Cthulhu and the Gun Lords of Terra

Comic 58 - Who have you been talking to ???

Who have you been talking to ???

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Save My Place | Load My Place

25th Aug 2019, 5:20 PM

warp9

Since I was asked about the Cthulhu and Gun-Lords of Terra game (and that is something I always like to talk about), here is a bit more about that topic. . . .

The game's set up involves a 3D environment, with a 3rd person camera. The world has a destructible, procedurally-generated, environment.

The eventual goal is to make an RPG, with an ability for the player to create almost any character they want. However, that is a fairly big undertaking, so the very early versions of the game will be more limited, and will focus on combat (the RPG will need combat anyway, so I will just start by dealing with that aspect). Also, the character building features in the early versions will be more limited. I'll probably start with some pre-set characters, and then add character building flexibility as time goes on.

Since my comic started with a character exploring ancient ruins, and fighting giant wasps, that is what I have in mind for the earliest version of the game.

As far as development goes : I currently have the basic environment set up procedurally, although I also have tools created to edit the landscape manually. There is a dummy character that moves around (and jumps around) and interacts with the 3D landscape.

As for what I'm working on right now : Yesterday, I was working with sound stuff, so that it is possible to hear when the character bumps into something, or jumps off of something. This mostly works as intended, but there seems to be some strange bugs with the sound volume. I'm using SFML (Simple and Fast Multimedia Library) for sound, but the setVolume function provided by SFML seems to be giving me inconsistent results. I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong, or if it is some kind of bug with SFML.

Graphically, I'd like the make the landscape look better, which will involve adding more variation, and more textures. Of course, one can always keep making things look cooler, and it might be better to instead focus on other aspects of game-play.

I've previously created the code to read in OBJ files, which are good for loading static 3D models. Unfortunately, OBJ files don't support animated models. Therefore, I've been working on new code to read DAE files (COLLADA files). This has been an interesting process (one problem is that different 3D modeling programs out-put DAE files somewhat differently, even different versions of the same package produce different versions of DAE files). But hopefully I'll have animated models in the game soon.

On the topic of animation : The goal is to set up procedural animation, as seen in this Animation Boot-camp video here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNidsMesxSE , which is where I got the idea for my current dummy character (that consists of a bumper-sphere and a lifter-sphere).

I can say more about all sorts of things, but that is probably enough of my rambling for now.

Comments:

chris-tar

That's fascinating that you can do all that with C++!
What do you think of video games made in Visual Basic?
I have some experience with that program because it is easier to learn for me than C.
Please post screenshots in addition to your blogs. You could post the screenshot in place of your comic until you are ready to post the actual comic?

22nd Jan 2019, 1:20 PM edit delete reply

warp9

Re Screenshots : Yes, I will get some screenshots up for you to see (a picture is worth 1000 words and all that).

Regarding the Visual Basic Game question : I don't really know enough about VB to have an opinion on that matter.

22nd Jan 2019, 2:41 PM edit delete reply