Some basic conceptualization work and a small milestone accomplished.

The conceptualization includes the growing suspicion that vertex and pixel shaders are the new black. Yeah I know, welcome to the year 2000 — but prior to now my main development efforts were DX7-based, so it’s taken a little bashing to get the concept through my skull to make it feel natural; in DX7, you did all this crap on the CPU, so shunting off all the special wonky stuff to the GPU kinda feels like cheating. I get it now, though, and now that I’ve got a firmer grip I feel a bit more as though the omissions in XNA make more sense than not. Why include a static boned animation routine when you can roll your own via a vertex shader and tinker with it?

(The answer is ‘because it would be nice to support older machines,’ but I see the point, and I’ll roll with it.)

The small milestone is that I’ve got the console working. Not a huge deal, but it’s a requirement in any real engine work — I’ve worked on too many projects without consoles to think they’re anything but mandatory. Well, now I have mine. I even tossed in some commands to make the truly oldschool out there feel at home, but I’ll share later, when it does more than just exit the program and wing back wisecracks.

That’s all. Hopefully CG and the Baron have something more interesting to wing online in the next few hours, but hey, progress is progress.

Professional game design generally includes a metric crap-ton of documentation. Thankfully, we’re not doing this on a professional basis, so we’re probably going to skip about half of that metric crap-ton, but with that said it’s still very useful to have some of this documentation. Even with a small team, ideas can get confused, concepts miscommunicated, and the goals of the project, unless stated explicitly, can go all over the map. This is a spare-time project as it is, so I want to maximize the time we’ve got, and that requires clear communication.

So, thus and therefore, I’ve generated the first of those aforementioned documents: the Concept Document. It’s based on Tim Ryan’s excellent Gamasutra articles, and it’s a good start, I think.

And it’s right here if you really want to see it: LJ Concept Document, Rev 1

Be warned: it’s in OpenOffice format. I like OpenOffice. You should, also, like OpenOffice. So no, I’m not going to turn it into a word doc.

As mentioned in my first post, I have been researching the actual history behind the Liber Juratus (or the Sworne Book Of Horonius) for the better part of a month. And I continue to find the source text amazingly rich: the only surviving manuscript of the Liber Sacer, is housed in the Sloane Collection in the British National Library, and is believed to be at one time a prized possession of legendary occultist - mathematician John Dee. A heinous archive of enchantments and nigromany, it is said that the book along with all its copies should be buried with their owners and those who transcribe it without permission are damnable souls. Now that’s a serious copyright penalty. The book has also been connected to a number of other infamous medieval writings, such as the Greater Key of Solomon and the despised Grimoire of Pope Horonius.

So, while the Necronomicon sounds jazzy…we’re talking about the original here.

And speaking of the old “Liber Mortuorum”, I have begun the enjoyable task of re-reading a few volumes of H.P Lovecraft. A favorite of morduun, it has been noted that much of what takes place within our story follows a Lovecraft-ian - curiosity killed the cat sensibility. A deliberate choice to push sanity and good sense aside for the sake of exploration, with the end result being a rotting of the soul and a fate far worse than death. As we have discussed, the game design itself is reliant upon this fact; our ‘hero’, the Lord Inquisitor, must make his choice: to use the corruption of magic to save his skin, but damn his soul, or take the higher road and punish the flesh.

I took these notions into consideration as I began rewriting the “Trithemius - Discovery of the Liber Juratus” flashback this weekend. Hopefully, I will be able to share a bit of script with you soon!

- Baron Wasteland

Under normal circumstances I’d never bother to toss this up as an upload, but since I’m forcing ConceptGuy and Baron Wasteland (hur, hur) to vomit up all their in-progress work onto the site, this is the least I can do.

It’s real simple. WASD to move, mouse to look. The model spins and moves on its own, and it has an insane amount of fog applied to it because I was tinkering with per-entity fog settings. The underlying code is far sexier than this particular result, but hey, it works and I’m happy. Miller time, etc.

Get it here: Engine Alpha 1, Heavy Fog.

Hey all,

I’ve offically been researching our torrid little tale for the better part of a month now; however, being this is my first post I’d rather save the juicy bits for later in the week and simply wish everyone a Happy Hallows Eve!

It’s not impressive-looking progress, but it’s important progress.  I’ve managed to properly wrap my head around the XNA 3D rendering model, and now have a working model viewer with WASD movement controls, multiple moving onscreen models, and mouselook.  Better, it’s not just a model viewer, it’s using a prototype of the engine — so it’s using wrapped methods.  Camera control and entity control now works using heavily simplified control schemes (Camera.move(x, y, z) and Entity.turn(yaw, pitch, roll) instead of multiple calls to translation, rotation, scaling and transformation matrices).  I’m using a mailbox / messaging system for event management, so I’ve already got keybindings in the game.  And what’s best, in my opinion, is it’s 100% my code.  I borrowed only from the Microsoft examples in learning the methodologies, and they’re all now heavily modified to accommodate my object-oriented methods.

I was bitching to high hell because I was forced to learn matrix methods for 3D, I admit now.  I admit it because, now that I get it, I love the control I get with writing my own camera and entity code.  Consider me converted.

Will be posting a demo of the modelviewer soon — just want to get the okay from ConceptGuy that I can use his model in a public distro.  If not… you get a toilet.

It’s “silly” and not “insanity” because there’s a code workaround for it, but for an otherwise full-featured and complete toolset authored by an experienced, knowledgeable team, it’s a glaring, almost astounding, omission.

There’s no native support for boned animations in XNA.

XNA’s touted as the Indie developer’s next best friend. Rapid game development, developed and supported by Microsoft, using a free version of their highly productive and accessible development environment, complete with everything you need to make AMAZING GAMES for WINDOWS and XBOX 360.

But there’s no native support for boned animations, something I’ve had since at least 2000 or so in just about every other rapid game development package on the market no matter how amazing or crap it is. This makes so little sense to me that I didn’t even consider it might be a possibility when I was building my 3D entity-level object code.

Now, this isn’t crazy, only silly, because, as I mentioned, code that manages boned animations is available on the XNA Creators’ Club.    It’s not part of the MSDN Help files, since it’s not native, but it’s available… with limitations.  Because I only have access to a default pass of vertex shaders, I have to artificially limit the number of bones per model to 59 (coincidentally, the number of bones the shaders can process per model in one pass).  Generally this isn’t horrible, but it does limit us significantly, and it’s mystifying why this sort of limitation should be present in something that’s otherwise a very well-considered and full-featured development framework.

So yes, that means engine development continues to move forward after a horrifying moment where I thought I was doing all this work for absolutely nothing.  Just wanted to share my amazement.

A pirate you say?

This concept may or may not make it into the game..it was just an idea I had while thinking about the story and time period.. we’re probably going to have to represent naval personnel in the game… and naval types of the time fell into the category of military..merchant traders…or pirates.

I decided to riff on the pirate idea (which is way more interesting) and this is a very quick sketch based on that riff…

My own creation almost kicked my ass.

As promised, with court lines, scores, AI, beeps and boops. Also has delta timing and a few other things you’ll never notice because it’s stuff I did to learn with, but I’m pleased with the result. Oh, and don’t let the slow start fool you — try to get to 11 before you dismiss it as too easy. Those last few points are killer.

(obGeek: collision detection in XNA uses 3D methods, even if you think you’re using 2D assets, which is actually kind of cool; bounding box collisions in 2D are pretty fast and pretty effective. So far I’m very pleased with XNA; this isn’t the kind of test that’ll tell me whether the engine can accomplish what I need it to, but now I know for a fact that it’ll accommodate the way I think, and that’s a huge plus.)

If you’re up for a spot of Pong yourself, download the Windows version here: ooPng 1.0