SSSSOOOO! It's been quite a long time since I last talked about this, so here we are with a couple of updates about the project. I got some screenshots to deliver, a couple of new ideas for game mechanics and more stuff about the story to talk about. Let's get to it! [comment]
Alright, so. The engine is in a mostly stable condition now. The collision system is still… well, old and thus kinda broken at times. It'll stay that way until CAPE[sup]*[/sup] is finished. I mean, it DOES work, but it has some weird bugs in a few rare occasions. So yes, CAPE isn't finished yet and there's still a lot to do there, but I'm very excited about getting it done, so I'm quite sure it'll come along nicely. As for the main engine itself, there's been some rather large changes in the way things are done. I wrote my own texture loader that also supports deferred loading and is quite flexible. It could be a bit faster though, but I won't look for loading time optimization right now. Another change is that I switched to optimized list classes and re-structured the world format a bit. All in all it should render faster. One thing that I haven't done yet, but will change today is something @Malakin suggested to me, which should speed up drawing time some more if it works as intended. I also introduced a resizeable frame mode, using a standard AWT frame as OGL container. This introduces a problem with my GUI system, in that it is currently of fixed form and doesn't adjust well to a changing frame size. I don't quite know how to solve that problem efficiently yet, so if you have suggestions, please tell me, I'd love to hear about it!
One of the major problems I've had recently was the texture wrapping problem that OpenGL has. Some textures randomly warp from one edge to the other, which produces ugly lines on transparent textures. The solution to that would be to generate the textures with clamping on. However, that doesn't quite work as of now since the system doesn't know if the loaded texture is going to be used in a tiling mode or not. I'll have to see about fixing that somehow. My first approach with rendering everything to an FBO doesn't seem to work, but it would also be a bad idea since it could produce huge textures. I think I'll go for an automatic texture tiling detection instead, which requires a couple of changes in the way textures are loaded and displayed though, but I'm sure I can figure something sweet out.
As for the graphics and textures themselves, I re-worked most of them and got a nicer set done now. There's still a huge lot to be done though and I'll really have to spend more time creating environment textures. The problem is that it's a very tedious thing to do, especially since I don't have much experience, which means I have to remake a texture quite a couple of times until I get it somewhat decent. Ah well, I'll get better with time, I just wish I were more patient about it.
I'm thinking of deepening the story and making it a lot darker. One of the main ideas is that the towns I planned can be turned into ghost towns if all the people have been killed. The other main idea behind it is that all the monsters you fight are actually humans that were infected with a disease spread by the king. I might even introduce a kind of inventory system so you can buy items and trade things and so on. As for how the "infection" is handled. Well, the ink infects a certain area. If you defeat enough enemies in the area, it becomes temporarily healed. Meaning it'll turn back to the ink state after some time, until you defeat the end boss of the world section. I'm also planning on putting in a swamp area that is permanently cursed. It would be really interesting to see how the different abilities of the characters come in handy there and how i could add separate ways to travel around it. So yeah. Exciting stuff going on!
New game mechanics include movable blocks, horizontal platforms that can push the player around and switches. I'll have to expand on those and find a good solution to incorporating them into the editor. Probably through my event system. Yeah that'll work. Hooray for coming up with solutions while writing about the problems!
And now, have a couple of screenshots: [img]http://shinmera.tymoon.eu/public/transcend%20fight.png[/img]http://shinmera.tymoon.eu/public/transcend%20desert.png[/img]http://shinmera.tymoon.eu/public/transcend%20form.png[/img]http://shinmera.tymoon.eu/public/transcend%20editor.png[/img]
A rather large thing to announce is this: I'm looking for other people to join me on Transcend! Yeah, that's right, I'm finally trying to open myself more to the public. If you're interested in playtesting or even contributing some code or artwork to the project yourself, contact me and we'll figure something out.
So yes, I think that's all for now. I'd love to hear some feedback or thoughts on this from you, so please, write a comment.
[sup]*[/sup] In case I forgot to mention what CAPE is sometime, let me explain again: CAPE stands for Collision And Physics Engine and is an extension to the Transcend engine. It features time-perfect collision detection and realistic rigid body reaction. Or well, that's what it WILL feature once it's done. Right now I've got collision detection between circles and lines and the main collision detection loop done. Yay, lots of work
Written by shinmera