Status reports

Re: Status reports

Postby amuzen » 27 Oct 2013, 20:54

I have spent quite a bit of time trying to improve the random map generator, and the results are now starting to get somewhat interesting.

Some highlights of the new things:
  • More interesting terrain surface (hybrid Perlin noise and Diamond-square algorithm).
  • Steep mountain walls have less grass and dirt (the magnitude of the gradient of the Diamond-square terrain affects the probabilities).
  • Support for generation of buildings and other large structures that span multiple chunks (a separate planning step pre-allocates them for each newly discovered 16x16 chunk sized region).
  • Experimental generation of mostly empty random dungeons (Drunkard Walk algorithm)
  • Experimental generation of castle walls
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Re: Status reports

Postby amuzen » 10 Nov 2013, 20:44

Lots of random fixes and such since the last update:

  • Integrated gruntunbur's animations and added a few placeholder animations of mine.
  • Fixed various weapons not being wielded correctly.
  • Rewrote terrain physics and fixed bugs to make the game work with Bullet 2.82.
  • Minor sound playback and graphics fixes.
  • Separately customizable eyebrows, mouth and base face texture.
  • Integrated some of Julius' face textures.
  • Fixed the AI becoming unable to attack when having certain item combinations in its inventory.
  • Fixed the AI ignoring the cooldown time of some attacks.
  • Dungeons have longer corridors and fewer branches.
  • Dungeons contain occasional treasure chests and more monsters.
  • Fixed the annoying bug about NPCs sometimes becoming invisible.

It's momentarily even starting to feel kind of game-like, so perhaps it'll officially evolve from the pre-alpha to alpha sometime next year. :p
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Re: Status reports

Postby Bertram » 11 Nov 2013, 10:21

Hi Amuzen.

This is really becoming more and more exciting. :)
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Re: Status reports

Postby Julius » 11 Nov 2013, 17:41

cool! got screenshots of my face textures integrated?
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Re: Status reports

Postby amuzen » 11 Nov 2013, 22:08

Julius {l Wrote}:cool! got screenshots of my face textures integrated?


Sure, I just took a few.

I modified the eyes a bit (both yours and the old ones) in order to make them more consistent style-wise. I wish everyone released their stuff as SVG since it's so great for modifications.
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Re: Status reports

Postby amuzen » 25 Nov 2013, 22:06

Changes since the release:
  • Minor performance tuning.
  • New combat art system with two semi-placeholderish combat arts: circle cut and stun smash. I actually find them kind of fun to use. I'll try to add at least 3 more combat arts later to increase the count to 5, which is the number of different moves one can enable simultaneously. That should be enough for the next release.
  • Billboard-based censorship of breasts and stuff, complete with a neat pixelation effect if you have shaders enabled. This should be good enough for YouTube and such since the same approach seems to work for other games there. I particularly like the unintended consequence of the pixelation effect leaving more to your imagination while also making nudity feel more sinister at the same time. :p

As for future development, I got a long list of big features that I'd like to implement, but I'll probably end up postponing some of them since I can only do that much alone in one release cycle. In any case, expect to see some of these: random building generation, more dungeon elements, usable castle generation, better ore vein generation, random merchant NPCs, better particle systems, dismemberment, user interface improvements, ragdoll animations and animated clothes/hair/weapons.
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Re: Status reports

Postby amuzen » 01 Dec 2013, 23:53

This week's updates:
  • Decapitation. No rolling heads yet, but the engine code to do that is there already. The system is actually quite flexible. It can create the meaty stuff to seal the gaps of the removed limbs, and it could be used for more generic dismemberment or object splitting tasks.
  • Rendering of particle animations created with Blender. This is quite significant since there's just no usable particle animation editor for Ogre itself. I found it bearable when I created simple particle effects for decapitation, blood, summoning and healing with it.
  • Some refactoring needed by softbody (hair) animations.
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Re: Status reports

Postby charlie » 02 Dec 2013, 01:05

That sounds incredibly cool. Put up a video, show us it in action!
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Re: Status reports

Postby amuzen » 02 Dec 2013, 21:29

It's not really that impressive visually. The decapitation effect basically looks like the head just disappears while a couple of polygons and blurry particles appear. It's good enough for now, though, since it's technically sound, works in principle and could be improved relatively painlessly in the future. I'll think about polishing things once the basic feature set of the next release is done.

I'm not particularly thrilled about spending my precious development time on recording videos, but I might do it eventually if no one else with a semi-decent graphics card will. Not posting anything in over 2 years is just pathetic performance, but I'm still posting a screenshot instead. :p
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Re: Status reports

Postby charlie » 02 Dec 2013, 22:56

A screenshot is good. I only encouraged a video because it sounded like an impressive feature. If you feel it still needs work, by all means don't spend your time recording videos of features you don't feel require it.

I always liked the Overgrowth alpha videos however. I think they are a good way to get interest in a game. You might consider that at some point, but of course they are trying to sell their game so it's a different kettle of fish.
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Re: Status reports

Postby Bertram » 20 Feb 2014, 09:56

So how have you been amuzen? It's been some time I didn't see any news here, and I truly miss them. :)

Best regards,
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Re: Status reports

Postby amuzen » 23 Feb 2014, 12:24

Frankly, there hasn't been a whole lot of progress lately since I have been rather busy with playing games and real life. :p

I have also been somewhat out of ideas on how the gameplay should develop and how I should focus my efforts. Too many things to do and no clear idea on what would improve things have made development problematic. However, I have found some inspiration from other games and am getting the real life sorted out as well, so the development speed should be picking up.

By the way, historically, the development speed has always been really inconsistent. It's business as usual here, and development continues even after longer breaks.
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Re: Status reports

Postby Bertram » 25 Feb 2014, 11:04

Hi amuzen,

Thanks for answering :)
For the record, I didn't want to put any pressure. I was just asking whether you were still up and running (even if on other games^w busy with essential questions of life). ;)

Best regards,
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Re: Status reports

Postby dimproject » 06 Apr 2014, 11:45

I can't run last dev version
of the game (not helped libBulletSoftBody.dll) in Windows.
But older dev version (without libBulletSoftBody.dll) is
really better than ver 0.8.
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Re: Status reports

Postby dimproject » 10 Apr 2014, 00:08

Some ideas for game:
1 Attack and magic attack.
2 Need some EP (experience point) for level up.

Amuzen, maybe you someday to continue developing a game.
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Re: Status reports

Postby charlie » 23 Jun 2014, 16:10

I see a lot of commit activity lately. Is there an update in progress?
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Re: Status reports

Postby amuzen » 29 Jun 2014, 09:11

charlie {l Wrote}:I see a lot of commit activity lately. Is there an update in progress?


More like I actually had enough spare time to develop normally for a few days. :p
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