So a few months ago I posted about resigning and how I was planning to set up a software development company. It’s now a little over 6 months later and I thought I’d give everyone an update on how things are going. Walter and I formed Opticode late last year and have been [...]
So I’ve been extra busy as always and haven’t had a great deal of time to post. This time I have an excuse! Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on my first draft for the upcoming “AI Game Programming Wisdom 4″ book. I’m writing an article entitled “Scripting Your Way to Advanced AI” [...]
Hi guys,
This is just a quick post to say happy Easter and let you know how things are going at the moment. Things at work have been going crazy leading up to big milestones so I’ve been putting in 10+ hour days for a while now. This has left me little time to [...]
Just a quick update to let you know that things are coming along nicely in CIC at the moment. I’ve decided to put together my second tech demo (alpha 2) which wills how off movement and may have orbital mechanics involved. I’ve always been interested in orbits, both how they work, and the [...]
It’s been quite a while since I posted specifically about CIC so I thought I’d give a quick update. Last night I made my first check-in since September (before the wedding). I’m beginning work on the ‘3D movement’ part of the game which I’m hoping will be one of it’s main features. [...]
In software development there are many goals that we aim for in designing our software, some of which compete against each other. Two such goals are flexibility and speed. While they may not always be in competition, I’ve found in the past that they quite often are, and particularly so when it comes [...]
All games have user interfaces, from first person shooters to puzzle games and hardcore simulations. Their quality ranges from excellent down to looking like they’ve been hastily put together by programmers themselves at the end of a project. Sometimes they seem to only be there to let players have access to the internal workings [...]
It’s done! After months of development and testing the first alpha of CIC is complete. Those who have signed up for the closed alpha should have received an email last night giving them instructions on how to download the latest build to try it out. If there are any major problems I [...]
Everything is in and ready to go for the tech demo. I’ve been working on polish and bugs fixes for the last couple of weeks and I’ve cleaned up all my known bugs. I’ve just got a week of testing singleplayer and mainly multiplayer over a LAN and the internet. After a [...]
I’ve put up some video tutorials of CIC in preparation for the alpha test. I’ve got one more tutorial to make and that will be up by the end of the week. Please check out the tutorials and let me know if there’s anything you’d missing and I can make a few more tutorials. It’s [...]
Cliff, at work, has signed up for the 14 days trial of Eve-Online. If my plans for removing sleep from my life had been fulfilled, it’s definitely a game I would sign up to. It’s the best MMO and one of the best space games I’ve played. If it weren’t for the [...]
Microsoft’s Speech API allows me to add voice recognition to CIC so players can give different commands quickly and while using the mouse to do something completely different. I was interested in speech regonition a few years ago when I was making my RTS and so I reused some of my code to get [...]
So after doing some general testing of CIC I noticed that my environment mapping wasn’t actually working as it should be. I spent quite a bit of time looking through my code and the examples I had used when putting together my HLSL shader. The problem was the ray I was using to look into [...]
Things are continuing along steadily towards the tech demo release. I decided to put together a closed alpha test mailing list for anyone interested in getting a sneak peek at CIC. The test will mainly be for hardware compatibility and network testing. I’m upgrading the AI to accomodate the added gameplay features [...]
I’ve added a poll to the forum, let me know what you think by clicking here.
After adding environment mapping I decided I was on a roll and would add ‘gloss mapping’ to my models. The alpha values within the normal map now specify how glossy or reflective that part of the model is. The more reflective a pixel the more of the environment will be reflected from it. [...]
On a whim last night I decided I wanted to add environment maps to my spaceships. This may be due to the fact I saw Ysaneya’s new model or that I can never say no to implementing some new graphical feature. What started out as being a small job turned into a mammoth [...]
I’m looking for everyone’s opinion about the control the player should have over the phalanx system on their capital ship. I’ve implemented a simple system where the player chooses the direction and width to fire their phalanx defence in order to shoot down incoming missiles. The skill comes from figuring out where the enemy is [...]
Just a quick update. I’ve just finished the auto path generation (version 1.0) and it’s working well. You can now choose where on the enemy ship to target and whether to fire directly or indirectly towards the target. The former means the missile will be travelling as fast as possible and is [...]
Normal mapping is now in. If you excuse the dodgy programmer art you can see the difference. Also in the background is my first attempt at a new skyscape.
