Experiment

OpenGL

I've started doing stuff in 3D in OpenGL. So far I just have some white blocks on a green plane but it pleased me to know I can draw simple geometry in OpenGL fairly easily. I've also written a first person camera system that allows me to navigate the scene, although I've yet to implement collisions or any other game-useful features. They'll be coming soon though.

My girlfriend is awesome.

I made a little shmup prototype

Get it here: http://rapidshare.com/files/413588760/shmup.rar.html 

Arrow keys move the player square, hold A to fire. It's currently very basic and will be expanded upon greatly in the coming weeks.

Overhaul

I completely rewrote the main generation stuff in my map generator to use the diamond-square algorithm rather than more basic two colour fractal noise. It makes much more random, much nicer looking stuff but it's more difficult to control. Height values for each pixel also made adding rivers really easy. Everything could do with some tweaking though, as usual, and I'm not entirely satisfied with the rivers yet. Download it here: http://rapidshare.com/files/408250592/mapgenerator.zip.html

Less boring green!

Better...

But still not right.

Progress report

The program now distinguishes islands from each other, so that I can carry out map generation stuff for each island seperately. The beginnings of a better mountain generation system are in place, with peaks generated at any point further from the coast than the furthest point minus a fraction of the distance of the furthest point. It's nowhere near perfect and still needs a lot of work, but it's a lot better than the previous system.

Quick update

Scrapped the mountain generation stuff I did, working on new stuff now. What I currently have isn't perfect but is definitely better. Still only a work in progress though. *goes to bed*

Mountains?

I'm really not satisfied with them at all, but I guess it kinda works. Going to have to think about it some more, methinks.

Peaks...maybe.

Tweak...

Tweak tweak tweak

Map Generation Mk. 2

So I've started programming things again, this time using SFML instead of SDL. It does so much for me it kind of feels like cheating but meh, it's a nice environment to work in and helps me get stuff done quickly.

My original plan was to move on and make some prototype games in different genres, starting with a scrolling shooter and making full use of procedurally generated content. However, I've gotten distracted generating maps again and I've started playing with different techniques to those used in OpenQuest. The map generation stuff in OQ, while functional, was actually pretty poor.

I've started looking at some simple fractal height map stuff and come up with a program (based on this http://properundead.com/2009/03/cave-generator.html ) that creates some nice looking maps. Could do with a lot of tweaking and I'm wondering how the hell I'll get mountains, forest, rivers, etc on there.

Weekl- err, Biannual Update

So the whole weekly update thing didn't work out. This was because I was an idiot and didn't have anything new to report until two weeks before my final deadline. By that point updating my blog was the last thing on my mind. The game is now handed in and shall be forgotten and lost to the mists of time. It turned out okay but a lot of stuff had to be dropped due to time and a lot of what's in there is half-baked. There's little variety in all of the dynamic generation stuff and the AI was done really quickly. The player's stats do absolutely nothing (apart from health) and the special death stuff I wanted to do went out of the window. It would have been fairly easy to do, but would have taken a couple of days that I didn't have available to me.

My dissertation is now also finished and handed in so I'm very near the end of my course. Just the one essay left to do.

I'm not sure if this blog will see any more action after today. I might use it to chronicle the development processes of any future projects I undertake, but maybe not; no one reads this blog anyway. My current plans are to make another couple of 2D games in an attempt to learn some better coding practice and make clean, fast, efficient code rather than code that just works. The aim also is to make some entertaining games rather than games that just work, as OpenQuest (that crap name stuck in the end, I couldn't be arsed to think of anything better) turned out to be. And then maybe I'll move into 3D.