August 18, 2007
Last night on the way home from work, I started thinking about making things blow up. The first thing I did was to add a "Explosive" behaviour object that listens for JOLT events from the physics engine to tell it the object it belongs to has hit (or been hit by) something. Behaviours in my engine …
August 15, 2007
The new camera control model (where the control logic is a separate control object that gets attached to an otherwise passive camera object) is in, and works a treat. I now have a selection of smaller more focused camera control modules that can be attached to the camera, like a 3rd person controll…
August 05, 2007
This week I got my first little running prototype of my side project: it's a side scroller in 3D. The curves are used to lay out the "2D" track that runs through the otherwise 3D world. This allows the 2D scolling plane to wind and twist through the game world (think spiral stair cases, winding cav…
July 30, 2007
Prototyping on the side project continues this week as I move from collision mesh support to curves. Now I must admit, back when I was designing the basic framework for my engine, the idea of supporting curves never seriously crossed my mind. But one of the things I'm hoping to get out of this prot…
July 21, 2007
July 19, 2007
Well those of you with long memories might recall I last left you in the middle of some procedural environment/puzzle generation. Really tough problem that. I'm still planning on getting back into it, but just because it's such a massively long undertaking, I'm taking a little break to work on a fe…
March 30, 2007
Well, not a whole lot to report this week.
I decided I needed a temporary "floor" so I could see the shadows of objects (as without any depth cues, even I couldn't understand where some of the things were being generated). I dragged out some old water code I had from a previous version of the game w…
I decided I needed a temporary "floor" so I could see the shadows of objects (as without any depth cues, even I couldn't understand where some of the things were being generated). I dragged out some old water code I had from a previous version of the game w…
March 23, 2007
For reasons that have nothing at all to do with game development, it's been a wonderful few weeks. Still - now that I'm back at work and stuck on a train for 2 hours a day, I'm back working on my procedural level generation.
The first new addition is some basic support for doors, allowing it to happ…
The first new addition is some basic support for doors, allowing it to happ…
February 28, 2007
While I've always thought it would be fun to design fiendish puzzles for my game - I've always thought it would be orders of magnitude cooler to have the computer do it for me. The idea that there's a little Dungeon Master sitting behind the scenes thinking up cool puzzles and encounters for me to …
February 23, 2007
Despite journal evidence to the contrary, I've been super busy working on Milkshake over the last few months. Before I get into what I'm currently working on, I thought I'd take some time to write up the portal based rendering stuff I put in while back. (Quick aside for rendering boffins: I call it…
December 12, 2006
I was really dreading this whole high-speed collision/simulation problem. Frankly, this problem scares me as I have no idea how to accurately simulate these bodies without either breaking the rest of the simulation or making it unbelievably slow.
The basic problem here is that, like many physics sol…
The basic problem here is that, like many physics sol…
December 09, 2006
I'm still a long way off from having my gun do anything useful, but I was playing around with some video capture utilities tonight and thought I'd post the little moo-vie that it grabbed. I work on mac and haven't had a chance to test the codec in Windows land - can anyone using Windows confirm the…
December 04, 2006
A few weeks back I was sitting down at my compiler after a healthy Gears of War session wondering which of the many hundred of ToDo items I should pick off next ... when all of a sudden it hit me: my trusty little cow needs a large gun to run around blowing things up with. Given my plans for 'gamep…
September 12, 2006
It's been a really productive week, and I've coded up something I've been avoiding for months:
I can now edit any entity in the game and connect them together like lego blocks, and it all updates interactively (if you flip the numeric state of the switch, it will happily animate ON and then open th…
I can now edit any entity in the game and connect them together like lego blocks, and it all updates interactively (if you flip the numeric state of the switch, it will happily animate ON and then open th…
August 31, 2006
UI Overhaul
Don't you love it when you fix a bug that's been haunting you for months (and in this case, I mean the better part of a year)? For some reason, I could change the game resolution a few times, and them boom - nothing I rendered would show up anymore. I tried everything - I put in full GL …
Don't you love it when you fix a bug that's been haunting you for months (and in this case, I mean the better part of a year)? For some reason, I could change the game resolution a few times, and them boom - nothing I rendered would show up anymore. I tried everything - I put in full GL …
August 20, 2006
Pressure pads are the next puzzley element to add in. They're a little over-used (and even make an appearance in some of the Tomb Raider: Legend puzzles), but I couldn't resist throwing one in.
Creating a new pressure pad is exactly the same as a switch: you just setup a mesh with an "On" animation …
Creating a new pressure pad is exactly the same as a switch: you just setup a mesh with an "On" animation …
August 18, 2006
As promised, the next toy for my little toy box is a switch.
After all the work I needed to put in for the proximity sensor, this one actually went in quite smoothly. The animation uses the same rigid bind skeletal animation that the doors use. You just create a Maya animation clip on the mesh call…
After all the work I needed to put in for the proximity sensor, this one actually went in quite smoothly. The animation uses the same rigid bind skeletal animation that the doors use. You just create a Maya animation clip on the mesh call…
August 16, 2006
After a brief siesta for SIGGRAPH and a wonderful family holiday, my cow and I are back.
This week I've been looking at adding the first smatterings of game logic. Like probably every other game engine on the planet, I have scripting support that allows you to drop a script onto any object to handle…
This week I've been looking at adding the first smatterings of game logic. Like probably every other game engine on the planet, I have scripting support that allows you to drop a script onto any object to handle…
July 31, 2006
As any physics programmer worth his salt will tell you, one of the keys to fast and stable physics simulation is auto-disable. You want to auto-disable everything you can. Aside from mass-destruction sequences, most of the time, there are actually very few physical bodies in motion - and so it's wo…
July 27, 2006
A week or so back, I dropped a prototype door into my level just to check out what it would look like (which proved really useful as it unearthed an unseemly horde of issues I needed to think about). This week I've been extending my engine to make the door a living part of the level ... and unfortu…
July 22, 2006
As I suspected last week, I'm yet to convince myself one way or the other about how I should handle door rendering - so this week, I've gone back to basics and added matrix animation support. I think skinned character animation was one of the first things I coded up way back when (because getting m…
July 15, 2006
This week I've been thinking about doors. The problem is that when a door opens, it needs to go somewhere ... but most of the time, there's nowhere for it to go.
Closed doors are no problem. Here are some smugly closed doors in their natural environment. They're rough prototypes I knocked up on the…
Closed doors are no problem. Here are some smugly closed doors in their natural environment. They're rough prototypes I knocked up on the…
July 12, 2006
Welcome to the very first entry in my development journal of Milkshake. Perhaps some introductions are in order ...
Hands up which of you remember a truly beautiful little game called Head Over Heels? In case you've not had the pleasure of playing it, this game put you in charge of two intergalactic…
Hands up which of you remember a truly beautiful little game called Head Over Heels? In case you've not had the pleasure of playing it, this game put you in charge of two intergalactic…
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