Migrated to my own site using wordpress.

http://www.swiftthought.com/development/blog/

mevha evo-lution

Well will the impending arrival of the new version of Animation Master I spent some time playina around with some different concept art and currently I'm leaning away from the current tracked model to somthing more along the lines of windup toy meets battletech.

So this is what I came up with.

I kinda like it. The shield bot will be more along the same lines but a lot more robust and the gun bot will, have guns...

These guys are going to require significantly more animation but I think it will really liven up the gameboard, which was looking kinda sterile before.

And just for posterity's sake here is the old concept for the tracked model.

Baby Steps.

Ok so not much time to work on the project today. Had a nice relaxing evening catching up on some tv though.. Some days it's just nice to be able to not have to think after 6 pm.

Got about an hour to poke at things though and started to get some things to make sense. I still wish there was a more concise 1000 foot overview of how TGB actually worked. The whole scenegraph/viewport/gui/canvas thing is still a bit vauge for me..

But I did get the First level loading properly and pushed a custom GUI onto it and manged to get the 2 pcs inthe house to actually connect and say hello to each other.

Yeah sounds totally trivial any way I can think of it too.

Still it's a bit of a personal Eureka! moment.

On a totally unrelated note, teh SciFi channel's Eureka series is shaping up fairly well, and I watched an anime (50 eps) called Eureka Seven, I might have to pick that up if it comes to the states.

Second life, however, is closing it's forums. I'm not sure how that's going to affect the long term development of the world but it does feel like the developer is attempting to perform PR triage after a couple months of bad patches and half way solutions after opening up the world to everyone without any registration or verification. Not to mention some BIG and logtime supporters / developers in world have either left or gotten banned. The only thing that's keeping the kiddie hordes away is that it looks like a 1990's video game reject. So BombBots may or may not survive in SL as anything other than a prototype. I've just paid another month's Tier and I'll give it that long before I start to thing about just closing up shop there. But I am not planning on sinking any more development resources into it until things stablize.

Found some resources on how to make a perl based MasterServer for TGB so that should not be an issue anymore. Match making shoudl be fairly easy now.

Past my bedtime now. Gotta Crash.

Explosions and craters.. mmmmm.

Here's a chain reaction of bomb bots exploding in a nice massive fireball! I love the particle editor in TGB!

And here's the ruined remaining line of craters from another failed assault.

Pretty things make me sleep well at night. More goodies soon!

I plan on putting a development section up on http://www.swiftthought.com for concept art etc etc

Good progress

Well I checked in on Second Life. It's still there.. no progress to report for now on it.. the more time I spend away from it the more I realize how shitty LSL is. So For now it's just gonna be on hold.

I did finally register http://www.swiftthought.com which is where things will be available from.

Made some really nice progress tonight. Ive got bots being able to detect collisions and damage each other. Pretty much now I just need multiple bots, proper networking, actually an instantiated game. Ok so there's still massive amounts of work to do. But it's way easier to work on than in SL. That might have something to do with the fact that I've already written everything once before.. Still Im learning the torque script on the fly so that should make up for it.

Man I cant wait for getting the networking up and running.... I may crack that nut tomorrow. :)

p.s. O I almost forgot.. I got a nice universal fade out function up and running.. That made implementing craters a snap. And they gradually fade away so the board doesn't get covered in em. Puurty.

Visual Aides.

After some difficulties here we go.



Got some better ones brewing after I make some minor corections to the lighting.

Hrm.. might look into importing them as actual 3d objects.. which could be interesting. Especially now that obsidiangames.com has a solid AM to Torque pipline exporter...