Curse it all, we missed last week's blog post!

We had our hackday on friday, and it was quite productive. Battery got the BSOD engine back up to scratch after moving it to Pyglet, complete with physics and frogs and everything. Me and Propellor spent most of it arguing over whether we needed to, or indeed could, optimise the player ship (currently 256 polys). He got it down to about 200, but I thought it looked too spiky and didn't have the solid look of the original. In the end, we decided it didn't seem worth the performance gain to compromise the look in that way, but it was a worthwhile exercise. I also started retexturing the ship, in line with the graphic style we've more-or-less decided on.

In other news, I now have a Wacom Cintiq - a wacom tablet, with a screen in it. It's pretty much the ultimate tool for digital art, and while I've mostly used it to draw Pokemon, it'll mean I can get a lot more artwork done for P&R.

I'm not sure if/when we'll have another hackday, as Propellor is moving out of the city centre, meaning he's not 5-minutes walk from me any more; you'll have to make do with normal, on-and-off progress from now on. See you next week!

Well, this week's been mostly behind-the-scenes work by Battery. He's doing a fantastic job porting what we'd done on BSOD out of Pygame and into Pyglet, as well as tidying things up and making a clearer hierarchy of ... things. The tidying up comes about because of me and Prop; Battery had put some things in that, it turned out, we didn't need:
A warning for prospective game developers: explain the gameplay properly to your coders.

Part of the reason we're changing to Pyglet is so that we can add framebuffer effects and shaders - things like glows, bump-mapping, and depth-of-field (guess which one camerafag Propellor is most excited about!)
I was experimenting with bump-mapping earlier in the week; as I model in lightwave, but it can't display bump-maps live, I thought I'd export into Blender:

Turns out Blender doesn't read UV maps properly if there's more than one texture applied. So, instead, I used the program that comes with LightWave, Layout. This works fine, but it turns out you have to watch out for contrast on bumpmaps:

Quite a lumpy spaceship, I think you'll agree. I've changed it around and now it looks like this, which I'm more or less happy with.

I'm keeping a bit more depth there than seems right, mainly because the ship will very rarely be viewed at this scale. That's why the texture is so low-res, too.


What we're aiming for is something that can be played on low-end hardware, but still works well in 3D with pretty effects. With a bit of luck, we'll be having a hackday this week, and we're at the stage where things will start looking more prettyful.

Next week, we'll also be going to fizzPOP's Drawdio workshop! We highly recommend anyone local (UK, Midlands) to come along, as they're a great bunch of people, and you get to take home a new toy! =D

See you then!

First, so it doesn't get lost, the TurnShip Demo is up for download!

So today, other than being Propellor's birthday, was a hackday for BSOD. Due to a raft of unexpected and birthday-related events, we didn't get started until three, and it ended up less a hackday and more a hackfourhours.

Anyway, Battery got more work done on the engine:


Propellor modeled some enemy ships:


And I modeled a carrier (that's the player's ship above it):


As always, click on the thumbnails for the big versions.

Next week we might have some textured ships, or something else entirely. See you then!

I'm back from my trip, and P and B have been hard at work. BSOD now has splines and, of course, frogs.


Many people underestimate the importance of frogs in today's video games. Back when games were written directly for hardware down to the byte-coding, using a frog was unheard of, but nowadays with compilers and intermediate languages (such as the python that BSOD is written in) amphibians have become more of a necessity. They help with the toading. Sorry.

We're planning another hackday this week, so stay tuned!

Battery has tasked me with designing stuff. And so i DO:


edit: hueg fixd.