Today I mostly worked in balancing the weapons… Not much to say about it, I basically just spawn an enemy with different weapons and different levels, and see how does it feel… Then I adjust it and try it again, over and over again… The game so far was “mathematically balanced”, which means I had […]
Carried on the work from yesterday, fine tuning the shooting mechanisms… It’s now working properly, with two easily adjusted parameters, and I even have a new parameter for the accuracy of the weapon (a machine gun shouldn’t hit as often as a pistol). The high-level enemies may still have too much accuracy, but on the […]
Working on a new AI shooting system… The current system uses a sine-wave altered by the danger level of the enemy and some parameters (frequency and threshold)… This is hard to control, and the fact that enemies shoot or not against you is dependent on where in the curve you’re at the moment… So, I […]
Well, this was unexpected and shows the highly mutable nature of game development… When I started of on this asteroid polishing, I wanted to add alien moss… After a lot of experiments, tweaks, texturing, shader work, etc, I got to something that’s way simpler, but looks better: cracks on the ground! It’s better than the […]
This took a bit longer than expected… Had to implement a decent Perlin noise implementation, and had to do a million tweaks… First, I had to go back on the drawing board (thought I had an error), and build a decal that shows the ambient occlusion (which looks fairly cool!): Then I had to create […]
I’m trying to add a glowy alien moss to the asteroids, based on the decal code, but using a kind of spherical projection instead of the planar one… The first run, I tried using a cube map… If I’d thought about this for a bit, instead of going straight for implementation, I’d reached the conclusion […]
Today I worked with the savegames, adding descriptions and fixing bugs introduced with the jump to multithreading… Most of the work was mainly finding out what the problem were! Lately I feel I’ve been working mostly with bug fixing, which is boring, so I think my next step is to add something new/fun… I got […]
Tadam! Found the issue with the frame rate… The game is running at a good framerate, but due to some old code, the frame rate got locked to 50 FPS, which in a normal monitor that refreshes at 60 Hz causes some jumps in the image… “So, Covenant, you just had to change a variable […]
I wasn’t happy with the performance of the game in certain points, with drops to 30 or 40 FPS, as measured by Fraps… So, I decided to dust off my profiling tools and try to figure out where were the bottlenecks, but when I was running the initial benchmarks I got a very strange issue: […]
The more we approach the end of the development cycle, the more bugs we fine… or more precisely, the less we can ignore them and hope they don’t happen again… I’m having a nasty bug that I have no idea what causes it and I can’t replicate it consistently… When I run the game in […]