Planet 101

Just been whitelisted for friend-connect, so you'll see a log in thing over to your right.

Nothing else is linked in for now, but soon :o)

Oddly, somehow my db server died back in Feb, due to a physical move and my backup appears to have lost a lot of old posts... A replacement hosting platform is now in the works. I've only just been bothered to update.

What's new?

"Deformable" Ships; bits fly off if you hit them too hard, and explode etc...

Projectile weapons; a nice framework where these things are launched by messages sent by appropriate controllers, launch sounds hang about the launcher, trails, explosions on impact, maximum lifespan etc ... all in all a pretty good component. Needs some cleaning up though.

Steering behaviours / autopilot. Much of this is done, apart from the actual orientation part ... I left this alone for a while as it was seriously frustrating! Trying to do physics-based motion without cheating is a real talent!

Radar, a simplistic 2D radar idea was unashamedly stolen, but will be replaced by a rather better (dare I say it...) elite-like scanner.

Ships ... A couple of new ones to test out if deforming them would work as I wanted them to, The Ryder Mk2 and a small one man atmospheric craft

So far most of my ships to date have been single objects, and been a real pain to texture map ... perhaps the limit of 256 polys per collision mesh will help to make TM easier.

New Hardware Yes, my trusty G4 iBook decided that it would rather freeze randomly back in May. Because Leopard was finally out, and many bugs have been squashed I decided to purchase a mid-spec MacBook. Which a few weeks later decided to throw a disk, still this was fixed post haste and the local Apple Store being open on a Sunday made me one happy hacker! There's *still* bugs with the X3100 drivers though!
While I was laptopless I moved up the purchase of a mac mini (lowest spec) to use as a low end test machine and a media center. Works great, and not much in the way of OpenGL Bugs so I can model better on my cheap and nasty GMA950 based mini!
All this mac talk will no doubt scare the heck out of you windows guys out there! Don't worry, you'll be catered for. At the moment the plan is to have the game embedded in a browser!

What Next?
Well that's always a difficult thing to nail down, due to the constant stop-start nature of this project. I plan to sort out some 'turrets' using the new projectile launcher code next. Also I have done a little work on shielding, which was hilarious, though how to practically do it I have no idea ... perhaps I'll have a brainwave soon.

Well, after a while not posting to the blog I thought I'd best do an update. Many things have happened, both project related and not. Since this isn't your typical whiney emo-blog I'm going to keep focused on the game!

Unity 2.0 is out! That right folks, the guys at http://unity3d.com/ have released a new, improved version of their game engine. As with any .0 release there's some rough edges to work out, but it's no worse than 1.6.x *and* it works now with leopard!

Universe generation, the universe of planet 101 can now be viewed in glorious 3D. Unfortunately 3D star maps suck badly unless you've got an essentially flat map (like, say eve) a 100LY cube isn't really navigable because there is no point of reference to orientate yourself.

Piloting your brand spanking new ultramon class 3 fighter isn't easy - or rather getting any kind of realistic flight dynamics in a rigid-body based physics engine.
Unity 2.0 comes with a mesh-based collider - if it's convex your mesh can interact properly with the physics engine - rather than just being a solid hulk. However it's not quite suitable for ships, as there seems to be some weirdness with applying turning forces to the test mesh. It probably also didn't help that my test was essentially a long thin tetrahedron (triangular pointy thing).

After finding the source code for my universe generator, I've turned my attention to the next thing: Online chat. My chat library was sat on the same drive that was due to be wiped! Though it probably can't/shouldn't be used with Unity as it would probably put the editor into a weird state - however ... with 2.0s GUI I might be able to work something out! (recovered from www.archive.org )

Woo! Finally after a few years some content on this page!

Yes, I know it's been quite some time, and lot's of things have been happening in my personal life that's been distracting me from p101.

Now some of you will be wondering "omg, a blog what a yawn". Yes, I know ... but I'm not going to waffle about rubbish on here, just stuff I find you might be interested in the game I've been twiddling with over the past few years, but not getting very far with!


What was it?
Well planet101.org used to be the unofficial portal to planetarion, and my was it popular! When planetarion got its act together all our traffic dropped, and a lot of the guys that wrote content, went off to do other things. Such is life.

What is it now?
Well nothing apart from a dev blog with a single post at present, this one :o)

So what will it be?
Well the ideas for the game are very free form even now, it's going to be a web game for sure, and space based. A web 2.0 Eve/Elite/Planetarion type affair is the general direction me thinks!