Low fat disposable hats present, part 7:

A Sunset in Stone

Which is probably quite warm, despite the cold imagery of anything in stone…… Why are you looking at me like that?

Okay, I wanted an epic name to finish my cheesy little series of updates. Then it’s actual updates when they happen!!! Wow! That actually makes this a blog, instead of story time!

But I like story time …

So back to the technical. Don’t worry, I’ll put a stupid image at the end to better transition artfulness to technicallityfullness.

Way back, I mentioned the engine used the monkey of a library AllegroGL, as a wrapper to hardware, and OpenGL. Well, some time in December, we decided we couldn’t stand the instability of AllegroGL. Yes, AllegroGL, the not so updated piece of honk honk is unstable. I’m actually impressed the game worked at all. I had to disable deletion and destruction of any GL or related objects so the game wouldn’t crash on exit, and trust XP to handle all the recovery of memory. It was that bad.

So eventually, on and off busy with some other obligation, the code was ported and made a tad more generic as we moved to SDL/OpenGL. Hurah. And an exciting story that was.

And wow, that’s it? We’re all caught up!!

Okay, well, I guess we’ve been building some tools as well. These past few weeks, Richard has been working on the object editor. Collision/Spring placement is all there now, and he’s started working on our little interface for associating display polygons with these fancy collision thingies we can make.

Sophisticated looking isn’t it? So, soon we’ll be playing with and building game content.

Then there’s me. As mentioned last time, I’m working on art stuffs at the moment. I gave myself a crash course in Blender, and I seem to have that reasonably well figured out. Though, I wish the scaling via the normals feature was a tad less destructive. Anyways, prior to that, I’ve been toying with game mechanics, and fixing stuff to make the editing interface work. One item from the mechanic playing was switching to a segmented rope, instead of just the big spring between point A and point B.

Visually it’s nice, as it’s all bendy, curvy and swingy. But what you can’t see in this image, is that compared to the old rope, this one’s functionality is crap. So, it appears Umihara Kawase got it right, with the stiff rope that bends only when it crosses collision. Unfortunately that means a bunch more work, making the rope a really special case in the engine’s design.

There’s also this *other* gameplay element I’ve been toying with, with some encouraging success. But I’m going to be an ass, and sit on it for now. I’ll try not to tease it like it’s some super clever gameplay element or something. It’s more of an “oh! hey cool!” type mechanic, than a “Holy shoe!” type mechanic. That’s right, shoe.

And there it is. You’re caught up. I’m experimenting with art stuffs now, so expect something on that front to pop up. I can’t vouch for exact days or frequency of updates. Every couple weeks though, there should be something. Or just RSS me, and know. RSS, it’s an ESP for us non psychics.

And, your wacky image.

Have a good week.