Building Placement is working

I've finally worked out most of the problems with the dragging and dropping of buildings in the editor and it now works! Not only that but the buildings are added to everyone who is in the game. Very exciting to see after all this effort.

I even made a video of two clients being connected to one server to show this off.

threads are hard work

I just pushed up revision 77 which includes my first implementation of threads on the server code. A thread allows for the execution of multiple pieces of code "at the same time".

I'm currently using it only to manage the clients on the server and there are still bugs in it. I have been reluctant to upload anything until now because it has taken me quite some time to get the code back into a state where the game loads again. Unfortunately there is nothing to show off this time as it is all server side.

My plans are to get this working correctly before I move on to object placement/level editing. The idea is that only the admin can have access to such features, which is why I am working of the server first.

Loading screen redux

Only one day after posting my poorly done concept artwork for the loading screen and I received an amazing response back from the community.

Below I have posted my original drawing (left) and next to it is Tranberry's effort (right).











As you can see it is really looking good and I am currently making an effort to get it into the game.

This however is taking time because I have removed CEGUI in favour of MyGUI, a different GUI library. I am also in the middle of finishing my university course so there won't be many code updates until next month after my final year project deadline. I will be active in the forums though so please come and join in the fun.

Loading screens and models

There has been some discussion over the loading screens for the game. This is what we have so far.

There are plenty of things still needed for example we could use a game logo on here for a start, but it's coming along nicely with lots of people taking part in the discussion so please login to the forums and join in.

Dave "c-thru" has been busy working on 3D models for the tunnels. As usual his work is top quality.

Network programming

I just started working on the networking in the game. It meant moving a lot of code around but I'm pretty happy with the results which is it very uninspiring connection screen (hint hint UI artists) which after connecting to a server will load up the main game.

We're using Enet for the networking library which can be pretty tough to get your head around the code, however it's worth it.

Apart from initially connecting to the server the code does not do much else at the moment. However it is exciting to see how the code forms more and more of a game whenever I get the time to work on it.

I already committed this version to bzr so you can check it out and see. You'll need to do "./hardwar --help" to get a full list of commands.

Latest Artwork

David has done some amazing modelling on the hardwar forums that I wanted to post here.

The idea with regards to buildings in the game is that they're going to be made out of reusable parts which can be stacked on top of each other to form a variety of different buildings.

Forum

I've been working on hardwar but rarely update this blog.

Instead please go to the free gamer forums to stay updated.