That Was The Year That Was: Space Year 2023

 

2023 comes to an end ... and if I am honest, it was kinda non-descript ...

So what actually happened? I have no idea, but it did include me porting Monsters Loot Swag to the latest version of the game engine - available here for FREE under MIT license - and all it's glorious new fangled stuff like asset systems and Physical Based Rendering (PBR).

Have you seen this PBR'd catgirl?

You have now!

So, anyhow, the latest engine version of Monsters Loot Swag got a BETA, whilst I fixed a few things up on that version to bring it more into line with the default v.3.x which I had initially uploaded to Steam - not that I got the feedback and testing which I was hoping for, but hey, that's just one of those things. The v.4.x Beat build did come with it's own script compiler which was invaluable to finding scripting issues which the the default version would not. I will probably retire the default Steam version and replace it with the Beta as standard moving forwards. 

Have you seen how to opt into the Beta?

You have now!

 I also beat Micro$oft at it's own game when it locked me out of the source code for Airship Dragoon, and managed to finally put out a new update with the latest version of Steam.

Have you seen this Airship Dragoonette?

 You have now!

Have you seen this Sparrowhawk?

Well he spotted me first ... I mean what did he want? It's not like I can just feed him juicy blackbirds, which judging from the carnage near the veg patch, is his sole diet.

In other news I managed to survive five (5) whole decades on God's blessed earth, I think wearing a sallet for the whole time helped.

In other news I have made good progress with my GAMBESON which I have designed specifically to survive Winter with when heating prices go through the roof, or someone Kalibrates the UK gas pipeline, and yes, season should have caps. I am currently messing around with the edging at the moment and need to sort the arms out and some strapping for the front which is double layered in a slightly eastern fashion. No prizes for the sewing aesthetic but it will hold together. 

It's surprising how sore my finger and thumb has got just from holding a needle.

Once I get chance, I will return to my medieval hack-and-slash-cum-RPG idea which I have already coded combat up for, but really now need some 3D artwork and animations, and I'm thinking of a lowpoly aesthetic with that. 

I also intend to port my old aeronauticals air combat game demo to the latest version of the game engine and release it for testing. To be honest if I go back to that I might make it low-poly too as that seems to be faster with production. It's a style which certainly did not do Valheim et al any harm.

Another 365 days are gone, so you for the next 365 ... unless it's a leap year some time ...

Happy New Year!

That Was The Year That Was: Space Year 2022

Level 6 Monster Boss, Kareu The Horticulturist

So, annoyingly, I somehow missed November devblog, being the first month missed in 4 years. Bloody Embuggeration!

Not doubt I was otherwise engaged with a number of updates to Monsters Loot Swag on Steam, and trying to get the new level knocked out. This not only had Level 6 and it's monster boss, Kaeru The Horticulturist, as pictured above, but also a final fix of a long running bug issue, the dreaded "Out Of Bounds Index Array" which I had previously narrowed down to some sort of audio issue. And, eventually I had it cornered and trapped, and finally fixed, Audio Emitters had been getting their ghosting out of synch. The simplest solution was to create a delay in turning them off and then deleting them, but this had taken months of investigation.

Literally ALL the printf

 With all the bugs - that I am aware of anyhow - finally vanquished, I could finish off the newest level, finalize the missing portrait artwork for the previous level boss monsters, and get on with expanding the game. I am now on the 9th Early Access update to the game, and the fourth major update.

Level 5 Monster Boss, Lula The Non-Resident Alien

And so that is where we are now, with the game running well and up to speed, waiting for completion of levels 6-10 and the remaining 4 unlockable catgirl cosplayers ... and a few other things such as the Souvenir system I have planned, where boss monsters drop a collectable via RNG with a difficulty setting modifier.

All that and more is planned for the new year, with a final completion of the game between late Spring and early Summer. After this I might code up a melee based combat system for a hack-and-slash-cum-Soulslike to see how that works, before deciding on whether to use that as my next project or the Aeronaut vertical slice I made a year or two back.

Happy New Year, and see you in 2023!

That Was The Year That Was 2021

 

Look out behind you!

It got windy and I had to climb on the roof to fix some broken tiles by sticking them together with No Nails glue.

In other news, I have mostly been integrating Steamworks with Torque, in all those hard to reach places I haven't used before like Stats and Leaderboards and getting multiplayer achievements to fire.

To be continued ... as I forgot to do this earlier and there's only 12 minutes of the year left ...

One Year Of Aeronauticals

 So it has been an ENTIRE YEAR (from 1st October 2020) of working on my aeronaut/aeronauticals/dogfighter game that was loosely inspired by Ace Combat with 1930s aircraft and a lot more tightly inspired by Descent: The Great War space combat simulator but with gravity.

How it started (after a month or so anyhow) ...

And, how it's going ...

 

 

So ... that's been a bit of a change then ...

 

First up, I've created a brand new class of object, aeronautVehicle, that derives off vehicle class, which derives off rigidShape which is the thing that controls the physics, and shapeBase class ... which everything and it's dog seems to derive off if you want it be any form of a dynamic object.

 

This meant that I had to work out how an aircraft actually flew worked. Obviously this would be incredibly boring so instead I worked out how an exciting arcade style flight model worked basing it on ideas and physics values that I mostly pulled out of my bum.

 

Actually that's not entirely true, I did detailed research for months previously, basing everything on real world values and compiled lengthy text files on how the whole thing would work; eg: hitpoints were based on empty aircraft weight divided by length per area element (wings, tail, etc); and thrust was based off maximum take-off weight divided by kilo-watts of power per engine (or something like that) with modifiers for total aircraft area versus air friction... eg: fat aircraft would lose speed faster than smaller ones, etc, etc.

Similarly gun damage was based off calibre, calibre per 10mm modifier, number of guns, and some other stuff, with more guns increasing both damage and overheat timing.

The real problem was creating an Ai system to fly the aircraft against the player. Not only did they not have to crash into anything --- which ended up being much harder than you'd think --- they also needed to act as if they were a real pilot, so I ended up making 12 (?) evasive maneuvers that they could pull when neccessary. Stalling ended up being a huge issue depending on speed and attitude of the aircraft and tightness of a turn. I ended up creating a class of super-Ai pilots who I never stood a chance against, and had to dial the whole OP back, discovering that the margin between genius Ai flyer and absolute idiot was very small.

Damageable elements reduced performance of the aircraft's speed, turning, rudder, etc, and the whole thing had to modeled in 3D and textures to give the player good visual feedback as to what is happening to their aircraft.

PBR was a thing ... a thing which I did not know what ORM stood for and so ended up putting the rough and occlusion maps into the wrong channels because that is how they are set out in the materials editor.

My grasp of networking certainly improved, I had managed to create a co-op mode - based on seperate instances on the same box because I only have the one machine - and I soon realized that I wasn't supposed to just fill the whole of pack/unpack with all of the read/write data because much of that was on the server anyway. Trailing definately need to be on both or either Ai/players would trail and the others wouldn't depending on how they were handling their aircraft. Huge amounts of pack/unpack were commented out and the weird jittering my AI aircraft had been doing in debug mode stopped.

I created a crude lobby system were the level loaded without the mission starting except a briefing to give the player the details of the mission via a seperate file and to choose their aircraft and paint schemes. The player would then wait in this psuedo-lobby for other clients to connect or start a co-op multiplayer mission alone and newly connected players could drop in and out. Debriefing required a bit more voodoo as shifting large amounts of player-mission contextual descriptors - that's text - required some fancy thinking to avoid abusing huge numbers of server to client calls - something that I had been very keen on working smoothly and with the least possible amount of bandwidth.

 Creating missions was a series of timed and triggered events based on what the player and Ai pilots were doing. This required lots of scripting due to the lack of physical triggers which a player could walk into on a more normal character based game of the types I had previously demoed or developed.

And so that is kinda of it. After a year of development I have a fully functioning dogfighting game that plays halfway between an arcade shooter and simulator with a mission complete with playable roster of aircraft, briefing, debriefing and drop in and drop out online co-op mode. So naturally it's time to relegate this to the backburner and go return to my previous game project (and really tidy up it's networking) as I want something that can at least be released for Early Access early(ish) next year and Freespace-style dogfighter will require the most work whilst topdown catgirl mayhem is around halfway complete but needs "fluff" adding for the player's ease of life for the first few levels.