A New Zero video update 2/15/12

Here's a video showing some of the things I've worked on, now with robot voice.  I was talking with David from Wolfire about voice overs for videos, I wanted to do something similar to his but it takes a whole day for him to record those.  So I decided to try using robot voice.

Some of the things I need to finish before I release the next version are:
net code improvements
improved human movement
make AI not totally stupid
cities
more weapons
fix vehicles
improved graphics

further down the line:
voxel landscapes
structural physics
economy/trading
building interface

A New Zero video update

I added a simple AI to test out infantry combat.  There's only two weapons so far, a submachine gun and an auto-cannon.  At the end of the video you can see how to look around corners, you back up to a wall, hold down the right mouse button and then look right and down.  I've seen a lot of games with cover systems, but they're almost always just pressing a button to cover.  I think it's more interesting to actually control it yourself, it feels pretty natural once you get used to it.  You can also see what happens when I decide to leave cover and charge in.

I will be doing an open beta with infantry soon, there's a lot of things to fix/add to do an open test though, last week I found a bug where it runs at 2 seconds per frame on some PCs here.  I also need to optimize the net code, and improve the AI some.  And no, the ballmen aren't final, but it will be some sort of abstraction of a human.

Recommended: Escape Goat

Last week Ian from MagicalTimeBean came by to show his game Escape Goat, a really fun goat-based puzzle game.  If you have an Xbox you can buy it from the Xbox Live Indie Games channel, I know Microsoft likes to bury that behind 10 different interfaces but I think you can also buy it here.  It's only $3, or just 240 space bucks.  If you don't have an Xbox there will be a PC version out soon, hopefully on Steam.  I don't usually recommend games, but this is a really good one and I'd like to try and get the word out on it.

Hockey? Mac?

Hockey? for the Mac is now available, and there's a new Windows build with improved stick handling.

Download:

Mac: hockey055.dmg

Windows: hockey055.zip

Instructions:
Press 1 or 2 to join red or blue team
Press 0 during warmup or intermission to switch teams

Use WASD and the mouse
left mouse button looks at puck
right mouse button for mouse look, also lean for checking
space bar to jump
mouse wheel to tilt stick
enter to chat
Shift F5 to restart game


Also more fun with Google translations of Hockey? reviews:

Well, a very fun game from Cryptic Sea . Represents a such simulation hockey with a first-person.
Multiplayer - a generator of pain management for very peculiar. Play a lot of fun if you gather a small group in Skype - without communicating somehow not.

StopGame

Ludum Dare: Relativity

I actually finished something for Ludum Dare, it's entered in the game jam section (72 hours instead of 48, and relaxed rules).  It's a first-person puzzle game, you can slow down light to 2 m/s, the puzzles are very simple right now since I didn't have much time to work on them.  The engine is a 4D raycaster, the world is stored in a 4 dimensional voxel grid, as the ray moves though the spatial grid it also moves backward in the time dimension.  There's a lot of cool stuff that could be done with this with some more time.

Try it out here: relativity.zip

Ludum Dare video update

Here's a quick video of my Ludum Dare game so far, you can see some of the effects of having a very slow speed of light, the ball appears to warp when it's moving towards the camera.  I've been working on optimizing the raycasting, I changed the structure of the voxels to a nested grid, which at first seemed way slower but that was just a bug in calculating which part of spacetime to check.  I'm done for tonight so tomorrow will be a mad dash to try and finish it.

Ludum Dare Halftime

Ludum Dare is halfway through, I have the basic engine working, still need to figure out the gameplay.  The concept of the game is that the speed of light is really slow, like 1 m/s or so.  I'm going to try and figure out some puzzles based on that, I need to fix up the engine some more before I can though.  The engine is a raycasting voxel engine but it casts rays through 4 dimensions instead of 3.