This week I was able to track down a bug to do with saving the building’s rotation. Along with some code refactoring I have moved on to changing the user interface to be a little more pleasing to the eye.
Since I am using a third party library called MyGUI to do all the menu work in, it was very simple to replace the old style. I simply edited some XML and after 10 to 15 minutes of tweaking had things in place. Problem is that since changing the user interface I’ve discovered a flaw in the drag and drop code that needs fixing. Not a big issue but it has given me a reason to experiment with the new version of the MyGUI library which I hear might be better for what I want to do anyway.
You may have noticed an empty space under rotation and position. This is going to be for selecting different materials to apply to the building pieces however I have not yet decided on how it is going to be implemented. Designs and suggestions are welcome of course, just make a post on the forum.
I’ve been pretty naughty and have not posted anything new for the last few weeks on the blog. To be honest there is not much to tell. Work on the code is progressing nicely (however I wish I had some more help getting the code to build on windows).
There is a lot to be done before our 0.1 release. So far you can login to a game, edit the level and save the data. According to the road map I previously posted I also want to get the main menu and some other map editing features in.
The idea of the 0.1 release is that it will give content creators something to play with and get their art in the game where as the 0.2 release will be focused on getting the flying implemented.
Last week there was no developer update as I was sick with the flu. This week however I wanted to do something different so I have been working on the sky in the game.
My first attempt was to simply place a skybox into the game with a star background. A skybox is simply a box with an image on it.
As you can see the results are not very pleasing. I tried numerous ways to increase the resolution of the image displayed however nothing seemed to work, including increasing the image size.
Instead I tried something completely different. I read about SkyX in the Ogre forums and decided to give that a try.
Firstly however I had to convert the shader code from HLSL to CG and then get it working in linux. Below you can see the results.
I am unsure that it is working 100% correctly at the moment. The screenshot with the dark clouds should show a star background which doesn’t seem to be displaying. The second screenshot with the white volumetric clouds seems to be working correctly however has very slow FPS.
This week was very successful. The problems saving building layouts has been fixed. You can now load and save your layouts. My next task is to get editing working and then I am hoping to generate some support in helping to texture all these building models we have.
Right now they’re all texture-less white, Boring. If you know how to skin models please consider dropping by the forums and helping out.
I upgraded the debian packages I use for development to the latest version of Ogre (1.7.1 RC1) and found some new bugs which only appeared after the upgrade. They’ve all been fixed now.
This week is Chinese new year, so happy year of the tiger everyone. I opened up a new thread on the free game dev forum to try and debug some of the problems I have been experiencing with integrating SQLite into the server.
It seems I’m not the only one having problems saving to file which is good as it means my hard drive is not broke. However, tracking down what the actual problem is has been difficult. There has been some banter on the forums about the game music, however it has been mostly quiet this week. Hopefully there will be more progress next week.
