Game Development Blog

I just released another tech demo for DayOfWar.
This demo just demonstrates some of the key game play mechanics for DayfWar.
Namely the spherical terrain system. This version has been vastly improved over the previous one. The lighting has been reworked as well.
The shadowing of the entire sphere is more realistic.



There is also and addition of a new detail system. This new system allows for placement of location appropriate detail texture.





This detail system will pave the way for a relief mapping system.

While this demo includes complete mutiplayer functionality the "Query master" option will not return any games because the master server has not been completed. The "Query lan" option will work and return any hosted games on the local network and you should be able to join them but there is no real point in doing this in this demo because this demo has no support for teams or goals or points at this time.

To check out this demo simply download it from here then unzip the demo to any folder and locate DayOfWar.exe and run it.

In the demo there are 3 types of user controllable objects.
The player.
A dune buggy vehicle.
And a hovering transport vehicle.

You will start out as a player in a spacesuit.
This player can be controlled via the keyboard and mouse or a gamepad like a xbox 360 controller.
The player can take control of the other 2 objects by simply bumping into it you become the pilot or driver. To exit the vehicle just press the jump button.
For a full list of keyboard/controller assignments press "CTL + O" to bring up the options dialog.

I just spent the last week migrating the game from a newer version of the game engine that is being used only to find out that the latest version has some problem with the engine.

First some back ground.
I have been using Garage Games Torque Engine Advance game engine.
It has an interesting terrain system based on Thatcher Ulrich's Chunked LOD terrain system.

Garage Games refers to this system as Atlas.

It has been apart of the engine from almost the beginning.
All the way to version 1.7.1 the terrain system worked well but when release 1.8.0 came out it introduce some rendering problems on the terrain. Also Garage Games decide to discontinue development on the Chunked LOD terrain system in favor of there new system that was developed along side of the Chunked LOD terrain. The new system , they call MegaTerrain , uses a lot of the concepts that the Atlas system paved the way for.
Unfortunately the MegaTerrain system is incompatible with this project.
I had been working on version 1.7.1 as the basis for this game. When 1.8.2 was released about a week ago I check it out to see if the rendering problems had been addressed. On my initial run down it appeared it did fix the rendering issue. I then spent the last week porting my code from 1.7.1 to 1.8.2.
Then yesterday it become clear to me that the rendering was still messed up.









Don't get me wrong here. Garage Games decided to not to continue with atlas.
Like I said before , there current terrain system can not produce the massive terrains I need for this game.
Since there is no feature in 1.8.2 that I absolutely need then I will resume coding for 1.7.1.

This is a recent test of the scout ship. I also took a ride on some vehicles for the heck of it. Manage to get around the whole moon/asteroid a couple of times. The terrain system is coming along well I think. There is still some terrain "popping" happening every now and then but it is a simple issue to fix. The terrains texture just need to be synced a little better.

Well we will start out by posting a video I did about 1.5 years ago.

Some of the key things this video shows is scale.
The "moon" this video is done on really shows off the amount of play area you have to move around in.

Ignore the player avatar and the "buggy" that are in the video, they were used just to give a since of scale. They are a stock component of the 3D engine used for DayOfWar and will not appear in the final product.



I only intended to make a quick video of a simple test flight and simply lost track of time and the fact I was recording a video and it went for 9 + minutes of me just flying around.