Hitler Banned?

To Lose, a Carcass Zone

You don’t wait for ages then two posts happen in the same year. Having met Britinla recently on his trip back to the motherland (or the land adjacent to the motherland) I suggested a game of Carcassonne. Unfortunately I picked up the wrong satchel, instead of a mellow & interesting Eurogame of tile-laying I had my homework and lunchbox.

There are various implementations of Carcassonne, notably on Xbox360 Live, but more in keeping with the original game is a Dutch-made online Java variant: Toulouse (double-geddit?). Registration is free, doesn’t even need your email, and the site is without adverts or sales. The implementation is superb, from lobby to play. The first two expansions are included (and optional) and you can play against AIs too. The site also has a Settlers of Catan variant, Xplorers, and some others. It’s a fan site, donations are welcome and it’ll be closed the moment the owners of Carcassonne or Catan decide to close it. But that’s not in their favour, the site keeps interest in the games without profiteering from them.

See you there. I’ll be the one called “viberunner”…

ENGINE of the EMPIRE

Baron or Arboreal?

I have an alien planetary body in the background of a shot. I had been toying with the idea of a Green Mars using NASA images of Mars, including height maps, colourised to give it the appearance of life, from shades of red to a blue/green world.

The look appealed for a while, but when you look at the planet you can see lots of neat-edged craters turned into lush vegetation. A quick search on the Internetwebmail and I found a mock-up of Tatooine, home to the original Skywalker ranches.

The desert wins the beauty contest. I’m going to look again at the Green Mars rendering, because as a texture it’s twice the resolution of Tatooine, but it doesn’t look as good. Not that it matters, sandy dustbowl for backdrop it is.

Click them for a larger version.

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Update. I mentioned looking at Open Office. Wow. The first three things you notice about it are that it’s based on MS Office, secondly that’s based really closely on MS Office, and also that it’s a clone of MS Office. Not quite as many options, but does everything you’d want from the hundred quid incarnation.

The Power Point tool looked like it could do the job, if you fed it in enough templates. Unsurprisingly there are plenty on the World-Wide, so am downloading a few of them. The Word/Excel engines look strong, but am not risking converting my documentation over at this stage. I’ll graduate to them at some non-crunch time. Shame Math is just for writing formula, it it’s not a computation. The flow-chart software is adequate. It doesn’t have anything like the scope of Visio, but enough for my immediate needs. Open Office could really do with a Gantt-chart project manger.

Paperwork Time

At the end of University you get exams. You might have some hand-in work too, but you get exams. At the end of a first-year equivalent course in college, you don’t get exams. Or you do but they’re really easy ones, mostly multiple choice. What you do have to do is hand in a ton of homework.

For June the 1st I have to hand in a CGI-film, a team-made arcade game, a personal Java card game, and fixes to a 3D shooter. It’s the documentation that’s the slog: five design documents, three business plans, three project plans, two gantt charts, three user manuals, three technical manuals, story boards, endless PDL, two design diagrams, three test strategies, three lots of weekly work logs from start of term, and the magnum opus of ethical issues reports.

I don’t mind too much getting on with it methodically. A few hours throwing a few words into Word, then head into XSI. There I model and animate for a while, a nicely creative exercise after documenting. Lately the scenes have reached the stage I get the first renders. Compositing a film, changing the models and animation, is great fun.

As for admitting to using Word, I checked out Open Office. It looks amazing, have started downloading it. I’ll certainly find a use for the Math and Draw suites.

Project Mayhem V

We’ve had all manner of technical issues with Project Mayhem, not least that our very high-end modelling package Softimage XSI doesn’t correctly export textures to the low-end Direct-X-dot-X format we use in the game. A lot of research and downloading of 3D model conversion packages and we have a mechanism for exporting our models, animations, textures, and shaders (a technical texture that gives the appearance of ‘shine’ and ‘depth’) into our game. This was more challenging than it sounds, lots of attempts saving in various formats and using conversion programs cut, changed, chopped, or altered some other part of our model. As it is we’re being forced to manually edit our model files to paste animation information into them, but now we know what to do it doesn’t take long, and the results appear pixel-perfect.

During this process we were using single models, for example a spaceship with integrated gun, wings, exhaust ports, and the like. Today we worked hard at chopping a ship up and loading bits of it separately. Overcoming a number of errors we finally managed to get an easy-to-implement mechanism of constructing the ships in bits and assembling them in-game, and keep the complex animations together. What this means is when aliens swarm in they will have, randomly, different guns attached to them, each firing different weapons. All we do is build a library of guns, exhausts, etc., and we can have a very, very large array of distinctive opponents.

Due to the short timeframe of development we came up with a mechanism that avoids building “levels”, yet as a “cheat” to avoid work we’re starting to get really excited about the idea. We won’t have levels, all attack waves will be randomly generated, as will (as discussed) the weapons. Actually the attack waves will come from a number of pre-determined attack wave types, but essentially the more you play the game, as you get power-ups, the more likely it is a very-hard type of attack waves arrive. That the ships themselves can be dynamic (having puny guns on early on and very powerful ones later on) means, with luck, the game will have a real sense of progression despite being random.

I’m currently working on a scripting language for attack waves and enemy bullets. This is a challenging task, but if I can get it working (within our timeframe) it means people will be able to modify and extend the game without needing the source code. While I’m not using “XML” natively, I have produced what is essentially a customised version of it. I am debating if it’s worthwhile writing an editor for this language, I suspect it is and will probably produce one this weekend – time I have reserved for project development.

There are three other teams. The team I left, Acid Works, are producing a 3D space tunnel game where you collect chillies and sombreros. It’s really the game they always wanted to make and their development has gone well. Another team are working on a vastly ambitious 3D RPG project, they’re being told they’ll never get it ready in time but they are making good progress- they’re working hard at it. The final team are also working on a space shooter, except they’re using 2D sprites nicked from the Internet. I feel that’s a shame because they are led by a talented coder, he’s not making a 3D game because he’s daunted by the task. However the inherent simplicity of their format means they will probably have a lot of time in which to “shine” their game, something we might struggle to do.