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.