I’ve been working with some textures, and randomly felt like doing something “arty”. Here goes nothing.

Will begin posting bigger Zymbiote updates as time progresses (just remember that time is relative)

- Soyuz

So I’ve been working on particles for … fun (I suppose?) and created 2 new fire particle systems, one “ordinary” and one “pure plasma” form.

The whistles go WOOO

- Soyuz

I’ve been really busy the last few months, so development has been rather slow on my end, but finally I am free! So a few days ago I threw together a dynamic shadows fix for Soyuz as a whole new HL2 mod, compiled it and it seems to be working ok, I imagine he’ll post about it soon.

Now i’m finally free for the summer, I don’t know where I’m going to head my development. I’ve been working with the LOVE engine for a while, but I want to move onto something a little meatier. I was planning to try out XNA and test some Xbox 360 development, but typically my 360 RROD’d for the second time about a week ago (And this time out of warranty). So I guess 360 developments a miss.

I still might have a go with XNA, I don’t have any experience with C# but it shouldn’t take too long to catch on!

- BAZ

Just another quick update, been working with dynamic lights in Source for a while now (it’s a pain in the ass) and have settled with using environment projected texture shadowing, which means that we’ll have to recode the Engine to better fit our needs, but that isn’t going to happen until later this month.

I’m also going to increase the projected texture resolution to remove the “grainy” feel to the shadows, and re-do some of the collision models on physical props.

- Soyuz

Minor Update, pictures are self-explanatory.

We will be adding our own models shortly.

- Soyuz

So… As of recent events, or lack off, I’ve decided to actually begin creating something with the textures provided by Mike. So after one hour of work I’ve finished a some kind of surface tunnel, enclosed with snow (beats me).

To start off I’m going to fix the lighting and re-do the HDR outside (since you can’t see ANYTHING if you look directly outside) then I’m going to add more props and add a couple of rooms and probably some geometry to the corridor, to keep it from feeling so plain.

So stay tuned?

- Soyuz

So after consulting the problematic events after the last blog post with Mike we decided to skip the whole bump mapping idea — instead we added normal maps (yay!) This was the result:

Personally I see it as an improvement… though considering how the last version was broken I suppose that doesn’t say much.

- Soyuz

So I’ve finally gotten around to fixing Hammer and trying out Mike’s new textures.

The result was pretty good, except for some EXTREME BUMP MAPS (EBM from now on).

(The picture which is really dark shows one of these EBMs, the engine is tricked into thinking the wall is insanely “deep” within the texture, making it black when you use a flashlight on it)

- Soyuz

So, I’ve spent some time making a bunch of textures for Alex this evening. Nothing special, just some environment textures for something I don’t even know anything about.

Well, knock yourselves out.

That’ll be all for tonight. Sleep well.

-Mikael

Over the past few LÖVE projects I’ve constantly rewritten the way objects were declared. Each time I started a new project I found my previous method either unsuitable, or just plain ugly.

My first method:

A new object would be assigned just a number (Lets say 1). So to manipulate the object  I would have to use “bodybox1” and “shapebox1”. I used it as a quick fix and as my code grew so did the problems.

If I wanted to create a box using this method, I would have to do this:

Now while this looks simple enough, it is very confusing to understand.  What do the values represent? How I can tell what’s scale and what’s alpha? What if I want to add air resistance as a value? I’d often put a mass value in the wrong place, and to cater for an additional value like air resistance I’d have to edit all calls of MakeBox. This obviously wasn’t going to work.

The Solution:

One of the main limitations of the Lua language is the fact that it’s not, by default, object orientated. A quick look at the LÖVE wiki and I found exactly what I was looking for. The MiddleClass library. The MiddleClass library makes it easy to create classes, which are perfect for an entity system.

First, I created a “Body” base class in a lua file of it’s own.

This base class provides loads of useful functions, like SetMass() and SetPos(), but on it’s own the “Body” class creates just a blank body with some functions, there’s no shapes for collisions or for sprites to draw on. This is where subclasses come in.

Using a subclass of “Body” I can create any shape and define additional useful functions specific to that subclass. Here’s a look in my “Physics_Rectangle.lua” subclass:

Here I’m creating a body from Body.lua, inheriting basic functions and then defining two more useful functions, SetWidth() and SetHeight().

This is great because it means you can create a new subclass for anything, a subclass for a new shape, a subclass for a layout of shapes and even a subclass for the physics of a character. It’s easy.

If I wanted to create a physics box using this method it’s much much more customizable and legible:

These are the necessary functions needed to spawn a box, but you still have all the possible functions like SetRotInertia() and SetWorld() which you can either call before or after spawn. You can use any new subclass you create as an entity type.

Every created entity is added to an entity table, so you can easily get all entities or just search for specific entity types. The new entity system is massively customizable and easy to read. Job done.

- BAZ