After procrastinating nearly the whole of last week, I found my inspiration once more. It was under a pile of old dusty papers on the top shelf.

I did quite a lot of work on Exile this past two days. Here's a progress log, with screenshots:

First thing you will notice - I added correctly billboarded sprites to my game (None of that player_direction - 90 nonsense. This uses the view matrix).

You may also see one of the enemies I adapted from Arbiter. Seriously, I started off with the sprite from the platformer, then magically turned it into a six-direction sprite. Yeah, I don't use Left and Right, 'cause I'm too lazy. :3

I changed the way lighting is modified, so it can be done using tile-layers in Tile Studio instead of in-game (Which was causing trouble for me). I also rewrote the basic sector trigger system, so it's still there, but works differently.

Something you can't see is my long-needed math library. They say that every 3D programmer should write a personal vector/matrix library at some time. All I can say is that I wish I'd done it sooner. Because now I was able to implement a culling algorithm with greater ease than ever (Nothing behind the view is drawn, which makes sense, since you can't see it anyway).

Oh. And stained glass windows depicting what appears to be a twisted version of either the Windows flag or the AVG flag. Either way, there is no doubt that the player roams an evil place indeed…

Microsoft headquarters

Reducing wear on the F9 key

One of the biggest annoyances all my C++ games had in common was the need to re-compile the game each time I wanted to change/add resources.

Turns out that with a bit of simple code, I can make things a lot easier.

Take a look at this screenshot:

The file at the top left is the config.cfg file. As noted, changing the resolution is not a good idea (You can, but the HUD, HUD-weapons, text, etc are not scaled correctly. Therefore, don't do it, play in fullscreen instead).

The AssetList line is of interest. For me, it means I can switch between my debug texture-set and the 'final' one at any time. That's what the other two files happen to be: Lists of resources to load.

Eventually the maps for the game, music, sounds and perhaps some simplistic scripts will be added, as I see the need for them.

Speaking of music, I've already started a soundtrack for this game. It's NSF, of course, but I might convert it to the YM chips later on, if I have enough time. So naturally, I also have an NSF player built into the game already. Heh. Picking up speed again.

That research I mentioned

Terrible use of the word. I suppose I intended 'study', but that's what happens with my blogs. I write them at <???>AM, and you get a blog with a few WTF moments here and there. Such is the likeness between a canned blog and canned meat.

Anyway, my studies right now are taking me through some of that math I keep shying away from. I don't know why. I'm supposed to be better at math than anything else, if my old test grades are worth shit.

Of course, I'm specifically studying mathematics that apply to the field I'm interested in, which just so happens to be computer science; and within that field I'm focusing on the math pertaining to graphics. So lots of trigonometry (My favorite), linear algebra, geometry, and a tiny bit of Calculus.

By the way, if you thought that math on a computer was straightforward, think again. The computer can only represent a specific range of R, and only to a certain precision. Great fun. Fortunately, with graphics programming, one deals with pixels in the end, that can be represented using integral numbers. Which is why my gross misapproximation of PI worked in my game, albeit causing some overflow errors with the billboard sprites direction-finding code.

Anyway, I rate this blog M… for Medium-Length. Popcorn costs $120 an ounce. Enjoy.

Seriously, fuck the price of popcorn at the cinema. Sneak your own in. You'll be able to take your friends, afford your medical aid, and buy a new car.