Here is a quick update on the latest developments.

I’ve been very busy these last few months and now I have finally finished the much needed rewrite of the core game engine. It took a while but I’m happy with the final structure as it has made it much easier to add extra things to the game in a way that doesn’t generate spaghetti code.

As per discussion in the forum I’ve decided to move the editing out of the game. Ogitor, a level editor will be used to modify everything in the game. This should speed up development a bit and move things along a little faster as it means no one has to wait for the game to test their assets.

I also spent a few hours on the main menu scene as a way to test some of the new game engine code I had been writing. I still need to port over some of the other code such as the console and level loading but so far things are going pretty well.

I moved the source code from launchpad’s bazaar over to GitHub as I’m finding it more convenient to use. After using Bazaar for two years I’m starting to see some issues with it that I think Git has it beat.

Branching is much better in Git then it is in Bazaar. In Bazaar you have to make a new folder for every branch whereas git keeps it all self contained and lets you switch between branches in the same working folder. When I first started using Bazaar I hated this concept but after using Git for a month I’m really starting to like it a lot. It keeps everything much neater without having lots of copies all over the place.

The total disk usage is also much smaller with Git (35 MB) then it is with Bazaar (104+MB). The Launchpad website itself is almost always down for stability fixes. These two things are pretty important to me since I live in Thailand the internet isn’t that fast so smaller size wins. Github was a pretty big reason in itself. This website is much better catered to developing code then launchpad is.

So from now on expect all the code updates to be from GitHub rather then Launchpad.

What I’m currently working on is moving over some of the older code that I haven’t ported to the new system such as the debug console. I’m also going to work on things such as a place to store configuration data as well as the main menu when I get the latest designs for it.

Once these small tasks are done I plan to re-work the level loading code to load up the Ogitor exports and get working on the flying physics.

nirokugraphic wrote:

To me the very core of this game is around ‘greed’, unlike the original where it was merely a tagline which didn’t relate in any real way to the story . “Future is greedy, mission: ESCAPE!” . To me this would have more to do with joining one faction and outright annihilating the others, which might actually be a good way of taking it rather than the objective being to escape Titan.

Andrew replied:

If we’re going with multiple endings then I think we should encourage different view points of the game as well.

For example the very core of greed could be the theme of the criminal arc where everyone is out to do you over. Where as other story arcs could be about a different side of the game altogether. I really think that the view you get of the different elements should change depending upon what role you play in the game.

A quick example. You play as a criminal you see the world as only greed. Everyone wants your stuff or is trying to kill you for the bounty. Every interaction with the police is viewed as corrupt. However, when you play the police role you see a completely different side, you go on missions with other police units that aren’t corrupt but struggle to to keep justice in an underfunded and understaffed force that has to keep the peace of a huge violent area.

Infrahate on the forums began work on the music score for the game and has taken over creative control of music..

Infrahate wrote:

One thing I would like to point out listening to a lot of these tracks from the original; I had forgotten completely about the softer, less aggressive tracks and a a definite theme that comes to mind is ‘driving’ . Driving (or flying in this case) around the moon dealing with the day to day . I think this is an important vibe to maintain and so we don’t have quite as much ‘in your face’ music, which would probably more suited for dynamic mission related stuff ?

Something else I liked too was that the music sounded like it was from the future, especially from my own experience of listening to it for the first time having never really been that introduced to Warp and electronic music . Trying to maintain that never before heard music from the future feel could be tough to achieve but I think would really benefit .

A common complaint about open source projects is that the user interface always looks bad. It isn’t something I want my project to suffer from; unfortunately I’m one developer and haven’t got much skill in UI design.

Apart from programming I’m also interested in getting more people involved in the game. A few people have expressed interest in helping out, however no one has yet got back to me with anything. If you have any ideas on generating interest then stop by our forums and post them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Kilagain submitted some rough concept art for “moth” designs. A moth is the name of the flying vehicles in the game. I also started a discussion about the new kind of moths I’d personally like to see in our remake.

I finally managed to debug the code I had been working on for two weeks and merged it into trunk. I also spent a lot of time internally restructuring the server code. It is easier to add functionality to the server now, however I’m still not satisfied with the design.

Along with my code updates there has been an effort to get a windows build working again. I also spent some time rewriting some of the cmake scripts so that they would generate a correct visual studio project file as well as updating the windows documentation. It’s still an on going task however as there is quite a variation between the library versions.