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Changing Scenery

By
The V Man
– 16 October, 2012Posted in: News

The last few months have been a whirlwind.

Personal life has been a very busy and bumpy ride – I think my twitter feed is evidence enough of that. It has at times detracted from development and at times provided opportunities for it.

On said development side of things the voxel engine tech side-project has been completed to a point it can be safely shelved until I can get time to finish writing the editor and finalise file formats – good rainy day work. Several other concepts have crept in and been documented in rough form. The Viking Age has seen some progress on it’s region/chunk system, though due to recent events regular development has been disrupted.

There has been ART however.

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On the Importance of Side Projects

By
The V Man
– 23 July, 2012Posted in: Development

Yes, side projects. Everyone has them. They are often distracting, often unfinished and often take up more time than you ever imagined they would. What started out as a little curiosity, or the seed of a “simple” idea (that is, if there is such a thing) grows it’s own legs, picks you up and carries you away from whatever you had planned to do.

That is, if they’re any good.

So yes, I’ve been putting a touch of time into a side project recently, as I do every so often. I find it’s an excellent way to test out pieces of code or general approaches to things without having to completely re-engineer whatever it is I’m working on. And they almost always turn out usable, modular pieces of code that I can use in the main project.

This has happened twice on the existing project so far, so it’s well justified I feel.

The current distraction is a little voxel engine that originally began life as a different side project. It’s undergone two radical changes (one of which was a complete rewrite) and is shaping up nicely. It’s full of challenges, some of them self-imposed while others are simply the nature of the technology, but it’s been wondrously educational. It is perhaps not immediately applicable to The Viking Age, but sections of it will be.

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The Fancy Map Update

By
The V Man
– 8 June, 2012Posted in: Development

Despite repeatedly saying I was moving onto the chunk management system, I crawled back to maps because they were really disappointing me. They had the right shape, however I really hated the linear fade that lead to really square edges around the outside of the map. Perhaps worse, I wasn’t able to see the correct range of depth in the grey-scale mini-map viewer I had (which the previous map image was exported from).

After a bit of tinkering I got the proper colour range working – found and fixed an issue with depth scaling (as the map’s range is -1, 1 instead of the usual 0,1) and then got cracking on a fade method that didn’t lead to ruler-squared edges.

Here’s a sample of the results:

Map_-245189570
Map_-747023056
Map_130630283


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The Long Silence

By
The V Man
– 12 April, 2012Posted in: Development, News

Things have been a bit quiet lately both here and on twitter. There’s progress, but it’s not terribly interesting to hear about. Of course there’s been a few problems here and there as well – just nothing inspiring enough to mention here.

In the background of all that I’ve started toying with the basics of yet *another* thing. Yes, I am easily distracted. It will serve it’s purpose though and will have the framework of another project that’s been planned for some time. Both of these nebulous things are fairly small in the grand scheme and will happen in the background of The Viking Age, which is the main project. They’re both also useful for testing out ideas and code snippets that will eventually be used (or not depending!) in the main game.  My intent is to release both games ahead of The Viking Age, because they’re smaller and give me a much needed break from some of the more frustrating aspects of that project – which means they’ll be done quicker. The first is a little more intensive on the art side (good for brushing up my modelling and texturing skills) and a lot less code and the other is almost precisely the opposite. No idea what order they’ll get released in though.

Maybe some screen shots soon, as well.

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Loading…

By
The V Man
– 21 March, 2012Posted in: Development

If you’re reading this then you can tell the server migration went swimmingly and all is well. But that was all *ages* ago. Let’s get current.

Work continues on the terrain engine. Recently I cracked a problem I was having with properly tracking the viewable terrain around the player. Last count was 4 iterations to get it from broken but basically correct, to optimised (for now) and pretty slick. So that’s good.

After a little house cleaning, the next step is to move on to displaying the terrain chunks in an intelligent order and getting the map’s data to apply cleanly to the chunks in view. That in itself will provide a bit of challenge as the edges of each piece of terrain will have to be blended together the first time they’re generated – something I didn’t have to worry about in the original terrain system because I was only building on a pre-existing 9×9 section of terrain; The heightmap was applied across the entire piece of land as one.

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