ahhh good times

I was browsing a folder on my hard-drive, checking out some of those old things i have been working on over the years, and i thought to my self... what the hell, why not make a blog post about it here :)
after all, some of those projects was very cool :)



oooh Tetravus! my old friend.... one of the very first game concept i ever invented (with a friend named Toivo), The original game was created when we was about 13 or 14 years old(thats 16-17 years ago!), in QBasic!
I belive the graphics was 256colors and hand "pixeld"/hard-coded in Data blocks ... I still cant believe we draw graphics like that, and did it GOOD!, compared to how we work today... it seems insane!

Anyway... the picture above was an attempt at an remake 5 years ago, it was never as fun as the original QBasic version and i am yet to make a worthy one...





For many years, this was considered my main flag-ship project! it was written in Delphi and had some great potential to be huge!
BloodHound was an Torrent search engine client with a DirectConnect interface, powerful multi-threading and an open Pascal-script language to support several big torrent sites like Piratebay and mininova among others.

You could make multiple searches at the same time, in different windows and even have the .Torrent file downloaded and started automatically with your favorite torrent client.
The only reason this project failed was the fact that i constantly had to update the scripts used to parse other homepages(piratebay for example), and some of those sites constantly changed the page code, witch of course broke my software... the constant maintenance was a pain in the ....
so i had to give it up after years of working on different solutions and versions, many of my friends had completely moved over to use BloodHound for all torrent searches, and I'm sure that if i had released it to the public, and solved the issues, it would have been BIG.
also, naming the software bloodhound, same name used by a famous virus, might not be my best move ever ;)




Aahhh... An old favorite game of mine, no other than Boulder Dash on C64, one of my very first games i ever played, No wonder i had to make a remake of it... unfortunately i cant release the game due to copyright issues :(
still, it was a fun project, and it even had a nice and simple little level editor.





Ooooh another old time favorite game of mine, Hexxagon! back in the days of 386 and 486! i remember thinking "when i get a computer, all i need is Worms1 and Hexxagon!" ... hehe those where simpler times ;)
of course, I got the urge to make a hexxagon game my self, and it was designed in XNA so that i could release it for ZuneHD, witch i was planning to buy at the time... things didn't turn out as expected and i got an IPod instead, and the Hexxagon zune project got terminated, still... those bricks had an awesome hand pixel'd rotation animation.



Another project i worked on for a while was my CrayonPhysics remake(even tho it was more of a painting software with physics), and it did look very sweet... however, some very annoying bugs was plaguing the project from the start, and in the end forced me to terminate it.


There are plenty of other projects i have been working on over the years, but these are a few that comes to mind :)

First tec-demo video!

Finally! i have decided that i might as well show you all a little tec-demo of the engine in action.

there is a few bugs visible, the normals(lighting) is weird in some places, and a few times you can clearly see blocky areas in the walls, I'm working on this atm.

And since the texture used all over the map is the same one, it is hard to see what is what sometimes...

so the overall graphics will improve greatly when these few issues are solved.

And As long as you guys understand it is still very Work-in-progress, here goes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE0QDfIZ8a0

hope you like it :)

Light at the end of my tunnel?

There is light at the end of the tunnel!

HA! funny thing... turns out i totally forget about the texture coordinates, when i moved from 24 vertices to 8 on my cubes, and that ment that it was impossible to add textures on the mud... DOH!

My first thought ofcourse was: "all this ... just to hit another dead end!?!? ..."

In pure desperation i swapped to the old rendering function (that uses 4x the graphics) and... to my big Surprise... it runs just as fast as the previous one, in fact... I'm not sure if its my mind playing tricks or not, but i can swear the lowest fps value is higher now... rendering 4x the graphics.

So i thought "well, then it must be because i use smaller holes now" and decided to try big holes again... and once again, i find my self at a steady 60+fps.

uhm... well thats just fine by me.

I can only conclude that the number of vertices was never the problem, but i must have screwed up somewhere in the Octree, or otherwise done some slow funky math.

so... no pointy triangles, and good frame rate... i guess this will be a game after all ;-)

PS: I'm not sure the lighting is 100% correct on the picture above, but that is tomorrows problem.

[edit]
It appears i had a temporary brain-fart, 4x8 don't make 24.
oh well, that is what you get for doing all-nighters.

ooooh... look at those pretty colors 8-)

Don't worry, nobody spiked your drink... this is only a test.

Since the beginning of time(for this project anyway), a constant struggle have been the "pointy triangles" issue, as most of you have seen in earlier pictures and blog posts.

Another issue have been bad performance...

well... I'm here to say both has been solved(most of it anyway), and the picture above demonstrates it more clearly than it would with normal textures.

so don't be alerted about the horrible colors, it is merely a test to more clearly show what is going on.
I am not going power-flower on this game ;)


One sacrifice i was forced to make was to make explosions a bit smaller, this means a bit more squarish holes, but as i see it:
I rather have a decent looking playable game, than a very nice looking unplayable game.

As you can see, the frame rate now shows a nice 61fps, and this seem to be the case for most normal scenarios, except when the terrain is to badly mangled.
of course, I'm sure there are still a few optimizations to do :)

From the way things are currently going, i think a tec-demo video should be able to be done very soon... of course, I have said this before to :P

G¤d d@mn!t!

You know... sometimes it can be very depressing being a programmer, and game development is no exception.

After reading up on the XBox sales market, what games sells and what don't... i had high hopes that my game would do well, and it filled me with so much energy, hope and excitement.
It started this whole damn project up again.

So i spent several days working on my engine, and ended up doing some major surgery on most things in it.
and after a "few sacrifices"... i managed to remove 3/4 of all "unnecessary" vertices rendered(as in 3/4 of all graphics)

And when i say "few sacrifices" and "unnecessary"... that means this most likely will come back and bite me in the ass later... but hey! its not a perfect world.

Now... This is about the time when i start doing some research on the -known performance issues on XBox hardware- ... just to find out that i can expect my game to run 1/3 of the speed it currently runs on a PC.
well thats just lovely... *sarkasm*

so i started reading up on alternative solutions, but the only one(VertexBuffers) apparently are insanely complex and messy to work with on an XBox360.

so that pretty much shatters my dream... we are back to poor performance on the targeted platform, GAAAAHH! *tear his hair*

Well, i guess this mean that an PC version is not totally impossible, it all depends on how fast it will run on a XBox, and this i wont know until i buy an xbox.
(would it not be fun if the game don't work on the xbox, the xbox i only bought to develop my game?)

but i guess i should look at it from the bright side, it will now run smooth like a baby's ass ... on my PC :P

Back on Liero3D

It seems this project just don't want to die, and that is a good thing i guess ;)

I finally got some inspiration back for the Liero3d project.
(This means that the 'planet to surface' engine is discontinued)

but a few things has changed in the process, and in the end, i think some of you Liero fans might be unhappy with what i have decided to do with it. *sorry*

First of all, after doing some research on the Xbox360 Community games and Arcade Live games, i decided that this would be a very nice source of income for me, something i badly need in my current very troubled economy.

So the new plan is to make the project a xbox360 game primarily, and not a PC game as i originally planned.

Now, since this mean making money on the project, i might be forced to change the Theme from classic Liero to a more "soldiers bashing soldiers" style.
This is to avoid any issues with the Aurthur of Liero, and the 'worms blasting worms' from Team17.

I personally doubt that ether party would care much, Joosa Riekkinen never seem to taken his Liero project to seriously and from what i hear, he seem to look back on it as a 'bad memory'.

Whiter this is true or not, i think that the line might be drawn when i start making money on my remake, and hence, think it might be a good idea to simply swap the "skin" on the models.

And as far as Teem17 goes, i seriously doubt that you can copyright the 'Worm' Creature and prohibit it from all future games.
The other 'blast the other player' content is hardly unique in todays games ether.

however, better safe than sorry!

Everything else in the game will still be exactly like the original Liero feeling.
i don't know if i dear to use all the classical Liero names on the weapons, but this is a later problem, and i doubt the game would suffer much if i swapped the name on 'banana bomb' to some other fruit ;)

One of the new big challenges is the xbox hardware, and the big changes this means for my engine.

I also have NO fracking idea how to get my hands on a XBox360 console to test it on, after all... i barely have enough food on the table as it is.

but that is also tomorrows problem.
At least now i feel inspired to put my teeth into it again! :)