Champagne Time!

Well You Gone And Did It!

Another little milestone on our rocky road to rapture. The daily views on my blog just topped 1000, the highest ever since I started at the beginning of 2013 and a worthy of a celebration drink.  I had planned to visit Wigan Friday afternoon and watch a good old game of rugby, but a huge email inbox, a pending blog and plenty of work ahead forced poor Lee back into his seat.

The project is starting to glow with the promise of what can be achieved, and it's an exciting time for me at the moment. I just can't put it down!!

Progress News

I was all set to continue my experiments into large scale dust bowls and sand storms, complete with sounds and subtle transitioning effects when Rick took one look at the early prototype from last night and suggested no further work be done on it. I personally saw great potential in the idea, but Rick wants his finished product a.s.a.p, so we move on.

I thus moved onto integrating the latest in-game engine stuff back into the main IDE editor, effectively allowing levels to be edited and then instantly previewed as though it was the final game.  To this end, I created a new and final prototype to hold the engine in-game pipeline to replace the current weapon prototype which was assuming this role, and also started the actual final map editor module which would replace the grid edit proto which I use to quickly compile and test editor features. These two steps easily consumed six hours of work, but the code is well ordered, neat and ready for expansion.

A Hiccup

Although I can now paint the terrain, jump into a gloriously shaded world and run around it, I cannot leave and come back to the same view. Returning to the editor from the game just shows a black screen and has something to do with my post process reversal code not working. Nor are the weapons added to this new system yet. It all works nice if I switch off post processing in test game, but this is just a stop gap.  The solution for a new day is to step through the rendering behavior when back in the editor mode and find out specifically which part of the post process system is irrecoverable. Once that is done, I can quickly add weapons and be back to where we should be.

Beyond that, finishing off terrain saving, allowing levels to be created and stored with everything we have so far, should be a good result for Sunday. With that, we can start making screen shots and videos as the new terrain content comes in.

Signing Off

It's been a series of very long days, and I am hopeful to get a few more hours in the garden to take a break from this monitor this weekend. I have a meeting on Wednesday to show the current visual progress of the product, and despite my prediction that the main game engine and IDE would not be integrated by then, it looks like it just might be.

A Note From My Ego

Here is a photo of me presenting a 7 minute ramble to the highly select fellows of the Intel Black Belt dinner in San Francisco, representing Wales by entirely failing to affect a Welsh accent.  Can you tell how many glasses of beer I drank in the 24 hours preceding this shot?