Author Archives: vortex69

Finally…

So I finally started working on this project more often than once every two months.

And stuff is getting done, after ~1 week working every other day we already have a basic — yet good enough for now — inventory system. Not complete, only object pick up is working for now. With object thumbnails and all.

Now the bad side of things, thanks to Cruz, who finally erased his whiteboard a couple months ago and doing so erased the little work we had already done as far as names, we had the name of the game, the name of the town where the game takes place, couple other names I can’t recall and a little start on the game…hmmm, what should I call it?…mythology?

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South Park — Coon 2: Hindsight

Surprise!! I like to watch South Park. Just watched the latest episode and…

Sorry, but my brain spoiled the fun…every time BP/DP botched something I always thought “How the fuck can they botch it even more? Release Cthulhu?” after the creatures of another dimension I just said…”Hmmm, next is Cthulhu?” And yes, it was.

Anyway I still laughed my ass off when I saw the almighty Cthulhu and then the “We’re sorry” clip.

Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn (if this is wrong, it’s wikipedias fault….)

But this episode sums up how stuff works, the big company fucks up, destroys something, no matter what it is, and then…”OOpppsss, sorry!” and everything is fine.

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F*ck you!…

…I ain’t paying $12 for a domain name renewal (well, renewal + whois privacy)…especially for my ‘hobby’ site ie. this site.

So after 3 years using vortex69.net – although I only have the blog since ~6 months ago – I’m moving it to vortex69.tk .

The 25 visits in 90 days will be biggest enemy now. tuzki_bob

For future reference (for myself, or anyone who finds this), this is the code to mass replace a string in mysql:

UPDATE table_name SET column_name = REPLACE(column_name,’original_string’,’replace_string’)

on wordpress, updating the posts would be:

UPDATE `wp_posts` SET `post_content` = REPLACE(`post_content`,’old domain’,’new domain’)

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Dropped

Don’t know why, but this project (Sniper game) is officially on the dropped section.

Yes, it’s dead.

I wonder why I even bothered starting it…

It was way too complex for my abilities, so the initial enthusiasm gave way to boredom and disappointment. Yet, I did know that it was too complex at the start but still went after the ‘vision’.

Funny fact, today – 10-Oct-2010 – was the date I had set for a ‘minimum playability’ alpha version.

At least I tried. tuzki_box

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Oh no…

I’m starting to like blender for simple objects, despite the wasted time doing stuff that had a button on 3ds max – chamfer comes to mind, as does the shell modifier – by simple objects I mean most things under 1k tris, hence most of the props on my current project fit that description – yes, I’ve heard that too little tris end up being as bad as too many, but why in hell would I use over 1k tris on a bullet box – so…yeah, that is all.

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Yay…

Finally finished the simple model I was making with Blender.

It ended up looking nice enough (don’t worry, it looks far worse after importing into Unity), guess I’ll use blender from time to time on simple objects especially if I have time to waste, since what takes me 30 minutes on max takes over 2 hours on blender at least for me (this is due to not being used to blenders workflow, I’m not criticizing blender (must be the first time such thing happens…I feel dirty :-( ))

Talking about Unity, I finally managed to make a tree on the ‘tree thingie’ a couple of days ago. Then I deleted the tree and never spoke of it again…

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Damn…

As of today, there’s one thing I’m sure.

While Superman had his weakness on kryptonite, mine is…video tutorials, every single time I even try to watch a video tutorial, I fall asleep on my chair after ~10 or 15 minutes. Maybe the problem is the monotone voices used on those things, dunno.

Bah, I should be thinking about my game projects, like, decide on how the hell I want the ‘vertical ladder’ system to work on Colina. For going up, maybe the typical ‘you’re on rails and can’t move your mouse’ way; going down just jump, since tall ladders aren’t planned, but every time I think about it I feel compelled to make a water tower or something just to put somewhere in the game.

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Progress

Finally got a terrain heightmap that I liked, still not perfect, but better than the previous one. Looks like I was finally able to use L3DT correctly, although it still lacks a bit of control.

As far as new 3D models, made a new bridge model (kind of…still being finished), next I’ll do some small props (a first aid kit, a toolbox, that kind of stuff)

Decided to finish the 30-day trial of Unity Pro and switch to free, reason: afraid of getting used to the pro features.

Talking about Unity, still trying to figure out how to use Beast.

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So…

Well, I decided to start posting my rants about ‘Colina Silenciosa’ on my website instead of the team site.

So, yeah, after being halted for some time, I decided to start working on it again.

Nice…so what am I doing now?

Scrapping the – few – models already made and remodelling everything. That includes the terrain in Unity.

Which brings me to L3DT – that I use to make the heightmap to import into Unity, Unitys terrain editor is a bit…crappy – which I can’t seem to work very well with, my biggest peeve with it is control, again, I love to control the measures on my 3D models and I wish I could do it on terrains too.

Another fun thing is that we are using a square 4 km by 4 km terrain, yet, for the storyline and other planned buildings we would need less than half of that (ie. 2 km by 2 km, which is in fact one fourth of the area, but you get the idea). Let’s call that ‘artificial gameplay extension’, we make the game look long due to you having to run around for hours between planned events (Hello Oblivion…and a few others of the same style).

All for now, will be back with more ranting some other day.

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Unity 3 is out.

For now there’s no free version, only the Pro trial. Scrap that, there’s an option to activate free

Which I was already using for a couple of days, in a fast and easy explanation: Google is a good friend of mine.

In a bit longer explanation, google indexed a download page for the f1 version (RC1, if I’m not wrong) and you could register it as trial. And Unitys update check feature took care of keeping me up to date.

Now, stuff…(Consider I’m using the pro features and I’m a noob, so I’ll only talk about graphic stuff)

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