Category: General

Got my new version of Hash.
Got started making the bombbot according to the updated concept.
Much happier with this than I was with the go-cart looking piece of shit.

Can’t wait to add feet and textures to this guy.
Not sure if I’m gonna keep this development blog going or migrate things to swiftthought after all.. (since I am paying for it, might as well use it.)
prototype dev page here: https://drakkheim.com/development/bombBots/bombbot-beta-spin.htm

Well will the impending arrival of the new version of Animation Master I spent some time playina around with some different concept art and currently I’m leaning away from the current tracked model to somthing more along the lines of windup toy meets battletech.

So this is what I came up with.

I kinda like it. The shield bot will be more along the same lines but a lot more robust and the gun bot will, have guns…

These guys are going to require significantly more animation but I think it will really liven up the gameboard, which was looking kinda sterile before.

And just for posterity’s sake here is the old concept for the tracked model.

Ok so not much time to work on the project today. Had a nice relaxing evening catching up on some tv though.. Some days it’s just nice to be able to not have to think after 6 pm.

Got about an hour to poke at things though and started to get some things to make sense. I still wish there was a more concise 1000 foot overview of how TGB actually worked. The whole scenegraph/viewport/gui/canvas thing is still a bit vauge for me..

But I did get the First level loading properly and pushed a custom GUI onto it and manged to get the 2 pcs inthe house to actually connect and say hello to each other.

Yeah sounds totally trivial any way I can think of it too.

Still it’s a bit of a personal Eureka! moment.

On a totally unrelated note, teh SciFi channel’s Eureka series is shaping up fairly well, and I watched an anime (50 eps) called Eureka Seven, I might have to pick that up if it comes to the states.

Second life, however, is closing it’s forums. I’m not sure how that’s going to affect the long term development of the world but it does feel like the developer is attempting to perform PR triage after a couple months of bad patches and half way solutions after opening up the world to everyone without any registration or verification. Not to mention some BIG and logtime supporters / developers in world have either left or gotten banned. The only thing that’s keeping the kiddie hordes away is that it looks like a 1990’s video game reject. So BombBots may or may not survive in SL as anything other than a prototype. I’ve just paid another month’s Tier and I’ll give it that long before I start to thing about just closing up shop there. But I am not planning on sinking any more development resources into it until things stablize.

Found some resources on how to make a perl based MasterServer for TGB so that should not be an issue anymore. Match making shoudl be fairly easy now.

Past my bedtime now. Gotta Crash.

Worked through some basic networking tutorials this weekend.

Gonna have to spend some time thinking about how to make the game behave according to a proper client – server configuration.. Right now I’m looking toward making the server just be a command relay from client0 to the other clients, thus making client0 the actual control center of the game.

But client0 and the server should in theory always be on the same PC so it should not create that much overhead. The hardest part will be coming up with a useful way to send the data i need to the clients. I think im going to have to insert another reference method for the bots. currently each client will just have a simObject containing a list of object refernces.. if I give each object a more generic method of being retrieved such as (player 3 bot 4) that should be easy to pass along..

Still more ponderings to get done before attacking it with an axe.

Here’s a chain reaction of bomb bots exploding in a nice massive fireball! I love the particle editor in TGB!

And here’s the ruined remaining line of craters from another failed assault.

Pretty things make me sleep well at night. More goodies soon!

I plan on putting a development section up on https://drakkheim.com for concept art etc etc

Well I checked in on Second Life. It’s still there.. no progress to report for now on it.. the more time I spend away from it the more I realize how shitty LSL is. So For now it’s just gonna be on hold.

I did finally register https://drakkheim.com which is where things will be available from.

Made some really nice progress tonight. Ive got bots being able to detect collisions and damage each other. Pretty much now I just need multiple bots, proper networking, actually an instantiated game. Ok so there’s still massive amounts of work to do. But it’s way easier to work on than in SL. That might have something to do with the fact that I’ve already written everything once before.. Still Im learning the torque script on the fly so that should make up for it.

Man I cant wait for getting the networking up and running…. I may crack that nut tomorrow. 🙂

p.s. O I almost forgot.. I got a nice universal fade out function up and running.. That made implementing craters a snap. And they gradually fade away so the board doesn’t get covered in em. Puurty.

Got the pipeline to bring rendered stills into TGB all smoothed out. The most involved part was rendering a shadow pass and managing to get the resultant image into photshop as a psudo transparent layer so the final PNG includes translucent shadows for each frame of animation. I did wind up equilizing the levels of the individual frames, since the skylight shadows turned everything light grey resulting in a box around the final image. Yuck..

Other than that I’ve got bots being programmed, running their program and eventually dying at the end of their program… (not sure what kind of effect to indicate this with.. maybe sparks and a fade out…)

GarageGames release a 1.1.1 point release so I’ll be seeing how things work in the new update tonight.

Did a bit of reading about GUI controls as well over the last few days.. I may have to investigate replacing my imageSprite buttons with GUI based buttons instead.

After some difficulties here we go.

Got some better ones brewing after I make some minor corections to the lighting.

Hrm.. might look into importing them as actual 3d objects.. which could be interesting. Especially now that obsidiangames.com has a solid AM to Torque pipline exporter…

Well I am really liking t2d err.. TGB so far. With just a couple hundred lines of code I now have the bot programming and selection and buttons and a visual preview up and running.

Also not being limited by SL’s already stressed servers makes a big difference.

And being able to preload all the graphics and not have to rely on other people’s internet connections to stream data..

Granted I’ve not dug into the TGB networking yet so the potential latency pitfalls still loom.

I’ve got some goodies rendering and they should be done lunch timeish tomorrow afternoon so I’ll get them up shortly.

Well with the difficulty tracking down the ‘stillborn bot’ bug that still plagues me and the downright tediousness that fixing the console security tweak entails, I’ve started building bombBots in what I hope will become it’s final form off the Grid.

I started porting the game to TGB (torque game builder). So far I’ve got the console for programming the bot up and running (keyboard and mouse) The buttons still need a ‘click’ sound but that should not be that hard. A nice new feature I was able to add was a mini display of the entire program for the bot so you no longer have to remember how many times you hit forward etc etc..

Next up is a minimap where you can see a proxy bot move around as you enter the program.

I may take a break and go back to the hack at the SL version of the game this weekend. Ideally I’d like to be able to use the TGB & SL versions to cross promote each other eventually.

But the biggest problem with SL is turning out to be latency and extremely slow script performance.. And Junghee is usually a fairly light loaded server (6-14k ips) so maybe I’m just trying to do something that’s beyond the capabilities of of the Grid.

Oh and since I’ve never messed with the TGB networking it should get interesting… If not educational.. Well I’ve never messed with TGB before so it’s already educational. heh.