Weekly update. CMaking it so.

I missed the Monday with a weekly update, didn’t I? Also, most of the rest of the week. Not that I’m really on a tight schedule here, since I guess I have about two regular readers. But it’ a slippery slope, which ends with only writing to this blog two times a year, and I’m hoping to avoid it. So, here’s the latest news.

We’ve made some more progress on UI, and now have a final variant. I’m now waiting for Oleg to create a texture atlas out of it, so I can finally begin programming.

Since there wasn’t much to do on coding front last week, I concentrated on two thing: making Return of Dr Destructo easier to compile and checking out a new feature of Emscripten called Asyncify.

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Weekly Update: UI and difficulty

In this weekly update, I would like to talk about game’s difficulty, options and UI.

The modern notion is that game’s options should be as simple as possible. It is even preferable if a game has no options at all, which is often the case for browser and mobile games. While I see some validity in this point of view, I simply can’t embrace it. For me, exploring various menus, ways of tweaking a game, was always a pleasant part of experience, especially when it comes to difficulty options.
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Weekly Update: Time Is Running Out

I have nothing to show you from Return of Dr. Destructo this week, since the changes I’ve made are important, but invisible. So let’s talk instead about other people’s games.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been replaying one of the lesser-known, but still much loved turn-based squad tactic games, Blue Byte’s Incubation: Time is running out. I bought it on Good Old Games as a part of Battle Isle pack some time in the past year, but I have already played it before, long ago, and remembered it fondly. Well, let me tell you that replaying it didn’t disappoint me at all! Even though I found graphics ass-ugly and camera just awful.

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Weekly progress: fiddling around with Dr. Destructo.

So, Return of Dr. Destructo has been in development for three years already. I first started coding sky drawing routine somewhere around August of 2012. I’m still missing a few pieces of the new art, and mobile versions are not ready, and the new UI broke some screens, because a lot of stuff was hard-coded to save time.

So, for the last week I got back to writing code for this game and fixing things. There isn’t much to report just yet, but you can check out an updated version of High Score screen:

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Reboot.

This blog has suffered a catastrophic failure due to my error in managing my web server. All posts are gone, and there are no backups. So, I’m starting from scratch. I’ll be keeping current theme for now, and I’ll try to write more often. My friends say this site is where projects come do die, and I want to change that 🙂

As for old posts, some of them were just a little bit popular and had incoming links from other sites. I’ll try to restore a few of those under old URLs from drafts I have on my desktop’s HDD, but everything related to Razgriz’s OpenHorizon project is gone (beyond downloads). Razgriz himself is no longer going to work on OpenHorizon because of lack of interest.

As for me, I still hope to release Return of Dr. Destructo some time in the future, and I also maybe have a new project going, but I’ll wait a bit before posting any details.

If you have any particular questions about content of old posts or state of various old projects, feel free to ask, and I’ll do my best to answer.

Update: Razgriz took upon himself to re-create his posts about OpenHorizon. He might be back to working on it.

Progress report

Screen-Shot-2014-04-15-at-4.45.21I’m glad to share with you my current progress. As you can see, I’ve loaded landscape (with hacks that I’ll fix later), loaded animations and added basic post-processing – color correction and FXAA. I also wrote linear approximation to AH’s flight model, it works pretty well, but another approach is required to get exact formulas. What’s next? Clouds, perhaps.

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Textures

texturesInstead of working on a flight model, I’ve researched locations’ format and texture assignment in AH a bit. Looks trashy without proper shaders and post-processing, but it’s an another step on a long way. I wish I had more free time…

 

A friend of mine (I don’t know if game files’ modification is legal or not) also found another approach in flight model’s research – to modify plane’s parameters, run the game and see, how it affects plane’s performance. By the way, Assault Horizon doesn’t recognize my PS3 controller on PC and I can’t complete the first mission with a keyboard, lol. Thus I shall start with F-22′s params.
I hardly believe that AH can recognize my save files from PS3