These past three weeks have been pretty good. I took two weeks holiday as I mentioned in my previous update and this week I have been working on the save functionality of the game. Currently you can move and place buildings, however without being able to save your layouts the whole thing is totally pointless, right?

Well hopefully not for long, I have been working hard on getting save functionality working. Current I’m still having some problems, but progress is being made.

Zeljko Lazic who is a music producer submitted a music soundtrack for the game. He has included two different versions for us to use. Please comment on what you think.

Happy new year! No rest for me this holiday as I have been busy cracking out code like there is no tomorrow. This week I fixed a long standing bug with buildings not appearing correctly upon starting up the game as well as some other small fixes. I am currently concentrating on saving the buildings to file server side.

I have also been planning the release roadmap for the project which you can see below or if you have Google wave can view here. Unfortunately Google wave is not viewable to those without an invite. I am not sure why this is because I have found it very productive for quickly brain dumping things that needs collaboration so it is a shame I can not let you view it. If anyone wants an invitation I can give you one, if you post on the forum and get involved with the project.

I decided that for our first release it should just be something simple that lets people join a game, add, edit, delete buildings and then save them. You will notice that in the 0.1 release flight is not there. I think if I added flight code to the 0.1 release it would delay things a lot which is why I put it in 0.2. I’m hoping that by the time I start working on 0.2 we will have a few artists perfecting the building models and world map. Even if we don’t it still allows people to start making their own levels.

I put down “advanced building piece loading” for the 0.1 release because there needs to be more information associated with a building piece such as does this piece have an airlock, if so where is the airlock suppose to be, which materials (textures) can be used with this piece and so on. It might seem like a waste of time to some people however it think it’s better we get this done right before proceeding on to more difficult tasks and making a mess of the whole thing.

You will also notice I put down “shader editor” however I think it’s the wrong word to use. I want to put in a tool which allows you to reload the materials and play with the shader variables. I think this would make things easier for artists and myself when trying to get things to look right. The only other alternative is to continuously exit and start the game to view your changes, not cool. I do not think it will be that difficult to implement so I decided to put it in sooner rather then later.

This week saw an explosion of work from multiple contributors.

Kilagain submitted some rough concept art for “moth” designs. A moth is the name of the flying vehicles in the game. I also started a discussion about the new kind of moths I’d personally like to see in our remake.

I finally managed to debug the code I had been working on for two weeks and merged it into trunk. I also spent a lot of time internally restructuring the server code. It is easier to add functionality to the server now, however I’m still not satisfied with the design.

Along with my code updates there has been an effort to get a windows build working again. I also spent some time rewriting some of the cmake scripts so that they would generate a correct visual studio project file as well as updating the windows documentation. It’s still an on going task however as there is quite a variation between the library versions.