Well I finally got everything setup after the Sourceforge FTP access came back online I was able to upload the site and get this blog looking better.
There is not much to report right now as not a lot has been done in regard to the actual project because I would rather start out with a good design and some knowledge of where we are going. A lot of my time has been spent getting things up and running.
Right now I need people to help out on the project. A game requires masses of content creation and right now we have no artists, 3d models and content creators. If you can help out in some small way then please do send me an email.
We also need people to help shape the future of the project and give helpful suggestions on the direction of the game.
Project Milestones
As far as programming goes the following will most likely be done in order…
Loading up the level (Craters)
The first thing I will be working on is getting the level loading up.
My personal vision for Hardwar as I see it is that we will be able to make content creation easy so that it will not be hard to for example add new craters (the areas of Hardwar).
Which leads me on to how the crater data should be loaded and rendered on screen.
One of the methods I was thinking about was to use height map for the craters and then procedurally creating the tunnels between them and cut a hole in the vertices of the crater height map to link everything together.
I believe this will be the best way to easily change the areas of the game if someone wanted to add an extra crater they wouldn’t need to edit a large mesh in a modeling program.
Networking
What we are going to do for networking should be implemented very early in the project to avoid problems in the future. The final game is intended to have single-player as well as multi-player.
The single-player game will start up its own local “multi-player” game which the client will connect to. This will save us time from having to program both a multi-player and single-player game.
Development time doesn’t come cheap and any pre-existing networking library that is under the GNU/GPL will probably be used. We will need the following requirements:
- It will need to be fast and secure
- It will need to be able to work on multiple operating systems
- It “should” be easy to use
A pretty obvious checklist as you can see.
The server program that will connect to the client will also need to be carefully planned out so that it is secure. Although I haven’t really thought about it much my hope is that we will have some kind of master list for people to connect to online games which should also be planned for.
When this milestone is completed. I hope to have a game running with different craters, be able to fly around as well as see other players flying around.
When these two milestones are completed then we can then progress on to other features.
Other Hardwar Projects
I know there are at least two other Hardwar projects that are trying to simulate the Hardwar experience. I must admit I haven’t looked much into these projects as they seemed to be a divergence away from the original game.
I hope that these projects will also contribute to this project so that we can all combine our efforts on getting the “basic stuff” out the way.