Play contest this year. The money would be nice, but I really hope it gives the game some publicity and gets it in the coveted "contest finalist" section of the community games. To me that is worth a lot. I think the game will have that rare combination of innovation and polish that very few other community games have. I'm hoping that will lead to a lot of people playing and enjoying it.

Now back to script commands to get the tutorial finished.

2009-04-03T23:32:00.000-07:00

Many large systems have been added since my last post. You can see most of these in video below. I added the button interface system for controlling drones and your nanite pods. The drones are next up on the list, you can see two of the nanite pods firing here. The direct damage and the mine creation pod (at the end - the purple particles). I've also had to do a lot to get these systems up and running in an acceptable manner. The particle system needed to be made more flexible so that I could make particles that are more unique per instance.

I also have found out about the deadline for the 2009 Dream, Build, Play. My goal is to get a playable game into the contest by August 6th (the end deadline). I think I'm in pretty good shape to do it. As far as the basic gameplay, I need to some more of the nano-pod effects, which should not be that hard with the framework I've built. And the then I need to add the drones. After that I'll need to make an initial AI for the opponents and then I can have a basic match. That's the one minute experience. Make that as fun as possible and everything else will just be icing on the cake.

Then I'll need to add the leveling system, which should actually be very easy given my framework. That's the one hour experience (combat, leveling, more powerful combat).

Finally, I need to add as many levels as I can before the deadline. I have a pretty good set of tools for level creation, and I've made several improvements over the past few weeks, so while I'm not sure I can get all 20+ levels in, I'm sure I can give the judges a good sampling of levels in the game.

Should be great fun!

2009-02-24T21:11:00.000-08:00

Got the path planner up and running. This ended up being a lot of work, but I've got a really great system in place, so it should do a good job of moving ships of different sizes around.

You can see here that the ship to the left is moving from straight ahead, but a concave obstacle is in the way. The obstacle is represented by the light blue line. One tricky thing is that we want the ship to stay away from the obstacle by it's radius. So you can see, I had to write an algorithm that would grow a concave obstacle by any arbitrary amount, THIS IS ACTUALLY REALLY HARD! But after a few nights of pulling my hair out I finally figured out how to do it.

Next step is to add the asteroid field to the editor and hook it up with the pathing system so that ships can navigate around the fields.

2009-02-01T00:09:00.000-08:00

Finished the improvements to the script editor. Including the spline editor and the ability to fire events when an object on the spline passes certain event markers. Still have some model work to do, but I think this a good point to shoot another video of the game. You'll also see that the procedurarl asteroids are done, both as standalone objects (the green asteroid) and as parts of a model (the stardock). Also the colorization system is in which lets the models look a lot better then before.

Next up is to add an editor object that lest me place the asteroid fields I had prototyped in the last video. Also, some more work on turning the hud on and off through script (that should be very easy) and then starting to implement the actual tutorial: Fire at a probe, use the drones, use your nanite system.

2009-01-21T23:36:00.000-08:00

Another quick note on progress. Lots and lots done. Made the asteroid creator, hooked it up so that it could be an object in the model tool, made the stardock with uses an asteroid as a base and then some parts on top of it. Added a spline editor for moving objects around in cut scenes. Made a supply ship and discovered some improvements I needed to make to the rendering system. Discovered that I needed to slightly rework my vertex buffer system so that I could draw more things without hitting performance. And finally I'm now adding events to the spline so that I can get the spline to cause animations and effects to occur on the models that get moved during cut scenes. Once that's done (just another day or two). I'll be sure to make a movie of the tutorial cut scene so you can see how big the progress has been.

2008-12-17T00:03:00.000-08:00

Just a brief note to mark progress. I added quite a bit in the past few weeks. Replicas can now be colored and there is a nice coloring editor. I've added a new camera entry type into the level editor, so I actually have a cut scene at the start of the level now. My current task is to build the stardock that the chicago is launching from at the start of the turtorial. To do that, I need to create an asteroid object that generates a better looking asteroid then the one in the current movies. So I'm building a class that builds a procedural asteroid that we can then attach structures to. Part of the look for Ceres is that all bases, etc, are part of an asteroid, so I need to get this object in before I can build the stardock. I have another dew days of work on that. Then I'll build the stardock and post a movie of the intro scene.

2008-11-26T00:30:00.000-08:00

Got the asteroid field up and running. I think it turned out really well. Several hundreds of asteroids at a cost of around 0.5ms. Plus the algorithm to store the asteroids in a 3x3 grid and only generate grids as you move around seems to be working really well. I accidentally had the force rebuild flag on during my first run and the render time was around 47ms! So by only building them when required I cut that down by 100x.

Not entirely sure what to work on next. The three main candidates are:

1) Add colorization to the replicas (models) so that I can improve their visual quality.
2) Add the nebulas which will also force me to add fogging to the game
3) Some work on the mission editor, trying to flesh out mission one some more.

I think I'm probably going to go with 3. I've spent a lot of time on the rendering with all of the particle work. Getting the first mission up will keep me from forgetting that portion of the code. Plus it opens up a lot of next items to work on.

2008-11-14T22:28:00.000-08:00

Here's a capture from the game with the new shield effect and the ship explosion up and running. Not too bad! There is a ton of ground work in here too. I have my whole system to ship stats, displays (on the target ship the green centered bar is the shields, on your ship you can see your laser power, shields and nanites). The particle engine is up and running. Along with a bunch of underlying scripting systems (which are really visible in the demo).

Next up is asteroid fields. I've been thinking about it today and have a good idea of how to get them rendering. They are basically going to be another particle system, but we only want to render the visible ones. In theory we could render all of them with one render call, but then regnerating them would be tricky. So I'm going to build the particles in a three by three grid around the player, so we'll draw all of the asteroid with 9 render calls and we will only need to rebuild the render when the player moves beyond the grid cell. Should be a good blend of build cost and render cost.

2008-11-05T21:42:00.000-08:00

The stats system is in, so ships have actual hitpoints now. Plus I built the system in such a way that it can accept modifiers that allow the stats to be changed based on effects or things like improvement from leveling the player's ship. Next up is to get the shields to fail once the stat is zero and then do the ship explosion. Once I have a sample of the chicago blowing up a ship I'll post another movie.

I also finished up the trigger system, so we can now add triggers that cause script to fire.

2008-10-31T22:38:00.000-07:00

Got the particle system up, as well as stats system. So ships now have actual hitpoints and weapon damage. I'm adding some hud info now to display the shield level of your target as well as the shield, cannon and nanites on the players ship. I'll have another movie up in a few days.

2008-10-21T23:43:00.000-07:00

Got the shield effect in, and I'm currently putting in a particle engine to shot out particles at the point of contact. I'm also going to use the particle system to simulate fires on board the ship once it has taken sufficient damage, and do the explosion. I'm a few days off from having the particle system in although I've been distracted playing Dead Space. The polish on the game is amazing. Once the shield particle system is in, I'll make another video with the new shield.

2008-10-12T23:44:00.001-07:00

So here's a brief video of the Chicago firing it's weapons. All the pieces have come together. Notice that once the object is targetted, the weapons aims at it. I had to build an animation system that could use the matrices generate up to the point at which it was calculating the cannon's matrix and use that to solve where to rotate the cannon so that it would be aiming at the target. I also added a notion of a render effect that can be added to an entity that allows it to do certain transient drawing actions at named connector points. So in the case of the chicago, I have a laser cannon replica with a name connector point "weapon" then the laser cannon is added to the hull of the chicago with an aim at target animation controller. The nice thing is that this should be general purpose, so if you add a aim at target controller to any part of a replica (model) it will automatically aim at the target. I have also had to put in a lot of the game mode input for this, so there are placeholders for the drone and nanite commands now. I also needed to get a lot of the entity (the simulation object) up to the level were targetting information could be sent. Next step is to add some kind of shield effect. I'm still trying to think of how to make one that A) looks cool, B) represents being hit from multiple points. I've scene some hexagon shields that looked pretty cool. I think I might try that. I'll need to see if I can refactor my sphere triangle stripping code. Alfer that I will probably add the representation of the actual damage to a ship, and then a little ui work to represent the laser power level and the beginnings of the drone and nanite command interface.

2008-10-06T23:00:00.000-07:00

Finished and tested the quad-tree spatial partition. I also spent some time writing some debugging tools for the quad tree so I can make sure it's putting objects in the correct cell.

I also added a new part type for the replicas, a connector. This is used to create location where effects or connections will occur. I added a connector to the Chicago so I had a location to fire the beam. Now I'm just completing the last part: The addition to the replica entity that lets me add effects so I can add the laser effect when the weapon fire command goes off.

Hopefully I'll have the laser in another day or two.

I also shifted the game commands to a queue so that I can replay games and it's a good step toward making the game networkable (although I'm not planning on doing that until at least version 2).

2008-09-28T23:17:00.000-07:00

Still not much different to show. Got much more work on the editor and camera done. I now have a cinematic camera and a nice system to transition into the cinematic camera and the game play camera. I can actually see myself creating levels with the editor now.

Built a human size object in the game so I now have some scale (a man in a space suit). It's also part of the initial cinematic in the tutorial level. It helped me identify the fact that I need to get the coloration in the replica (model) editor soon.

I was planning on working on the particle systems, but I decided that I wanted to be able to select an object in the world and fire at it as my next visible goal. So that involves writing a spatial representation so that I can have a picker. So over the past few days I've been writing a quad-tree for representing space. This has also given me a max level size, which is 25k by 25k. I think this will be a pretty good size. At 60 meters / second (the current max speed of the Chicago) it will take a little under 7 minutes to cross. Hopefully that will be large enough.

I'm just finishing up the quad-tree spatial query now, which will allow me to select items with the targetting recticle. After that, I'll work on firing a beam from the Chicago's cannons to the selected object, which will require some kind of tagged location on the replica.

2008-09-17T23:50:00.000-07:00

Got a lot of editor work done. I can now add new actions from a grouped list and I should have the multi-line text editor done tomorrow. I also figured out the mechanism in the editor I want to use for adding attachment points and particle emitters. So I will probably do that soon. The game is going to look a lot better once the engines actually start firing. I'm also using a variant of the particle system for drawing asteroid fields which will greatly help define the terrain of a map. I still need to work on the issue of scale. I don't have a great idea of how large a typical map should be yet. I need to fill up the tutorial map with content so that it feels like a real level and play with it. To get that accomplished I need to have a better asteroid object in the game along with the asteroid field object.

Since I'm not going to get this all done in 5 days I guess I should admit that I'm not going to submit to the build-dream-play contest. But that's okay, I'm making really good progress and I think I'm still on track for my secondary goal, which is to have a shippable game around February. I think I'm going to pick an arbitrary date of Feb 22 and keep that as a target.

2008-09-14T01:04:00.000-07:00

Nothing worth a screen shot today. Put in the whole infra-structure for saving and loading scripts. Also connected the actual type editors. So now if you are editting a location in a field, you can just use the joystick to move to a location. I was afraid that the reflection systems wouldn't work on the xbox (you can't create an object from the classes name on the xbox, like you can on the pc). But fortunately that is not true, so it made my job about a 100 time easier. I need to make a multi-line text editor, which I'm really dreading, but I should do that soon.

After a little more editor work, I will probably implement a follow camera script command, a spawn asteroid field script command, and then write my particle engine (for drawing asteroid fields).

I after that's done, probably the next thing will be to get the laser cannon up and running on the ship. I need some notion of the named point on the model, so I can specify where the beam comes from. I also need to create my first animation function which will aim the two laser cannons at the target.

2008-09-10T00:14:00.000-07:00

Some more work on the editor. Still a ways to go before I can get to the state where I'm just adding custom editor code for new actions. I need to allow the editor to pretend to be the game so that it can process the same script actions as the game can. Luckily I'm doing it early enough that I think it can be done fairly painlessly.

Here's a picture of the editor so far. Notice the grenn cursor and the edit text where you set the location of the player ship for start up.

2008-09-06T01:34:00.000-07:00

Now that the replica editor is in better shape I can build a more final version of the Chicago (the player's ship). I still need to adjust the texture scale (it just looks like noise right now). I've actually spent far too much time figuring out the right dimensions for the ship to be realistic. The Chicago has a crew of about 150people and is around 150m in length.

I've also done some of the initial work on the mission editor. Still tons to do, but I have a fairly simple way of adding fields to the editor for each kind of scripting action. I'd love to be able to use this interface to be able to debug a mission, and luckily the "game" is still fairly simple at this point, so I think if I encapsulate playing the game enough I should be able to pull it off. But I still have a ton of groundwork: Saving and loading missions, editting the fields, allowing different controls for editting. I started doing the editor more because I wanted to test out implementing a cinematic camera for the start of the mission. My goal is to be able to select (or create) a placement action, move down to the location field and then use the joystick to move the object around the level. Some thing with defining a set of camera of motion splines.

I was really hoping to get down by the 23rd so I could submit, and I might still do it, just to see what, if any feedback I get, but the game is still very far from ready. But I am really happy with the progress I've made so far, considering I'm only working a few hours at night 4 or 5 days a week.

2008-08-25T01:21:00.000-07:00

Two images to make up for my lack of posting. I've continued to work on and improve the replica editor (I have to use that term becaues Model is already taken by XNA). It is just about complete, all that's left is selecting the child face for adding replica parts to another replica. A few hours of work at most. I've spent some time improving the usability since I'm going to be in there adding a lot of content soon.

I've also firmed up the "script" system so that I can build levels and scripts. I've tried to keep it as simple as possible. Scripts are composed of list actions with a time stamp that are triggered by events. So you can easily say, when the player enters this region I want to spawn a ship and have a dialog box 5 seconds latter that says, "I'm coming to get you." I added the time stamping to actions because I figured if I didn't I've be making a ton of events taht just corrseponded to time delays. This way events can be just for this where you don't know when of if they will happen (hitting a trigger volume for example). Should keep the scripting simpler.

Here's one of first things that you see during the tutorial.

2008-08-07T00:11:00.000-07:00

Almost done with the model editor. I've spent several days on it now and it's getting close to ready for production. I'll make a better ship then the Chicago that I have right now (although I'll probably keep the orignal model around for some other ship type). After that I'll need to make a few large asteroids and some settlement shapes for the tutorial (and my test) level. I also figured out an interface change which I think will make controlling the ship much better. I had a system that required using the dpad for system selection (ship, drone wings or nano-pod), but I've moved that functionality to the the buttons with a two or three button press system. I think this means that I'll be able to control the game with just the two joysticks and the four color buttons (I'm a big fan of simplified controls).

A = Chicago's main weapon
X/B = Drone command (followed by another color press A = attack / Defend / Y = Stop target)
Y = Fire nano-pod (Y = Offsensive programs / X = Enhance / Y = Detriments / B = defensive programs)

There is a point latter in the game where you become a squad captain and get to order ships to focus on specific targets but that will be something that is done fairly rarely, so I'll leave the dpad for that.

2008-08-01T00:55:00.000-07:00

Added the star sphere and turned on texturing. Also added camera control based on the targetting reticle, although it's not very smooth. Need to work on that. I also got it up and running on the xbox to make sure everything runs on it okay.

2008-07-28T00:41:00.000-07:00

Finished a lot of the extrusion editor and I really got itching to making part of the "game". Here's a screen shot of the game, still a huge amount left to do, but at least I have a ship that I can move around now. Also the serialization system is all done and is very nice, it really takes advantage of c# generics and reflection so that I have to do very little work. I also wrote an entire 3d transient line rendering library for draw 3d things to the screeen like 3d huds and debug info. I discovered a problem with the extrusion system where it isn't propogating the matrices in the correct order. I'll be taking a look into that next. Then I'll probable build some real art assets.

2008-07-22T01:18:00.000-07:00

No new images to show today. Now that the editor is more functional I'm focusing on the Corpus system (my database of resources used by the game). A bunch of groundwork needs to be laid out so that I can quickly add and remove data. I'm building a system such that you only need to describe the serialization once (no seperate read/write functions) which should make things easier. Probably a few more days of that and then I'll be able to start making a few objects for the game (the player ship, an enemy ship). Then I'll go into the level editor and gameplay for a while.

63 days left. Hmmm...

2008-07-15T01:08:00.000-07:00

Improved the layout of the extrusion editor tool and worked out the api for the corpus (the database of all objects). Also added a font system and fixed an issue with the way that I built render objects on the xbox (that xbox debugger is great piece of work).

I've also decided to amke a list based scripting system instead of a graphical one. Graphical scripting languages seem nice in theory, but a list will allow me to fit more informaiton on a screen and that's important.

Next up is to finish work on the editor (I have the point editor done, just need to do that attachment) and then actually save the data out. Once that's done I'm going to focus on getting a sample level in the game to stress the level editor and to start giving me direction for order to work on things. Luckily I know all the game systems (I've prototyped them already) so I don't have to worry about that, I just need to implement them in this game.

First a build a ship, then simulation space, then build a target, then build a laser effect... FUN!

2008-07-08T00:55:00.000-07:00

More editor and back-end work done. The hud system is complete, and I've laid out the system for the main game loop and update system. I also added a mode system so that you can move from title to editor to game. I also added the corpus system which is a system for grabbing resources as the game needs them. And finally I added the structure for the scripting system. Now I need to add some more of the interface for building extrusion and start creating a level in the game. I've definitely settled on the space RPG design, so all objects will be along thos lines in the future. The robot model is good though because it uses the animation system and I want to make sure I don't break that.

2008-07-03T00:54:00.001-07:00

Not a lot to show in this image, but as you can see I did get the mutliple viewport rendering up. I decided to go on the cheap somewhat in architecting it. It really only allows different views of the same scene, not full blown different renderings. If I even decide to do split screen (which I don't think I will) that will be sufficient. With the multi-threaded rendering, adding multiple rending list for each viewport would require a fairly big rewrite. I just need rendering viewports for the editor, and I can get away with this.

2008-07-01T00:33:00.000-07:00

Added a hud system and started filling in utility functions. Perhaps more importantly I got my machine set up to put the game on my xbox so I can actually play it. Very cool. I'm hoping to have the editor done in the next week or two.

I'm now actually thinking that I might shift to making a space rpg that I have designed on paper. The advantage is that space games are substantially easier to implement. And at this point I have less then 3 months. I wouldn't have to build any of the streaming systems, I could just use my extrusion set type with a plug in animation system (instead of a curve system). And I have always wanted to make this space rpg. The thing holding me back is that I know I can write these complex systems at this point and anyone how knows much about game knows how much easier space-base games are to write. At this point I don't have to make a decision yet, the engine will still be the same. I'll think about it for the next few days.

2008-06-25T23:07:00.000-07:00

Had a problem with multiple instances where bone setting was stomping on top of each other. The trick was to make sure I set the bones before the EffectPass.Begin() call to make sure the triangle batch is rendered using those bone matrices. Here is an image of 100 robots all animating. Render time is still good! I'm also trying to be really careful about reusing and not creating objects (which I hear really kills you on the xbox). Next stop is to get 2d rendering up so I can make my extrusion editor.

2008-06-24T22:26:00.000-07:00

Created a bone system for extrusion sets. So when you are specifying an extrusion you can also give it a bone name. The combining will look at the extrusion set it is a child of and build a bone hierarchy. I also decided to rewrite the renderer before I got anymore invested in it to run as a seperate thread. There are now render objects and render instances that get created by the simulation and then during the next frame while the simulation is running, the rendering thread processes and renders those objects. So in the image above, the wheels are rotating. I was also out on vacation for 5 days, thus the slow progress.

2008-06-10T22:24:00.000-07:00

Added a new terrain type as well as the extrusion type. I'll need this for game later.

2008-06-08T22:22:00.000-07:00

Here I've added an extrusion set to the extrusion set. So I specify the extrusion of the extrusion set and the face and then the extrusion and face of the parent. Now I can have libraries of extrusion sets that can be replicated. This entire object gets compressed down to one render call.

2008-06-05T22:20:00.000-07:00

First extrusion set. I created a simple api for combining extrusions to extrusions and extrusion sets to extrusions. You simply specify the extrusion and the face id and the system will automatically add it. Then you can use normal transforms that are in the face's space. So it should make building by combining extrusions very simple.

2008-06-01T22:19:00.000-07:00

Added texturing to the extrusion class.

2008-05-29T22:16:00.000-07:00

The is the first extrusion rendered by the game. An extrusion is going to be my rendering "atom" it is composed of a convex polygon and a set of line segments. Extrusions are built up into extrusion sets that describe more complex objects.

2008-05-28T22:15:00.000-07:00

First triangle render.

2008-05-28T22:13:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to build a fairly ambitious XNA game called Mercury over the next several months. I'd like to have it ready in time for the dream build play context by the end of october. This blog will be primarily composed of screen shots as the game evolves.