Generating Situations Link

Every story, be it a movie game or book, that is worth taking in will diverge through a series of situations leading up to the end result. A good writer can probably outline an entire book simply in situations and then connect the dots with drama lines, action sequences, an array of emotions, or some history. Take for example Star Wars where Luke first fights Vader. A situation arose which lead up to a vengeance action sequence and then on to one of the most memorable movie situations I can think of. The action scene before really built up the suspense and drama and lead beautifully into Luke’s frightening reality.

Read the rest here.

Since everyone has their RSS feeds coming into this blog I am going to keep this up for a month or two. I am phasing out my blogger blog for the most part, and moving into wordpress.

New Forum, Blog, and RPG

OK, I have a new site and blog up. It is still being tweaked a bit but it is fully functional. As for the RPG you can read more about it from here.

I will have an RSS subscription icon up soon for the new site.

Revisiting the Graphics

I think I am starting to see some light at the end of this tunnel. Scripting is almost finished, programming could be done unless I decide to port some more scripts in, and level building is getting much easier and faster to the point that it finally feels like a typical workflow rather than poking a badger with a stick. With this much work under my belt I am running out of excuses to procrastinate re-modeling and re-animating the characters. 

To the right you can see box man. His political appearance today is to signify our dedication to better character graphics for the Aeges Road Project. While I liked the old characters to a point, their bodies were more awkward than cute and they never seemed to animate well. My second attempt at a template body produced some decent animation, but it was still pretty lacking and didn't quite fit what I was looking. Finally, I decided to try some different 3D software and landed on Cheetah3D. I got Cheetah 3D on Sunday, just before I learned of my website trouble, did a few tutorials then started on boxman who will soon become my character template. The new software has made editing much easier and it has yet to really try my patients. I have actually found myself enjoying modeling and animating for a change. 

As for the goal of the graphic, I am still pretty intent on giving it a bit of an anime tone. I am going a bit more realistic than last time, but the deformities are still there and hopefully will come across much better than the last time. 

I am also trying to save myself steps and time where ever I can, so rather than model then animate, I decided to do an abstract, animate, then model and tweak the animation afterward. From there I hope to create a male and female template the several humanoid templates such as werewolf or goblin. If my fingers are crossed just right, I many only have to do a handful of new animations from scratch after I finish box man. So far box man can walk, run, wave, and beat me in every staring contest. 

Experiencing Technical Difficulties, Please Stand By

If you are looking of the actual web site it is there but the server isn't completely configured yet. Sunday I got an email stating that my host had changed my server. I did part of the reconfiguration Sunday night and it will most likely be this weekend or next weekend before I bring it back up. Depending upon how much trouble this, I may recant my plan to consolidate everything in rails until a time when I can work on this full time and not just in my spare time. 

Another Light Update

The phrase, "There's nothing new under the sun" seems to be relevant in every area of life. I am finding RPG's to be no different. While new ideas are introduced to the genre, it is usually a hybridizing practice that is often times found offensive to the hardcore players. So while trying to breath new life into the RPG it is very easy to repulse people with your morning breath. 

So the new (or rather altered) project is aimed toward a more mainstream audience. I am finding it is poor form to push JRPG elements into the genre, and while a few may carry over, I assure you it is being done as tastefully as possible. For instance, every character comes with a fixed class. However, your main characters class is more of an ability rather than a specialization. The other characters available to your party are more on the restrictive side as they have already chosen their paths long before you met them. 

I am ready to spill details, but I am trying to hold myself back until I get the new site completed. Most of it is functional right now with a admin interface to boot, but there are still a few bugs remedy and some basic security needs to be implemented on the off chance someone does decide to be malicious. I thought it silly a small timer like me getting attacked once, but a few years ago my entire site was hijacked and changed. Good times. :)

New Web Site Under Way!!!

Code Ugly has just underwent a web redesign. I started last night and the visuals and the static pages are up. The old site was slow and constructed in an older version of rails, the new site makes use of the 2.0 standards. It is much faster, and looks much better, go check it out. 

Rather than design my own template, for once I did myself a favor and modified an existing template. The excellent template I used was from Free CSS Templates. I plan on modifying the old forum and integrating a blog and news feeds along with it. If I fail I fail, but this is the plan as of now. :)

Inventory and Hexes

This last month has slowly brought some new features up for display in the Aeges Project. As stated in one of my previous blogs, I have put the inventory on a grid as you can see the screen shot below. A little bit of work has been put into implementing day and night, as well as keeping track of days. There is also good improvement in foilage and the level is building really nicely right now which brings me to my next item checked off the list.

I am a constant tester and tweaker, so after building two full 'basic' levels and performance maintained, I decided to try doing a single level. With a little partitioning of spaces things seem to be going well. I didn't any dynamic level loaded like I had planed, but rather I load the entire scene, and let each object add itself into its partitioned space. So far it functions almost as well as the individual layers, and still loads almost as fast. Right now on my MacBook I am getting a 4 second load time, while on my old 1.3Ghz I am getting a 10 second level load time.

Finally, the current project is somewhat undoing a change I made. I made the comment that I was going off the grid, and now I half repent of that decision. Exploration feels a lot better with free movement and not being tied to a grid, but tactical combat was suffering from a lot of silliness because of it. So now, when combat starts the players are aligned to the nearest grid and kept on the grid for the duration of the skirmish.

My biggest gripe with the isometric 2:1 grid for combat was range. Range was always fairly clumsy and the results were a bit unreal, especially when attaching to the East or West. So after playing around with some planning software I decided that a hex grid would be ideal and I could use it with all existing artwork with exception to doors. The results seem to be much more consistent. Beyond this, just more of the same. :)