Testing, Testing, Testing. ugh!

After lots of testing with the canvas tag I've come to the conclusion that trying to use just the regular 2D canvas will just not work for me. I mean I can get a lot better speed than a lot of the other engines I've seen trying the same thing but still it isn't good enough, then again i am overly picky with things like this.

What I am working on now is trying to use the new WebGL structures to simulate a 2.5D environment. I do not yet have anything to show you, primarily been reading tutorials on shaders, OpenGL and such. From what few demo's I have managed to find concerning WebGL it is very very promising and many times faster than the regular 2D canvas.

Will post something on the site when i get a good test working.

Isometric Sprite Maker

Ok, since my "game engine" is primarily based on an isometric view I started trying to find a way to better automate my sprite creation. I've played with World Creator 1.5 before but sadly they have discontinued the free version and only have World Creator 2.5 available now for about $120.00 USD. I did order a copy of this because i know it works well and does walls along with the floors. Still waiting on my order to finish, been almost 24 hours now though.

I checked out some demo's for some other stuff as well. Primarily what I was looking for was something I could put a 3-D model into, move the model into place, then let it cycle through all the animations in the model creating a sprite set with either 4 or 8 views. The only demo I even remotely got working kept crashing due to "missing files" of some sort. Un-installed it. :/

So I i'm hoping it will be Unity3D to the rescue! Going to do some tests but pretty sure I will be able to create a web-based version where I can load up the model and have it do all the things I am looking for. Even better would be if I can also get it to automatically render the clothing and armor. If it works i'll announce the beta of it here along with a link.

Hopefully I will also be starting an alpha of my Nemesis Star game soon too. But as previously stated my time is limited so it may be a bit, sooner the better I think though. Feel free to leave me a message if you are interested in participating.

Many Many Voltrons Later

Got a few days of vacation left. I notice that I have really neglected in working on quite a few things due to life situations (again). Not going into any rants this time though. I have however decided that I'm tired of life getting in the way and will begin some real work on this despite other's, and I will just leave it at that. Got a few days of vacation left which I will be working on this, specifically I will be ironing out the kinks in the JavaScript Isometric Mapping. Been almost a year since I worked on it now so will have to relearn my own code but I do remember the last thing was that I did get it working but was having a problem with it dynamically changing/loading new sectors.

The first two days of my vacation where spent enjoying Fallout New Vegas, but i have already become quite bored with it seeing how i finished it on hard-core mode in two days. If i pay that much for a game it shouldn't be so easy. :/

The next few days I spent updating my new JavaScript Game Developers site that you can visit by clicking on the link there. The blog and the site there will be for more theory and code not specifically related to this engine.

That's it for now, got to get to work. Yes vacation for me means only having to work one job instead of two. But i'm the only one in the house willing to keep a job (much less two) so I gotta do what it takes to make sure the bills keep paid. Hopefully By this weekend I will iron out the bugs in that map and can show it off with a character walking around.

Our Trip to Mars ...

People who have gathered themselves into a nation NEED something to believe in so that they may remain a nation. I have wondered recently if Kennedy wasn't shot like he was, if we would have even went to the moon. Or would we have given up their too? Belief stirs hope and hope for something is the only thing that keeps a great many of us going. When our nation does something great that stirs joy in every one of that Nations citizens.

Do you really understand why the Hover Damn was built? Not only did it provide a water reservoir and electricity, it stirred hope in people. It let them dream again. With those new dreams they had the willpower to build all that we now have today. But dreams and hope are fickle and easily swept away under a tide of problems.

If our leaders fail at this, if they fail us yet again .... I cannot remember the last time something truly good came out of our nations capital. And corporations ... well that's the same thing isn't it? Peas in a pod so to speak? Can we really continue to trust people to adjust their bottom lines by the number who have died? Once a upon a time if one person died it was too many ... Now as long as the dollars paid out in the lawsuits are not as much as the cost of the recall then it's business as usual. I think I will keep placing my trust elsewhere thank you very much.

It doesn't seem to be ... 'if our leaders fail at this ...', they already have. They are bought and paid for corporate lackeys who see the tax dollars that we earn through our blood and sweat as a giant piggy bank. Our tax dollars .... the last time my parents needed a fireman, yes they showed up but then refused to put out the fire because they had not donated $50.00 into the fireman's fund. THAT is our tax dollars at work.

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

If our nation will not do it, and we cannot trust corporations to do it, then perhaps it is time to do it ourselves. We are the ones who build this nation, it is our money, our blood and sweat .. our tears. We are a nation of adventurer's and explorers. It is time to expand that spirit and venture out of our womb that we call Earth. If we do not then I fear the last of our dreams may very well be lost as we seem to enter this new age where we are no longer individuals or people, just a statistic. And after we are gone and hope no longer remains the title of our obituary shall read ...

327,000,000 Dreamers Lost

quick post

busy as hell doing everything in the world but what i want to be doing (working on this game engine). But i did some reading on IE 9 and wanted to say something about it ... not that i think Microsoft gives a crap what the developers really think or want ... If IE 9 does not have support for the canvas tag i will ban the IE browser from my sites. A simple check and redirect to a page telling them to download a real browser that does support the w3c standards, why they should do it and links to the most popular browsers will do nicely i believe. I do encourage everyone who is trying to set up canvas-specific sites to do the same. If they don't want to support us ... they can talk to 404.html. :-)

going to go beat up a pillow now. cheers!

Progress

Ok, court could not have went more wrong but i won't vent about that but that is over now. Now to just get the move and holiday stuff out of the way! I did work on it a bit as soon as i got home while the wife woke up though. Added the image preloader so that it works fine the first time instead of having to press the browser 'reload' button to get it to go. Next is to get it to scroll beyond the current 3x3 grid which will involve some duct tape, a crow bar and a 10 lb sledge hammer. :)

This first version will remain as a flat-isometric plane but i do have plans on adding a layered isometric plane later on. Performance is good in Firefox and Opera but in chrome it just flies! IE ... screw IE we don't care about them. :p perhaps in the next version they will add canvas support but i'm not getting my hopes up. not going to post a new link or even upload the newest version yet. I will do that when i get it to dynamically load a map from the server and it is scrolling beyond the current 3x3 grid. Maybe i'll even add in a fence or a cow or something else in addition to the trees and grassland.

Court Week has finally arrived!

ok, my wifes insurance claims are finally going to court. Doesn't seem like they are going to offer a real settlement at all so i guess we'll have to go the whole nine yards with this one. Bleh! like i have time for this! STILL in the middle of moving ... my wife, bless her heart, has us moving tiny bit by tiny bit. Move a few things then set them up in the new place, move a few more then set them up. Me i just want to get the crap over their and then set it up then. At this rate it seems like Christmas will be gone before we are finished.

Ok so it's like 5:36am and i have to jump in the shower in just a minute but I'll throw out my idea for the first game the canvas engine will be laid out on. I purchased a domain called moghack.com. No it has nothing to do at all with hacking mmo's. :p Instead it will be a multi-player version of nethack. Though I will be getting a lot of ideas from nethack it will not be a duplicate or a web-based clone of it. That's been done before for starters and the current base design of nethack does not lend itself to multi-player options. Their are two features that will be absolutely migrated over, random-dungeon generation and perma-death. I have several ideas laid out on paper for the multi-player aspects of it but they are still in their infancy so will not be releasing those ideas quite yet. More details to come in January i hope if everything goes as currently planned ... which it never does. :p

-Matthew H.

aka Wetlander