Day 255 : Second production model

I'm starting the get the hang of Blender. I'm spat out my second production model, another fighter. With each new model I try a different methods of modeling, UV unwrapping and painting. So it's still not final. I went back to the code now.

Day 240 : First production model

At long last the very first production model is nearly complete. Considering it's my very first 3D model designed from scratch for use in a real-time environment, it's not so bad. Texturing is still very preliminary. I'll have to add some weathering. There's an off-chance that the model will be scrapped down the road as I get better and better with doing these 3D models. That sucks but it's part of the process. Anyway, enjoy the screenshot.

Day 235 : The Pipeline

Development is slowing crawling forward. Tons of real-life event have interfered, but the major reason for the slowdown is that my next step is the definition of the art pipeline, and I would have preferred to have found my lead 3D artist it was defined.

You see working with placeholder assets can only last you so long. I need to start integrating real assets. Naturally those need to be produced. To produce them, the pipeline needs to be defined. And so, here I am.

The biggest problem with game development now is that there is a de-facto standard in the 3D suite people use. That standard is 3D Studio Max.

Now 3D Studio Max isn't a bad program, although it carries a lot of legacy, giving it's interface a really dated, clumsy feel. Tried it. Hated it. Tried it some more. Now I like it. The problem with 3DS isn't the program itself, it's the price tag. 3500 US$ may be chump change if you're Electronic Arts, but for a guy doing this as a hobby project it's a fortune.

My 3D Suite of choice has always been Martin Hash's Animation Master. But there is no plugin for Ogre3D and I'm not moving into the plugin business. So that's out.

Maya's star appears to be on the rise. But it's still 2000$. Next.

Milkshape is ok. But really primitive. If I want fully rendered images for promos and such, I'm out of luck.

XSI is a tough cookie to judge. The plugin was created and is maintained by the Ogre God himself Sinbad. It's a 500$ program, which is reasonable. It's star also appears to be on the rise, after a few rocky years. But I tried the trial, and I hated it. Clumsy, weird interface. In fact, it's interface is pretty much as weird and clumsy as...

Blender. It seems the people behind blender had a theory : every user interface ever made sucked, let's make something completely alien that will revolutionize the concept of user interfaces. Not so, people. Leagues behind even 3D Studio Max and light years behind of Martin Hash's Animation Master, Blender's interface is a thing of nightmares. Every behaviour you expect, Blender will do something else. But the thing with Blender, it does everything from real-time to pre-rendered (it can render kickass images). Its Ogre exporter may not be as well supported as the Milkshape, XSI or 3DS one but it's still well-enough supported. But mostly, blender is free. That point and that point alone pulls it above XSI, and thus on top of the list.

I will spend the next weeks learning the intricacies of Blender. As horrible as the interface might be, it's all a matter of getting used to it. And get used to it I will. Expect a couple of production models to show up sometimes in October.

Day 212: Boring

Stopping such a big hobby project straight in it's track for several weeks is like slamming into a wall during a videogame car race. Sure you just pop back exactly where you left the road. But you're in first gear and it's gonna take a while to get back into full speed. I now consider myself in third gear, was in fifth when I crashed. It's especially tough when the tasks at hand are kind of boring. Stats system, scoring system, health system, shield, ammo, the works. It wouldn't be so boring if I actually had real assets to work with. But doing integration work with my crappy coder-art text boxes is pain, knowing it will all get replaced in the end anyway.

Anyway, half of that is behind. When the player gets hit, he loses shield, then health. When an enemy dies, score is added. When an entire wave of bad guy is killed, the special "wave" bonus is computed. It's pretty boring, but most of the programming challenges outside of final artwork integration are over. I just squash a few bugs here and there.

I'll need real assets. Soon.

Day 194 : Fantasia is over. Back to the game.

These last three weeks were the longest break I took from working on this project. 21 whole days. I did little bits of work here and there. Fixed a couple of bugs (disappearing clouds, and some adjustments to the drone architecture). Nothing major. But now it begins again.

A.D. Hoang Khan delivered his first sketch today. It kicks ass. I'll be working on HUD/overlay design for a bit. So I can move on to calculating damages, scores, special weapons ammo etc. This will wrap up the core programming nicely. After that I'll need to crank out final 3D assets. May the great Matriarch have mercy upon me.

Day 170 : No rest for the idiot

Not content with the progress I had made. I decided to work until the very last day of my vacation. I accomplished a lot, but it's starting to cost. Tomorrow is my last day of vacation and this time I'm not touching it. For real.

I've playing my first run through a multi-segmented level. Including the 2D cinematic system that I just developed and put in there. So, if I stretch the concept of "one complete playable level" as much as I can, then I can say mission accomplished.

It's not true though. Pretty much the only concept left to put in is the concept of dying. Right now you get hit but it doesn't do squat. But that'll wait.

Tomorrow is Silent Hill 4 marathon. This week the Fantasia Festival begins, which means I will have a lot less time to work on the game, for the next three weeks. Break will be a good thing I'm sure. Well, it's 2 am and I just wrapped up my work for this vacation. Now I can sleep.

Day 165 : I won't be meeting the deadline

As my vacations dwindle away it seems obvious the milestone I had set for myself, to have a complete 1 level working prototype by the end of the month, will not be met. To establish a quick post-mortem. Vacations always bring up unexpected events. My parents visited, take away 2 days. I cleaned up my apartment (a bit) take away 2 other days. Those are outside factors.

The single inside factor was the implementation of resource management inside the game. Up to now I had simply avoided resource management. I used the good old-fashioned "load when needed" that's built into Ogre. It meant tons of pauses with every first appearance of a bad guy. Not big deal I thought. Implementing resource management will be a breeze. It wasn't. I have to say, as much as I love Ogre, that it's resource manager is somewhat of an Achilles heel. Mainly because it has a tendency to crash inside without throwing an exception. If I could make two recommendations to the people out these using Ogre, it would be these:

- Start early. Don't do like me and wait until you have many groups containing many resources and world geometries all auto-loading and go "let's do a nice and proper progress bar in front of all of that". It's easier to implement if you have few resources and groups, and build from there.

- Ogre.log is your best friend. I had forgotten all about this one. I had so little problems with Ogre that I never really got to use it that much recently. When Ogre crashed repeatedly inside the resource manager, I didn't know where to look for answers. The debugger wasn't of much help, and (as it is often the case) when I tried smaller levels with fewer resources the crash never happened. Well, when I finally remembered that good ole file, I could pinpoint the crash times a lot quicker.

I'd like to point out that all the crashes within Ogre were created by my misuse of the resource manager (declaring resources that didn't have a path leading to it, and such and such) but it's true that I faced a lot of exceptionless crashes (mainly the dreaded "iterator cannot be dereferenced") that led to a lot of frustration.

I like to think that this is all behind me, but as with everything else. Time will tell. Tomorrow I will test everything out. Friday, Saturday and Sunday I plan on actually be on vacation from all of that. Maybe do a little Silent Hill 4 marathon. I still have reached two important milestones during these vacations : integration of the different level segments and integration of proper resource management. Not too bad.

Day 160: 2006 is the year of the exploding hard drive

It's pretty tough to keep coding and producing and such, without having hard drives burst into flames on your every other month. But this year beats all the odds. One of my 120gb drive has exploded, this one pretty much literally. It started to smell like burning plastic and then, obviously, died. It's tough to calculate the odds of having so many hard drive crashes in such a small time window. I feel like I'm spending more time backing up data than anything else. Nothing on that drive was related to the project, it was the receptacle for all my bittorrent and shareaza activity. So it's no huge loss. Still, it'll take weeks to recover, and there will always be a haunting feeling that there was something critical on there that I am forgetting about.

But this blog is about the project. Combination of the level segments is complete. It took several days but now the game can move seamlessly from segment to segment. That was the last huge step towards completing the prototype. Here's a small list of things to do before the prototype is complete :

- The 2D cinematic scripting language/segments.
- The loading screens/progress bar (which may be integrated with the 2D cinematic. Load while they read).
- Everything GUI (like the player's life left).
- Handling the life and death of the player.
- Scoring

The rest is mopping up the code, making sure everything is clean and tidy. Almost half of my vacation time is gone and I can't say I'm very confident in achieving my completed 1 level prototype before the end. If I can get rid of outside distractions, it is still feasible.

Day 149 : Art Director announced

Emotional blackmail, threats of physical violence and the application of those threats finally convinced Hoang Khanh Le of joining the team as Art Director and Lead 2D artist. I couldn't be happier. The man's a genius. You throw him a piece of paper and a pencil and give him 3 minutes and he'll throw something awesome back at you.

I've spend the last few weeks on forums trying to recruit people. I've also watched a lot (too much) of Battlestar Galactica. Those two things combined means I've begun to lost touch with the game's code. So today I'm getting back to it full force. There are a few nasty bugs to fix before my vacation starts next week. I want that vacation to be used to wrap up the prototype, so production can begin ASAP. Stay tuned!

Nobody would believe how messy my apartment is getting. Who's got time to clean?

Day 141 : Development website opens

I've finally gotten around to finishing up and opening http://archangelchapter.com. I've also publicized the game in several development-related websites such as ogre3d.org, garagegames.com, deviantart.com and a slew of others. That's taken a lot of my time that was unfortunately taken away from actual game development. It doesn't matter how much progress you're making working alone on your prototype, if you don't have a professional-looking window to the world, nobody will take you seriously. It's the old chicken vs. Egg story : You need a good artist to make kickass visuals for your game and site, but to attract them you need kickass visuals for your game and site. Well, as a programmer I didn't do too bad a job I think. Well, you tell me :-D

Day 129 : Boss Battle Complete

Yesterday (day 128) marked an important milestone in the development of the Archangel Chapter prototype. The very first boss battle is now completely playable. As a playtest I let two of my friends play it and I liked their reaction. I'm still on track to complete the prototype and begin production by the end of my summer vacations.

Day 126 : Boss battle

After having completed the second part of the level I'm now at the third and final phase : Boss battle. Alot of game coding got delayed because I started to work on a website to recruit people. I also had some hard drives give up on me. Not the most productive month but all in all some progress. It sucks to have to do everything but hopefully that will change! Once the boss battle is complete, I'll go on to the "integration" thing I spoke in the last entry.

Day 106 : Second playable level almost ready

I have been through several nasty bugs these last few weeks. A lot of memory mismanagement on my part (a lot of the code was prototypal, it had to be brought up to production code standard). I'm happy to say that I have something that I consider close to production code across the board. Meaning my classes are clean, the original Ogre application I based my game on is now almost completely gone and everything is done in my code where it should.

I have designed a second level, which is actually the second part of the same level I had done before. This new segment features a new, different gameplay mode from the first segment. A third segment, the boss segment, will feature the third and final gameplay mode.

One huge thing that is up and coming is the seamless integrations between level segments. I want to be able to design and test level segments independently but the final result has to look seamless. That should keep me busy for a while. But I believe this is the last "unknown" in this project. That is, the last difficult step to cross before production can begin. I still haven't created one single asset for the game, so really I can't provide screenshots or anything. I can say that I'm up to 12000 lines of original code so far.

It'll be tough to recruit people to help out. It's the old chicken and egg story. I need an artist to make content to produce screenshots, and I need screenshots to attract contributors (including artists). Oh well, I'll cross that bridge when I reach it.

Christian out.

Day 92 : Slow on updates, not on progress

Just a quick note. Easter hasn't been as filled with progress as I had hoped. Thursday and Friday I was sick. Although it helped my relationship with the bathroom, it didn't help the project. Found an interesting bug today in my XML parser. Actually, I discovered something that made me think : "Holy crap that NEVER should've worked". And yet I had made rather good playable demo with it. Strange how sometimes stuff just "happens to work". Anyway it's fixed now.

I'm now working on part II of the playable level and I'm having a hard time making the tanks follow the ground. All these talks about normals and maths are giving me headaches so I'm punching out. The result I have so far is kind of satisfactory. But I'll tweak it some more later.

Also making the turret on the tank follow the player was also hard as the tank's orientation changes based on the terrain. But I got that part right on the money in not too long a time. Hurray for me. Now I need the cannon on the turret to also follow the player. Shouldn't be too hard but I got sidetracked by the XML bug. Will work on it later.

So good progress, but updates are slow because it kind of detracts away from making progress in the game itself. But I'll keep posting. Once in a while.

Day 79 : Milestone achieved

Sunday evening I managed to create the first-ever demo creating what the game will kind-of feel. What does that mean? It means the level started with an in-game cinematic made with the actual mission editor and XML file. It featured camera/dynamic object movements, "talking-head" styled character intervention/briefing and smooth transition to the game. The game itself featured the 40-60 first seconds of the missions. With actual bad-guy behaviours and special effects. Full collision implementation and such. Your own characters couldn't die (and still can't) but it register hits with the intended special effects. Limited sound effects and music were also integrated.

All in all for the first time I had something to show that went beyond tech-demos.

I don't post as much here as I used to. Fact is, I have subversion now to keep track of what I'm doing, so this blog I'll use only to publish milestones and also make deadline predictions. BTW the milestone I talked about, I had predicted I would reach that after Easter. Score one for the optimists.

Day 75 : I've been subverted

Actually, subverted is not the right term, it's more like subversioned. That's right. The Archangel Game now officially uses Subversion and the Tortoise SVN front-end to handle source control. Again, amazed at how something free and open-source could kick so much bottoms. It took me a couple of hours to completely integrate the project in a repository and all. My old automated batch-file that created dated .RAR files everyday will no longer be necessary. A system like Tortoise SVN is much better, and also lays the foundation to what hopefully will be collaborative work. Good job Tortoise!

Day 74 : Level design has begun

Two days ago (Day 72) I begun level designing the prototype's level (which should be level 3 of the final product). The editor (as mentioned before) was a real mess. But most of it is fixed now and yesterday and today was very productive. I also did alot of code cleanup. There were still traces of the old Dark Game SDK code that I needed to clean up. The opening cinematic for level 3 is half-done. I expect to have a playable segment of level 3 at the end of the easter break. Let's see how that prediction holds up!

Day 70 : Editor woes

Day 69 was my longest day on record. I was on the keyboard at 5h30am and got off at midnight. With about 1h30 hour break total during the day (grocery shopping and a 40 minutes nap) that was one hell of a day.

Although yesterday was long and productive, only the first half was true for today. I did work about 7-8 hours, most of it was debugging the editor, which, contrary to what I thought, was (and still is) far far from being ready to roll. I was hoping to start level-designing today, but after witnessing the state of the editor, I'd say I still have a solid week ahead of me before I get anything tangible done. Today was a frustrating day, it seemed every line I change I'd make a stupid mistake that ended in a compilation error. Spirit isn't here, so I'll punch out early.

Day 69 : Nothing sexual about it

Started coding at 5h30am. Those days I feel I get more done by 9am than for the rest of the day. Today was no different. Still, here are a few things that got done in the past few days:

- Main character movement. That was done during the 10 days of 3D software package exploration. The main character (at least a pretty good-looking dummy of it) moves on screen with animation overloading and such. This is the first integration of a new and more powerfull feature since the migration from DGSDK.

- Talking heads. The Talking Heads are back on-line and in a much more production-ready status than they used to be in DGSDK. This is the kind of code that's kind of a chore to do. Always seem to take too long for what it does.

- Cloud layer generator. Pretty cool cloud effects that (for now) seem to go very easy on the processor. It's a weird kind of zone-thing that can move around and yet can't. Everything about it is illusion, but it works. This marks the realisation of what created the wall with DGSDK : cool transparencies. I can say that Ogre handles it all flawlessly. Go Ogre!

- Editor (again) It seems everytime I touch the game I break the editor. Which is kind of normal since the file format and such is still being finalized. I should be done re-doing the editor tonight and hopefully I'll start actual level design tomorrow.

Day 66 : Back to programming

I spend the last 10 days checking out 3D software packages, evaluating and spitting out a few test-models for the prototype. The main focus was 3D Studio Max. I can't very well hide my contempt for this package, but forced to recognized it is the standard in 3D gaming asset production, I had to give it my full attention. Still, at this point in time, most roads seem to lead to Blender, as it is free and thus would not put undue financial stress on what is basically a hobby project.

I'm taking a break from 3D software evaluation and going back to programming. There were a few minor untied knots in my porting. Namely the window/text system. I should be done with them by the weekend.