Codrer Industries

I'm now chasing cubes in dog fight. Everything runs fine... my own fun is rising!

This tricky thing here is to target particles. We can't rely only on visuals as light particles don't have this fog layer helping to "feel" its distance. Hard to explain. There's nothing to estimate size and distance of a point light in the sky.

The HUD indication helps a little. But the issue remains. Will sleep on it.

• camera effects
• complete HUD

Time to pause the code to do some graphical work, like this basic unit to fly with. Still a little gross... will refine while texturizing it.

That's a quite common design in order to let players start with a very basic unit. Of course you’ll get more styled ships further in the game.

By the way I just realized something cool (could has been pretty obvious though, but no): working on a MMO shoot’em’up… I won’t need to add bot units, but only to set up and connect the wires...

Done. I don't like that much working on models. That's even quite painful actually. Fortunately HK will only need a couple of units so I won't be stuck on 3DS for long.

For now everything is low poly as hell. I find it easier to upgrade and enhance objets later than having to destroy 1000s of faces afterwards.

I must say that there’s a gap between MAX’s rendered mesh and real time. I really really enjoy Ogre engine, but I also miss ready-to-use shaders. When I see whay Unity users get in just one click, I feel a little… depressed.

Now I'm working on PSSM shadows shader. I added also a simple specular map emulation. It still needs fine tuning but that’s better than nothing.

Game first, design later!

I can’t bear UWV unwrapping.

So... introducing my very first "face textured" mesh! I had never achieved something nearly close to that level of detail with a single 1024² texture with this method. Now I know for sure that's possible.

Ok. Get a land, a ship and a dock station. Back to code now?

Some intensive work here. Since this dock station is not here for the sole purpose of design, I'm working on my "Services" class: interaction with objects, docking ships, ammo reloading and all that kind of stuff to bring a more coherent world...

Oh and by the way, personal war against memory leak & loading time is declared. Some issues there.

• Mesh loading OK
• Far clip plane optimisation