Medieval RPG buildings in 3D

For my current project I've been 3D modeling medieval buildings. So far I've made a farm, a castle and a cathedral. I made some renders to show off the work in progress. In the game itself these are viewed from the overworld map from a birds eye view looking down on them at a bit of an angle.

Hardware

The New PC Build My old PC was built in 2007 and was showing it's age. One of the memory chips failed reducing it to only 2GB. The 3D card was hopelessly outdated even 7 years ago. The case had been damaged by fed-ex in shipping. Get the insurance if you ship electronics! Half the USB ports were no longer functional. The old dual core 2.66 Ghz Processor was slow. It was long overdue to replace the PC.

The Case I started with a case, The Rosewill Challenger. It's got USB 3.0 for faster file access on my external USB hard drive. It's got 3 fans, Front, Back and Top, Plus the PSU fan on the bottom and the CPU fan in the center and whatever fan the graphics card has brings the total to at least 6 fans. Good airflow is critical. This case has that bottom mounted PSU so I had to be sure and place my PC on a table where the rubber feet can keep it elevated for proper ventilation out the bottom. On carpet it gets muffled and overheats with this design.

The Power Supply I got a 520 watt PSU which should be plenty to run everything I plant to ever install in this system. Some enthusiasts put 1600 watt power supplies in their computer to power a Titan graphics card or other power hungry overpriced components. I Never buy the top end electronics. I always wait for the prices to come down as newer better parts come out and then I build it myself to save a lot of money and learn a little something along the way.

The CD Drive I just took the CD-RW drive from my old PC, It's been working fine so why waste money on a new one when I can harvest it like an organ and transplant it into the new body.

The Motherboard The next step was picking out a Motherboard. AMD or Intel is a tricky decision. AMD gives you much more bang for your buck but they are outperformed by the more expensive Intel I7 chipset. I found a good mid price AMD chip that I liked so I went with an AMD mobo that supports their latest and greatest AM3 technology. I watched some videos on PC building to refresh my memory on how to do everything right. I had thought it was important not to use a magnetic screwdriver but apparently it's ok with most newer parts. It makes installation a lot easier if you aren't constantly losing important screws in the bottom of the case.

The CPU This AMD 8-core 4.0 Ghz processor is fantastic. It isn't the best in gaming but the 8 cores can really improve multi-threaded programs. Most of what I use is multi-threaded software. Photoshop. Lightwave. They can use those 8 cores very effectively. It's a good idea to install as much as possible onto the motherboard before putting it into the case where space becomes very tight when you start adding components.

The CPU Fan Most CPU chips come with a fan and radiator that attaches to the CPU to keep it cool. I spent $25 on this and for scale, the default fan is the size of a fist while the one I bought is easily 4x bigger. Bigger is better, more pipes and a bigger radiator means more heat is drawn away from the CPU. It's even upgradeable, I can add an additional fan to the other side of it. bonus.

The Memory I got this single 4GB chip of Kingston brand 1333 mhz memory. It was just about the cheapest memory I could find. for most ordinary conditions 4GB of regular ram will be enough for the job. Lots of programs don't even know what do do with more than that. In the future If I want to max out my PC I can get 32GB of fast gaming memory but It's gonna cost at least $400 so it can wait. I figure this leaves room to grow and upgrade the system in a few years when it starts to be outpaced by newer computers.

The Solid State Hard Drive This little gem is amazing. I think a little $100 128GB SSD is probably the single best PC upgrade you could make. For the money it makes a 60% improvement in performance in windows and in all your installed programs. I think I am only using less than 50GB now. I put most of my photos and videos and other files on a traditional hard drive, which I cannibalized from my old PC. The old drive even still has windows installed on it, I didnt even format it, I just took it out of one PC and stuffed it in the other without a problem. If my SSD should ever fail I may even be able to boot the PC to windows from that second hard drive. It's untested though. It might not know what to do with the changed hardware.

Installing the SSD The SSD is tiny, I made sure my case had a spot designed to hold it. If you don't have a case like this though, you may need to buy a part that holds the SSD but fits the standard drive bays.

The Mouse & Keyboard I took the mouse+keyboard I was using and kept using it with the new PC. For days I struggled with a technical problem which was eventually solved by my buddy Dark and his 200IQ superbrain. I was getting a laggy unresponsive mouse and at first I had no idea what was the problem. I thought it could be a driver issue. I thought it could be the USB port I was using. I tried USB 2.0, I tried USB 3.0, I tried the front, I tried the back ports, nothing resolved it. Eventually I realized that the keyboard was freezing as well so then I figured out it was a signal issue with the wireless USB dongle that logitech uses. There was interference. I noticed if i moved my mousepad closer to the dongle it would respond. I ended up moving the PC from the floor to my left, over to the table to my right and then I moved my router as far as possible away from the logitech device. So moving the PC close to the mouse AND moving any interference further away seems to have fixed the problem finally. I was really tearing my hair out trying to solve the problem for days. grr.

So in conclusion I'll show you the completed build. I put my tired old 3D card in it for now and I'm using my 23 inch LED monitor through HDMI and it works well enough.

The Full Installation

The Full Installation Close Up

At some point I will get the final important piece, a newer 3D graphics card and then this PC will be a beast! But that can wait for another day. For now I'm quite happy with the performance of my computer. Here is the Windows performance index as it stands.

What's In A Name

So I started this game sometime in 2008 with no clue what I was doing. It's gone through at least 3 complete rewrites, as I got better at coding. The whole time I intended to call the game SPACE AGE. Well I was too late to the party, I found another game out there, already using the title. So I took some time to remove my splash screen and my loading screen and make new graphics, a new title, a new logo, new loading screens. -grumble-

I keep meaning to update this blog more often but I never know what to write about. So I apologize if this seems like a random list of things I worked on :)

I've started adding some more complex particle effects to my game. It's really complex but I've got some background in it from when I learned Lightwave's particle system. Game maker has it all as functions full of variables instead of nice little menus like lightwave has.

I put a lot of work into my navigation screen, which is like an overworld map, it lets you get to all the levels of the game. Now the sun has particle effects so it looks like it's glowing and the stars in the background are moving towards the screen like your flying through space. It's got a nice vibe. I just need to improve the feel of the user interface. Right now the info panels feel fat and sluggish. I built the menus in 3D in lightwave and rendered them as JPG's so that I could then import them and make animated sprites to make my custom menus expand and shrink. The next step will be rebuilding the icon system for what ships are at a location. Right now I have static icons but I need to rewrite it so that the location can have different states, one where it's clear, one where there are some aliens, one where there are pirates or whatever and any combination of those, then it's gotta show those icons in the menu when you highlight a location that can be clicked. So if the planet has pirates, you get a pirate icon. I want it to be a sort of open world game where you support and defend the solar system and the human colonies.

I've nerfed the radar so that it can be upgraded later for a price. Late in the game after a couple expensive upgrades the radar will detect targets further out from the player.

I've made a lot of changes to how objects interact with each other. The asteroids now damage each other when they collide as well as harming enemy ships who collide with them. I plan to take this one step further and add weight to objects so that when the little asteroid collides with the big asteroid, it reacts more realistically. Right now they are treated as equals and it looks strange when the big rock is knocked away by a little rock.

I added a bunch of new items that can be collected, power-ups which boost booster rocket fuel or energy levels. I also started coding a nice graphical inventory/shop system to replace my old clunky menu based shops. When the player hits pause it freezes and blurs everything and then creates the shop over top of that background. Each item is displayed with a title, a short description, item quantity, item cost(if you can buy it), A picture of the item. And to buy or sell the player just has to click it. This is a big improvement so far but it needs a lot of work.

For a day I toyed with the idea of giving the machine gun a clip size and so it would reload after firing a certain number of bullets. This seemed like a good idea in theory until I did it. I decided to scrap all that and go back to it being a regular minigun. Nice and responsive. Waiting for reloads in the middle of combat was just irritating. I think instead of improving the gun by giving you a bigger clip before a reload, I will just upgrade the rate of fire.

I've been coding and recoding my Stealth aliens. I have them working pretty well. It's basically invisible and it flies at you, shooting plasma balls. When it gets close, it creates a visible clone and teleports away. Repeat this process and before long your surrounded by swarms of clones, which actually do shoot real shots. Fortunately they are very weak but they act as a distraction to hide the only real one in the pack, invisibly stalking the player. Damage to the stealth ship makes it more visible so if you hit it with a few lucky shots then it won't be completely invisible anymore.

I added a new weapon that serves two functions at the same time. The guns in the game fall into two categories, projectile weapons and energy weapons. If you shot an energy weapon you burn up your reserve power. The shields use that same power to refill which means in combat if your shields are low, there wont be any power for energy weapons. The player can fall back on his missiles, mines or trusty minigun. All of those things rely on ammo, and ammo can run out. So then my problem is that the player needs a default weapon which can shoot even in a situation where all ammunition has been spent and all energy reserves depleted, and maybe even the shields are down. This is where the new weapon comes in. It is a charge weapon. So the longer you hold the button the more power its got. It doesn't cost any energy or ammo, all it costs is time. This is a perfect default weapon because it can do a few quick low power shots or after a pause it can do decent damage like a rocket but then to make it even better I added the overcharge where if you fully charge it and you DO have energy reserves then it fires a continuous flash beam which does all sorts of damage and knockback. It still needs some tweaking. I may adjust how long it can be charged and the cut off for the flash beam. Balancing is important and this may be overpowered.

Speaking of overpowered, I added a cheat code which gives the player a ridiculous amount of armor, shields, energy, recharge rate, boost speed, boost fuel, ammo and includes an even more overpowered version of the flash beam which requires no charging and is twice as strong. It basically vaporizes everything it touches.

I started developing the mission structure of my game. You can develop in several ways. Exploration, Trade, Combat, colonization. I made the colony mission where you must act as a wingman for the colony, protecting it from alien ambushes and rogue asteroids or comets that might cross its path. There's a time limit with a progress bar in the corner, with the colony ships health above it. The colony sends you messages over the comms about the job, damage to the colony and victory conditions. At the end the ship arrives at the planet and the player is paid. I made it so that you get paid a lot less if the colony is mostly destroyed but you get a nice bonus if the colony hasn't been damaged. Then I made a combat mission which is very similar to the colony mission except your escorting a heavy gunship on patrol. I spent a day building the gunship in 3D, texturing it, rendering it out in two parts, ship and turret. Animating the turret. Coding the gunship, the turret, and a flashy death in case you fail. whew. The gunship has less health than the colony and I increased the number of alien encounters. It makes for some exciting dogfights. The player can hang out close to the gunship and enemy shots will hit the gunship instead of the player, so you can use it as a shield if you don't mind losing money. If the player wants that bonus money though, they can draw enemy fire away from the gunship and let it play a support role with it's double minigun turret and rocket pods.

I have an enemy type that's like a little death star with a ton of health and bristling with a million turrets. It seemed kind of invincible so I made it more visibly take damage. Occasionally when you do about 20% more damage to its overall health it has an explosion and some parts break off from it. It's a tough armored enemy with a lot of firepower. Right now I have 3 in one level, I think I will go in and remove 2 heheh.

I also squashed 3 notebook pages worth of bugs. I am my own game tester so I just play it and when I see something I don't like I jot down a note about it so that when I exit the game I can work down through the list and get them all sorted before making another test run in the game. The best fail was when alien ships are supposed to spawn 3 little orbs to harass the player. Instead they were spawning hundreds. It was madness.

The hardest part right now seems to be keeping my frame rate at a smooth 30fps. It would be nice to get 60fps but I think that might be impossible in HD. My PC is getting old though so maybe other people will have smoother gameplay. I'm doing my best to keep the code simple so it won't get bogged down. These games are all about reflexes. Maybe I'll just say its a feature and not a bug, "Oh that? That's bullet time, the game slows down when the combat gets heavy, on purpose" heheh, nah.

Hard Work And Long Hours

Shout out to Pok for contributing this badass Moon photo for me to use in the game

I have devoted so many hours to this game. I can hardly believe it myself. I'm counting all the hours spent watching youtube video tutorials of programming in GML, as work. Research. Long hours bent over my mouse and keyboard has taken it's toll on my body. And sitting is possibly the worst form of inactivity. Bad posture is a problem too if I sit for long stretches. Sometimes you have to suffer for your art, just a little bit.

So this is the solar system, the planets spin around the sun, you can choose to travel to any of the planets or the asteroid belt, you can see small ships orbiting the planets.

New features being implemented. Here you can see the missile system in the top left. When you fire a missile, a number of missile slots go into reload mode. The game has a variety of missile types. You can switch to any type you have unlocked. The basic rocket uses 1 of 8 shots so it's almost rapid fire. The upgraded guided missile costs 2 of your 8 slots. The next one is a clusterbomb, it costs 4, so you can only fire a couple of these at a time. Then the big nuke is last and it costs 8 missiles, it uses all 8 of your missile slots up in one big shot. The communications system is popped up at the bottom right. It slides out from the right side of the screen when you receive a message. It's got a pleasant old-school RPG style text scrolling. and the star base is there at the center. The base handles repairs, refueling, buying weapons and upgrades. turning in resources for game credits to upgrade the ship. Giving missions. etc.

Here you can see the radar at the top right, it lets you see about twice as far as what is onscreen and can be static or relative direction. A comet flying by, nice trail effects there. The yellow burst is the flash from a small nuke. I modeled and animated some nice little missiles to replace old placeholder graphics. The asteroids physics are working really well. You can launch a nuke at a big asteroid, which fractures it into chunks and pummels those chunks into pieces which fly away from the blast radius. Huge damage is done all around it with colorful damage numbers popping from everywhere. The ship you fly has a shield so you can actually bump the asteroids to move them around wherever you want. The asteroids can damage enemy ships so you can use an asteroid for cover and then launch it at the alien ships.

This last one is a peek at the boss that hangs out in the asteroid belt munching on anything that moves. Asteroids don't even slow it down. And it's bite is very lethal.

New Video Clip posted today

February 2, 2013

Link-> ALPHA BUILD 13 VIDEO <-link

here is a new video of the alpha build version 13 of my space game. The framerate is bad while running the screen capturing software but generally runs at a smooth 30 FPS. I've been adding weapons in. As it stands now there are 3 strengths of laser red, blue and green, a minigun, rockets, guided missiles, nuclear missiles, storm missiles that break into ten smaller guided missiles and magnetic mines. 9 weapons so far. As far as levels go, the entire local solar system is explorable and it's full of asteroids and comets and aliens which can be shot to bits and harvested for resources. The hyperspace wormhole is working right most of the time. I guess the next step will be to design a whole bunch of different ships that the player can encounter.

New Creature the Wormhole Entity

January 25th, 2013 Long hours toiling over the raw code of my game has produced a new lifeform. The wormhole entity. Traveling the great distances between the stars is a slow and inefficient way to reach a destination. With some futuristic warp drive technology the space ships in my game will open a wormhole that folds space and connects two points in space together with a vortex that you fly through. This wormhole is, unfortunately for the player, the home of an energy worm which is nigh indestructible and relentlessly pursues the player to feed on his energy shield and burn up the ship. The beast has 5 energized tentacles, 3 trail behind propelling him on, while the remaining two tentacles stretch outward to capture your ship in its deadly embrace. The narrow tunnel of the wormhole is surrounded by raging energies which also cause damage, so not only do you need to evade this pack but you need to do it within a narrow strip of safe area. So the player is left with two options, dodge like crazy and run for it or shoot your way through an unkillable regenerating monster from beyond.

New Video of the early Alpha build

January 24, 2013

Todays posting is a good one. I have a new gameplay video up.

the next part I'd like to work on is making individual levels for each planet and the navigation menu to go between them. So far everything takes place in one of my test rooms. one for a planet and one for an asteroid field.

I'm still trying different things for the user interface, it's very rough at the moment. I have some code for text windows I need to integrate into the game and I'm working on pop up menus like an inventory and a ship status window

recent changes.

-planetary gravity

-effect showing damage numbers on a hit

-different color damage numbers depending on type of damage and target

-new graphics for the armor and shields healthbars onscreen

-fully working asteroids that break down into smaller chunks when destroyed

-fully working comets with gaseous trails

-2 weapons are working, the laser blaster and explosive seeker missiles

-new enemy AI routines including 4 types of weapon and both offensive and defensive maneuvers. but it's still buggy as hell.

LINK- LINK -LINK (wtf I cant figure out how to change my link color)