Wednesday When The Art Attacked

There I Was

Yes indeed, there I was, minding my own business when Mark submits an email of intense significance to the Reloaded project. He only went and re-wrote my shaders, and replaced my textures for the Terrain Demo. Music to my ears it was, and upon running the video he prepared and the new prototype in dropbox, I was not disappointed.

In the space of a few hours, Mark transformed my prototype into a drab unlit world into a scorching explosion of sharp contrast and infinite detail. He rescued a texture stage from my terrain shader and made the result look even better than it did before. Now that's talent ladies and gentlemen!

And Now A Visual

Oh, that's right, we're on a visual ban aren't we? :)  Ah well, patience is a virtue, or so they say. That is, if you believe 'them', whoever they are. 

Anyhoo, I can confirm it looks darn good and I have a video and a screenshot for the newsletter so all is well.  Sorry for the visual black-out. I will try to convince Rick at the meeting on Thursday that SOME visuals would be okay for the blog, just not horrible ones that squarely belong in the programmers cassette box.

The Trouble With Physics

In fact, there is no trouble, whatsoever. The bullet physics wrapping is going very well, and resembles ODE in many ways in the way everything is set up, created, released, e.t.c. 

I am currently toying with getting static terrain into a simple DBP prototype. I already have static and dynamic cubes and spheres, and thanks to a reminder from the blog comments section, I even have a dynamic cylinder!  We never managed to get good cylinder physics in FPSC Classic, so their introduction in Reloaded will be a great plus.  Always wanted to roll a barrel down some stairs, then strafe bullets at it half way down and have it explode amongst my enemies, who just that moment started up the stairs.  It's the little things that make you smile!

No doubt, largely thanks to precious little examples on the subject, I will be working on static terrain for a while, but once I've overcome that I am onto Character Controllers and that's where it gets interesting for me.  More on this later in the week, as I hope to cram some work in Thursday evening when the meeting is over.

Signing Off

It makes sense to make this one an early night which makes a shorter day than usual, but I can make up for it Friday I think.  Hopefully Friday's blog will reveal something you can use, and push the boundaries of what we've been used to so far with FPSC.

A few more notes before I resume terrain physics fun, our AGK V2 Kickstarter is starting i's last 10 days run-down to get to that mythic 1000 pledger's. It's a good wholesome number to get to, and we're tantalizingly close.  I recommend everyone pledge another £3 (or get their friend to do it) so we can push it over the edge and watch the wonderful splash when it hits the sea (sorry, my mind is still in terrain mode).

I also wanted to provide a link to a great write-up of the AGK V2 effort, in the form of a review of our Kickstarter from Gadget Girl.  Great to see such enthusiasm, and a real kick to see the photos of the old products and the stack of TGC inspired books!  Here is the link for your delectation: http://www.gadgetgirlreviews.com/2013/07/app-game-kit-v2-calling-all-budding.html  

Oh, and before I forget, the current AGK V2 total (with TGC Paypal pledges) comes to a rocketing £27,918 and an amazing 770 backers.  Good luck to that project, and wish me luck with terrain physics. It should be straight-forward, but I don't have sufficient documentation for half of the required parameters, but that's life for a developer, right? ;)