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.

Ludum Daring

I've decided to try a strange concept for this Ludum Dare, not sure if it will work or not, I'll try to do some posts tomorrow with progress(or lack of) updates.

A New Zero First Person Shooting

Here's a quick video I made of the FPS in A New Zero while waiting for Ludum Dare to start.  The movement is getting better, and the cool thing about having a physically modeled humanoid is the ragdolls are pretty much a freebie.  Next I need to add different types of weapons, once I have the system in place it should be easy to try out a lot of variations.  I'm thinking the weapons will be similar to X-COM, where a player could have a rocket launcher or auto-cannon but move slower and not have as much ammo as a player with a sub-machine gun.

SSAO Coding Battle!!!

Yesterday I was talking with David from Wolfire about Screen Space Ambient Occlusion, a lighting technique that adds some depth to the scene.  Since we had talked about it a few times before we decided stop talking about it and have a competition to see who could implement it in their game first.  About a half-hour later, just after I had decided which album to play while I work on it David had it working in Overgrowth.  Still I pressed on and eventually got it working in A New Zero.

I really hacked it in so there's a lot of artifacts, but what I ended up with was casting 16 spherical rays from each pixel, using the depth of the ray compared to the depth of the pixel it's at, and using a soft comparison to tell how much occlusion there is.  It has a lot of inaccurate highlights around edges but I kind of like it, I'll probably keep messing around with it until I have a style that works.  It's definitely a good technique for ANZ since it can be used in dynamic scenes and adds a lot of depth to the not very textured world of A New Zero.

Check out David's video at: http://blog.wolfire.com/2011/12/Overgrowth-a161-video-changelog

A New Zero update

I've been working on the landscape generation, I've got some real mountains in now, I also have been working on rivers.  For the rivers I'm trying to figure out how players will build bridges across them, obviously doing it brick by brick would take way too long.  I have the engine working now where players can build structures anywhere on the landscape, which will probably be about 4km by 4km.  I'll be switching it over to a voxel landscape instead of height mapped soon also, so the world can have cliffs or tunnels.  I'm still working on the human movement, I'm going to have to fake parts of it, it's just a matter of how much, but I'm glad I didn't go with a generic floating turret.  I'm not sure when the next version will be up, I was thinking of trying to get something done for the IGF but that's another lost cause I'm afraid.  Once I have something fun to play, whether it's FPS combat, tanks or planes, I'll put up a new version.