Friday 5 April 2013

Friday Rescue

Calling The AA

I nipped out for petrol earlier this morning in my 1962 Land Rover, and as I pulled into the car park, oily steam started to pour into the cabin and out the bonnet  Whoops.  Closer inspection and the head gasket was definitely waving a white flag.  Five hours later I am back home after an inordinate amount of time waiting for rescue.

Ordered a new gasket which will take a week for delivery, and now without wheels. More critically, it pretty much ate up my working day and dumped a good deal of stress onto my eyebrows.

Irrespective, I found time to work on my inbox and also some Reloaded stuff which I can reveal now.

Reloaded Inventory Concepts

Having looked at a few games out there, we have rested on two styles that we feel are generic yet stylish.  One is from Sky Rim and the other is from a game the name of which escapes me.  Copyright the respective owners:



The next step is to wait for our artist to mock-up something similar with a Reloaded flavour to it, and then start tweaking until we have our GUI style. Once we have that set, we can iterate the graphical theme throughout the HUD assets which will influence fonts, other panel art, gadgets and in-game overlays.

Once we have that artwork cut-up, we can go back and replace the place holders of the functional inventory system and it should spring to life!  The assets will be placed within an easy to find folder so you will be able to replace these graphics with a style of your own for your final distributable. Let's face it, you won't want your games to use an identical HUD panel style over and over!

Beware of Mines

As if one sneak peek in two days was not enough, I have another sneak peek for you.  It's a very early (old FPSC X9 scenes for the moment) prototype of proximity based munitions.


This one is an adapted grenade to explode in proximity to an entity, and will be adapted to allow a mine to be placed magnetically on the floor, wall or ceiling to provide the perfect rear-guard defensive line.

Once we get some nice graphics to accompany the grenade and mine, I will reveal them here for your viewing pleasure.

Signing Off

Alas it was not as long a day as I would have hoped, but I was expecting visitors this weekend who have cancelled so I have the whole weekend to continue coding and making a mess.  I also complete the Ultimate Coder App this weekend too (pretty much), so plenty to see across two blogs in the days to come.

Also I just want to reassure you that you have seen no Reloaded artwork thus far, with the possible exception of the inside of the explosion.  All the art seen so far is from FPSC X9 which is a convenient way to knock up prototypes quickly to see how they fit in.  Asset creation and integration will commence in earnest once we start to get closer to 'alpha release' country.

5 comments:

  1. I definitely like the non-Skyrim inventory better.

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  2. I think Skyrim inventory hud will be easier to make and it's a lot more nicely placed, but the non-skyrim is good aswell.

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  3. I can't not express how happy I am that your looking at games like Skyrim for inspiration for an inventory system.

    I'm so delighted! I have spent many months trying to create my own and its just incredibly hard with the current hud commands.

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  4. I could make some mines. I'm assuming Id have to create a tiny video texture area for a blinky red light.

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  5. The inventory system is one of my most looked-foward to features of FPSCReloaded.

    It would be really great if you could give us some powerful control to really customize the inventory to our own needs. It is such an important part of game play.

    A present general-use inventory system is fine, but if you give us the power to build our own, with our own layout and abilities then we'll be able to make a pretty diverse range of games!

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