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.

These past three weeks have been pretty good. I took two weeks holiday as I mentioned in my previous update and this week I have been working on the save functionality of the game. Currently you can move and place buildings, however without being able to save your layouts the whole thing is totally pointless, right?

Well hopefully not for long, I have been working hard on getting save functionality working. Current I’m still having some problems, but progress is being made.

Zeljko Lazic who is a music producer submitted a music soundtrack for the game. He has included two different versions for us to use. Please comment on what you think.

Happy new year! No rest for me this holiday as I have been busy cracking out code like there is no tomorrow. This week I fixed a long standing bug with buildings not appearing correctly upon starting up the game as well as some other small fixes. I am currently concentrating on saving the buildings to file server side.

I have also been planning the release roadmap for the project which you can see below or if you have Google wave can view here. Unfortunately Google wave is not viewable to those without an invite. I am not sure why this is because I have found it very productive for quickly brain dumping things that needs collaboration so it is a shame I can not let you view it. If anyone wants an invitation I can give you one, if you post on the forum and get involved with the project.

I decided that for our first release it should just be something simple that lets people join a game, add, edit, delete buildings and then save them. You will notice that in the 0.1 release flight is not there. I think if I added flight code to the 0.1 release it would delay things a lot which is why I put it in 0.2. I’m hoping that by the time I start working on 0.2 we will have a few artists perfecting the building models and world map. Even if we don’t it still allows people to start making their own levels.

I put down “advanced building piece loading” for the 0.1 release because there needs to be more information associated with a building piece such as does this piece have an airlock, if so where is the airlock suppose to be, which materials (textures) can be used with this piece and so on. It might seem like a waste of time to some people however it think it’s better we get this done right before proceeding on to more difficult tasks and making a mess of the whole thing.

You will also notice I put down “shader editor” however I think it’s the wrong word to use. I want to put in a tool which allows you to reload the materials and play with the shader variables. I think this would make things easier for artists and myself when trying to get things to look right. The only other alternative is to continuously exit and start the game to view your changes, not cool. I do not think it will be that difficult to implement so I decided to put it in sooner rather then later.