New toy (HD6850)
Posted on July 19, 2011
| Sascha
Back in the days before I got myself a PS3 I used to upgrade my PC every year. But since then (early 2009) I haven’t really bought any new PC games and thus never felt the need to upgrade my hardware. But well, my HD4850 (512 MB) started to show it’s age, especially when I wanted to play The Witcher 2 (I loved the first one, and the second one seems to be a great RPG too) and realized that even at lowered details and dialed back resolution (which isn’t really nice when you have a big display) the game was chugging along (20~25 fps with a lot of stuttering).
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The eternal circle of GUI design (and some new screenshots)
Posted on June 24, 2011
| Sascha
Odd title, but it perfectly describes my “workflow” when it comes down to the GUI of “Phase 2”. But since the user interface is such a crucial part for a complex strategy game I don’t feel bad when putting hours and hours (and days) into optimizing the interface of a single “window”, especially seing as how horribly one of my old drafts looked. And yes, I really like the current UI.
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Game design : Game modes
Posted on June 12, 2011
| Sascha
Something that has been lacking in “Phase 1” was replayabilty or better said the motivation to replay the game. This was mainly due to the fact that there was only on single game mode (now called “default”) to choose from in both singleplayer and hotseat games. So basically each game played the same except for maybe the player playind it different or the random factors that change some of the AI’s behaviour.
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Game design : Coastal building spots
Posted on May 27, 2011
| Sascha
Once again personal things kept me from posting news recently, so excuse the big gap between the last (game design related) posting and this one. Though I haven’t posted news recently I still worked on the game almost every day and a lot of things have been changed, added and done. So expect a higher posting frequency in the near future concerning my progress on “Phase 2”!
Something that has been implemented into the game from the very first prototype onwards was a property for all regions with a coast.
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"Phase 2" - Eyecandy
Posted on April 20, 2011
| Sascha
Don’t worry, I’ve been doing some gameplay related stuff too (including a revamp of global project functionality, coastal building spots for regions), but somehow I had the urge to spice up the game’s main view a bit and decided to implement a nice atmosphere for the globe. Something I wanted to do for a long time but somehow never got around. Another thing you can see in the video below is the new water shaders.
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Three new newton demos with source
Posted on April 7, 2011
| Sascha
While answering some questions concerning physics implementation to the man behind Tower22 (a survival-horror game under development with Delphi) I created a few new newton demos demonstrating several different things you might need in a game, demo 07 shows how to implement simple explosions (though for a real game you’d need to add some stuff like raycasting etc.), demo 08 shows how to use the contact process callback to play sounds depending on the impact of a collision (can be used to spawn particles, do damage calculations, etc.
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Newton 2.33 (beta) headers uploaded
Posted on April 4, 2011
| Sascha
I just updated the Delphi/Freepascal headers for the Newton Game Dynamics engine to the latest release, 2.33 (beta). Grab them here. The latest release of the compiled SDK for newton can be downloaded here.
The latest version of NGD added a new interesting feature, destruction. Julio (the man behind NGD) has uploaded a video of this new feature over here. As usual I don’t have that much time for coding, but I plan to upload a destruction demo (with soource) for Delphi/Freepascal at some point, but I can’t tell when.
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Japan
Posted on March 18, 2011
| Sascha
Right now my thoughts are with the people of japan, a proud nation that has been hit very hard by earthquakes and tsunamis and also is doing everything possible to prevent a second (or even worse) Chernobyl over at Fukushima I.
Ususally I’m not affected by disasters and human suffering (though it may sound harsh, but both are part of life) but with what happened (and what’s still happening) in Japan it’s totally different.
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Game design : Regional construction queue
Posted on March 11, 2011
| Sascha
This is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time now and I was pretty unsure wether it would be a good idea or not, as it would change a fundamental part of the gameplay, what I’m talking about is constructing buildings in your regions, a very important part of the gameplay that you spend a lot of your time with.
Up until now you’ve been able to construct only one building at the same time in each region, forcing you do revisit a region once this building is finished in order to start constructing the next building.
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Newton SDL developer demos updated (to SDK 2.32)
Posted on March 1, 2011
| Sascha
Just a quick note that I finally got around updating the SDL developer demos for the Newton Game Dynamics Engine to the latest 2.32 release of the SDK. Also note that I also uploaded the character controller demo for NGD 2.32 (I haven’t updated this one to 2.x up until now), and also note that it’s “just” an update of the version for 1.53 and that it does NOT use the integrated character controller of the Newton Game Dynamics SDK.
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