I aint dead...however my laptop is
... I shut it down after a marathon coding session (my engine is beginning to rock btw) ...next morning it just doesn't start up. I don't want to void my warranty so I ring the support peeps and they get me to pull out my memory, lan card and hdd but to no avail. So by process of elimination it's the motherboard that kicked the bucket. And to make it worse it died on Friday so I've been sitting around twiddling my thumbs using my desktop (this machine) ... which is only good for games really because I don't have my compiler and dozens of libraries and such on it..so I've had to play lots of games.. I think I'm getting RSI as well, my wrist hurts from playing UT2k4 and CS all weekend.
Tomorrow I find out when the technician comes to replace the mobo. Hopefully he comes Monday.
But it breaking isn't all that bad, gives me free time to learn some more stuff like pathfinding which is something that is still a little confusing to me (well seeing as I haven't read anything on it I guess it should be) ..
The last thing I got to add was my own model format, I wrote a covertor for it and all.. Took me a day to design the whole format, I'm going to make it a public domain format seeing as it's pretty good, much like a mixture of ms3d, md3 and my own stuff so it is pretty well compressed and there isn't any waste in it (ala md2/md3 strings (why the heck would you use strings? stupid IMO)).
I have registered a domain now and I'll put up a website so you can download and view screenies from the engine and the game that should follow..
Oh oh and I got a friend to write up concepts for different races and such. He even came up with this awesome idea. I'm not sure if I've seen it in another RTS before, but essentially it's like most other RTS games where you get to upgrade into like a different age or whatever at your town centre but when you get to a certain age or whatever you get to choose your next one out of 3 possible ones...Each one will give you different unique stuff or advantages etc... like one would be defensive primarily and the other offensive.
This would add for some really interesting strategy because you would wait to see what the other person might do so you know what to counter with but if you wait to long you could easily be crushed by superior units of that age or what not.
Sounds pretty cool to me at least... And that resource idea was a cool one as well, I really like that one a lot.. This game could be the best for strategy out of all the RTS games out there! And well it's graphics won't be that bad either, might be on par with Blizzard's even... However the only thing that I will be totally screwed with is sound. But dependings on how much of it I can get done and tested I might be able to get someone to back me on this and I can get some professionals.. I am thinking now that I will not go opensource, well I will, but only like how ID and Valve have done by releasing source long after the game has really died down and is no longer selling.
And something else I would really like to add but I think it might be beyond me at the moment (perhaps I can get some more people working on the project when it really starts to pick up the pace) is unit emotion.. EA games have it in their new RTS game 'The Battle for Middle Eath'. Obviously it's based on LOTR, and well they claim that it's revolutionary but really the only real revolutionary thing in it IMO is the unit emotion. The graphics look slightly beefed up but I think most of that is due to the more realistic textures and models used rather than any hardware or software rendering advances. Mutton dressed as lambm, as they say.
I'm still hoping for some more new ideas though because I want to come out and really make a name for myself with this. At first it was only for fun but now I want to make some money. The graphics as they go are alright so far. They aren't Doom 3 quality, nor HL2 quality for that matter but they're better than SC and almost as good as WC3. I can make them better of course, things like FSAA and some better filtering routines. But apart from that the main graphics quality lies with the artist (also me) and for that I need lots of time... I need to sort of put it on hold though for the moment and only doing work on it where I really can afford to because the clock is ticking and I have to smash these trial exams if I have any hope of getting early entry and/or fixing up my current rankings.
Once my laptop is fixed I'll put up the website and you can see for yourself my under estimated skills, I didn't think it would be anywhere as good as it is really.. Because I've never written a game before (only tinkered a tiny bit with OpenGL and drew a few colored triangles etc..) .. I guess it is really as good as it is because for the most part OpenGL doesn't really come into it. Only a single time in each cycle does it have work to do. The beef of the program is the different maths routines (btw I learnt 4 unit maths to do some of this stuff, considering I'm failing 2 units I guess that shows my real ability, if only Iwasn't lazy) and the masses of classes which I've written..and of course the low level assembler routines for lightning memory manipulation operations.. I'm so modest aren't I? lol..
The next thing I have to do is implement a scene graph. I was thinking I'll probably base it loosely around the
Open Scene Graph project, loosely because I like to code things myself and I feel like I'm cheating if I use any software based code that I didn't write myself, hardware is fine though because that require years of skill to write something decent and I don't have that much experience in hardware drivers...barely any to be precise, the best I've done was write a driver for my mouse.
Wow, I really am bored...look how much I've written! 8:00pm, I'm so bored. May as well go and do my chem assignment draft, it's due Tuesday.
