I’ve tinkered a bit more, and added occlusion queries for the stars, so now the flare fades out when some object is in front of it. Also added the option to display the object collision volumes by pressing ‘V’.

Binary at http://monkeyinthejungle.net/udg08/binaries/SpaceProto-uDG08.dmg

Still no gameplay, but I’ve submitted. The, err, game is now called SpaceProto.

This is what it looks like on a good day:

http://monkeyinthejungle.net/udg08/screenies/m10.mov
http://monkeyinthejungle.net/udg08/screenies/m11.mov

The binary is available at
http://monkeyinthejungle.net/udg08/binaries/SpaceProto-uDG08.dmg

But, be aware, the requirements are atrocious. Cheers, and good luck to all competitors!

Well, still no gameplay, but I haven’t been completely idle, either. I should have something pretty by the deadline. For now, what it should look like:

http://monkeyinthejungle.net/udg08/screenies/m8.mov

And a binary:

http://monkeyinthejungle.net/udg08/binaries/gameplay-proto29.app.tar.bz2

It doesn’t work on a lot of machines, on the GF 7300 its completely bonkers, on the ATI X1600 it’s got rendering glitches, for the Intel GMA 950 I see no hope at all, considering the complexity of the shader, on the 3100 it gets no dynamic branching and it absolutely crawls.

Bug reports welcome, though, if you happen to have a GPU not mentioned so far.

Oh yes, press ‘h’ for help, ‘,’ and ‘.’ to adjust the planets’ exposure.

Pie Menu demo: http://monkeyinthejungle.net/udg08/binaries/gameplay-proto24.app.tar.bz2

Right click on a star in the map to see a dummy pie menu. If you click anywhere, it disappears, but doesn’t if you just drag around the map.

So, I haven’t gotten as much work done lately as I hoped, but I haven’t been idle, either. Done quite a bit of under-the-hood refactoring.

And, I also (nearly completely) implemented a spiffy GUI feature called a Pie Menu. And it’s delicious. See for yourself:

I’ve been tweaking the particle stuff and implemented depth sorting, all to prepare for bullets, etc.

Though things will have to be reorganized, as depth sorting will need to be global for all kinds of transparent stuff, and particles still don’t collide with other stuff, it’s progress.

And trust me, it looks a whole lot better when things are moving and you’re screeching along the space station throwing sparks :)

Collisions :)

I’ve added collision volumes for most of the space station, improved the collision response, and particles are generated when the player collides with it. Bouncing around is worth another binary, don’t ya think:

http://monkeyinthejungle.net/udg08/binaries/gameplay-proto23.app.tar.bz2

The collision volumes are shown for debugging purposes, looks like:

Looks like this now:

The green blobs are collision spheres, the red/blue blobs mark the ends of a collison capsule. For the space station, they’re all part of a boolean “or/union” set, so if you collide with any of the parts, you collide with the station. For this particula space station’s rings, i’ll need to add a bunch of capsules chained together to approximate the torus. I have no plans for other collision shapes at this point, not because it wouldn’t be possible, but because the coding is tedious, as each shape colliding with another shape needs a special case, so I end up with N^2 cases, which with the sphere+capsule stays at a managable 4.

The collision response right now is just an elastic bounce, but it wouldn’t work for several simultaneous collisions, I’ll have to fudge with something smoother later.

No new playable, as its still not really fun to fly around.

The field of view became a bit narrower, too, as the distortion was too disorienting.

I’ve finally got around to get some simple collision detection working, I had to fiddle with it endlessly, as my initial scheme was overcomplicated. I can finally look into shooting things, then blowing things up.

So there’s a new build at http://monkeyinthejungle.net/udg08/binaries/gameplay-proto22.app.tar.bz2, where you can bounce off the space station’s, umm, let’s call it shield.

Then up is making this work with not only spheres, but also cylinders/capsules, and boolean combinations thereof, which should allow for quite good approximations of any shape.

There’s a new binary at http://monkeyinthejungle.net/udg08/binaries/gameplay-proto21.app.tar.bz2

It’s still 10.5 only. And it looks like that isn’t going to change.

What’s new this time are background stars and asynchronous resource loading. This means that the space ship and space station will pop into view only after a few seconds, but the long loading period is gone.

Appetizer:

In that case, i should probably also mention http://monkeyinthejungle.net/udg08/screenies/m2.mov

There is a pretty nasty situation with the ATI X1600 type cards claiming to support NPOT textures, but they don’t support mipmapping, for that texture type. So, I’ve spent a couple of hours last night trying to implement a workaround, and while it hasn’t been widely tested, I believe to have squashed that bug at last.

Here’s a binary: http://monkeyinthejungle.net/udg08/binaries/gameplay-proto19.app.tar.bz2

Don’t hesitate to report bugs or nastyisms, though keep in mind it’s a work in progress.

Don’t forget:

There’s a few stars:

…then there’s many stars:

While at it, current build is http://monkeyinthejungle.net/udg08/binaries/gameplay-proto7.app.tar.bz2

Should be self explanatory, if it isn’t let me know, I am striving to make it so that the player doesn’t have to read a 500 page manual before trying the game.

Let’s just say this is a space game. There will definitely be stars in it. And space. And stuff that goes ZOOOooomm and WOP WOP WOP and BANG.

What you can do right now is fly around in empty space and look at the galactic map. I know, I know, very exciting already. There’s plans for many more things, but I don’t want to announce anything before I can make it work.

Even though I see lots of people still on OS X 10.4, the game requires 10.5, as it’s very high-tech. For example, it uses MacRuby for scripting the game world. This means the game is very moddable. It also means I am extremely lazy and expect the players to do the work for me, by creating lots of exciting and amazing content to fill all the space with.

The game can import 3D assets in the form of COLLADA files, as I mentioned in this post. This means YOU should be able to create fantastic looking stuff in the 3D modeler of your choice, and just pop it in.

Did I mention MacRuby? Everybody knows Ruby these days, and now you can finally put it to good use, too, by creating stuff for this fantastic game.

So, finally, to all the good stuff: – http://monkeyinthejungle.net/udg08/ — is where source/binaries/screenies are and will be posted – http://monkeyinthejungle.net/udg08/log — contains the developer diary. I might post some of it from time to time on these forums, should I find the time – http://monkeyinthejungle.net/udg08/screenies — you won’t guess what’s in there