Well, considering we very nearly just missed another week's blog post, I think that indicates that not much is going on at the moment. So, rather than disappoint you with missing blogposts, we're going to disappoint you with missing blogposts in an official sort of way.

We'll post again when there is progress to report. Have a good summer!

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!

We all had a great day yesterday! Day is missing the "hack-" prefix, as we didn't actually get much done. And, really, should be missing the "day" suffix as we started at 2:30pm. Well, Battery had got BSOD working on his netbook, and I continued a little on some concept art, but mostly we played Gunstar Heroes, SSFIV, and Magic: The Gathering. Yeah, we're lazy.

However, at 5 we packed up and got on an hour-long train ride (joined by B's friend Eddy) to Birmingham, for fizzPOP's Drawdio event!

The evening was being run by a group from Nottinghack; as the four of us were approaching fizzPOP's building, we saw a group of guys walking the other way, on the other side of the road. The looked like hacky types, were carrying toolboxes, but were headed the wrong way.
Despite being a bit late, the session hadn't started when we arrived and sat down. They were still waiting for the Nottinghack guys, who of course turned out to be the hacky types who had been walking the wrong way. At least we helped them find it indirectly.

The session was good fun. I managed to get my speaker wedged onto the little PCB the wrong way around, and Battery's refused to work, but everything was sorted out, so now we each have our own annoying pencil.
And then someone told Prop where the duct-tape was. He has not only duct-taped some paper onto that sign, but also his camera strap. And then he started chanting the sacred cant and it all went downhill from there.



We're still contemplating running a python+pygame tutorial with fizzPOP at some point, we'll post loudly about it when we do. These meetings are not only great fun, but they always get us fired up for other hacky projects, including a few ideas we might be able to make money out of. Ben said he woul dpost about the BSOD engine, so until then, see you later!

EDIT: More photos can be found here!

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!

So yesterday (Friday 4th), after Battery finished off his last bit of university coursework, we met at Propellor's and started planning the hackday.

This comes with some sad news; we discussed it, and decided that TurnShip won't be a main game any more. Prop has been arguing that it was just a learning exercise to begin with, which got out of hand, for a few months. There are some serious, ingrained flaws that probably require a(nother) rewrite to fix, and none of us really wanted to debug it all.

I haven't given up on TurnShip just yet though; I'll either carry on with the Python one to get it going, or spend the time rewriting it, in C++ and OpenGL. Other than the basic game, though, it won't be out for a while.

So what did we do for about 10 hours yesterday?


Let's see how far we can get on a full game in a day! >