Hardwar

Happy new year!

Here is a quick update on the latest developments.

I’ve been very busy these last few months and now I have finally finished the much needed rewrite of the core game engine. It took a while but I’m happy with the final structure as it has made it much easier to add extra things to the game in a way that doesn’t generate spaghetti code.

As per discussion in the forum I’ve decided to move the editing out of the game. Ogitor, a level editor will be used to modify everything in the game. This should speed up development a bit and move things along a little faster as it means no one has to wait for the game to test their assets.

I also spent a few hours on the main menu scene as a way to test some of the new game engine code I had been writing. I still need to port over some of the other code such as the console and level loading but so far things are going pretty well.

I moved the source code from launchpad’s bazaar over to GitHub as I’m finding it more convenient to use. After using Bazaar for two years I’m starting to see some issues with it that I think Git has it beat.

Branching is much better in Git then it is in Bazaar. In Bazaar you have to make a new folder for every branch whereas git keeps it all self contained and lets you switch between branches in the same working folder. When I first started using Bazaar I hated this concept but after using Git for a month I’m really starting to like it a lot. It keeps everything much neater without having lots of copies all over the place.

The total disk usage is also much smaller with Git (35 MB) then it is with Bazaar (104+MB). The Launchpad website itself is almost always down for stability fixes. These two things are pretty important to me since I live in Thailand the internet isn’t that fast so smaller size wins. Github was a pretty big reason in itself. This website is much better catered to developing code then launchpad is.

So from now on expect all the code updates to be from GitHub rather then Launchpad.

What I’m currently working on is moving over some of the older code that I haven’t ported to the new system such as the debug console. I’m also going to work on things such as a place to store configuration data as well as the main menu when I get the latest designs for it.

Once these small tasks are done I plan to re-work the level loading code to load up the Ogitor exports and get working on the flying physics.

A good productive couple of weeks in the forums meant that a lot of planning, artwork and other details got discussed. Everyone got into an interesting discussion about what the main story should involve on the forums.

nirokugraphic wrote:

To me the very core of this game is around ‘greed’, unlike the original where it was merely a tagline which didn’t relate in any real way to the story . “Future is greedy, mission: ESCAPE!” . To me this would have more to do with joining one faction and outright annihilating the others, which might actually be a good way of taking it rather than the objective being to escape Titan.

Andrew replied:

If we’re going with multiple endings then I think we should encourage different view points of the game as well.

For example the very core of greed could be the theme of the criminal arc where everyone is out to do you over. Where as other story arcs could be about a different side of the game altogether. I really think that the view you get of the different elements should change depending upon what role you play in the game.

A quick example. You play as a criminal you see the world as only greed. Everyone wants your stuff or is trying to kill you for the bounty. Every interaction with the police is viewed as corrupt. However, when you play the police role you see a completely different side, you go on missions with other police units that aren’t corrupt but struggle to to keep justice in an underfunded and understaffed force that has to keep the peace of a huge violent area.

Infrahate on the forums began work on the music score for the game and has taken over creative control of music..

Infrahate wrote:

One thing I would like to point out listening to a lot of these tracks from the original; I had forgotten completely about the softer, less aggressive tracks and a a definite theme that comes to mind is ‘driving’ . Driving (or flying in this case) around the moon dealing with the day to day . I think this is an important vibe to maintain and so we don’t have quite as much ‘in your face’ music, which would probably more suited for dynamic mission related stuff ?

Something else I liked too was that the music sounded like it was from the future, especially from my own experience of listening to it for the first time having never really been that introduced to Warp and electronic music . Trying to maintain that never before heard music from the future feel could be tough to achieve but I think would really benefit .