I’m Sick
It’s been awhile since I’ve updated my blog, that’s mainly because of finals and mostly because of negligence. Those go hand in hand. Eitherway, I’ll try to keep this old thing going considering I’ve been getting a few new followers. Thanks everyone.
As my title says, I’m sick at the moment. Visited my nephews for the holidays and they gave me a wonderful gift - a cold. Or it could have just been the temperature of my room. I need something to blame for this dreadful sickness.
Programming Final (platforming game)
I’m working on a multitude of projects. My latest work was for my programming final, which you can play here. I got inspiration from Diamond Hollow 2. The assignment took me about four days. The engine was provided for me, but I changed a lot to make the game play as it does.
Secret Project: Elevator
I’m also working on a project called Elevator. It’s a secret project that me, Foohy, and Mr. Sunabouzu are working together on. Sun’s been in charge of doing all the art assets along with Foohy. I’ve been handling the coding (not much to code, though). Because of its secreticy, I’ll be able to only provide a few public images we’ve put out. All art is credit to Mr. Sunabouzu, who did an excellent job.
The game, a GMod gamemode, should be coming out pretty soon.
Verlocity Update
Recently I’ve been doing a lot of work on Verlocity.
I’ve optimized the engine and really polished it out nicely. I added a new physics forces system (which after release I’ll continue to add more features like actual physics bodies).
I redid pretty much all of the core engine parts mostly due to bad design choices I made in the past. Don’t worry - it’s all moving along nicely. I just haven’t had the time I had in the past. Luckily the holidays have been kind (other than the sickness) and I have had time to work on it. You can stay up to date on Verlocity here or on www.verlocityengine.com.
Couriette, and other projects
Lastly we got a team together, the guys who I worked with on Opus and Sunabouzu and Foohy. We were working on a adventure platformer called Couriette. Sadly, due to the set back of the engine - we’ve had to put that project on hold until Verlocity is ready.
Particles!
Recently, I had a class assignment that told me to make a particle system. So I went full blast at it. Turned out great!
Went waaay above and beyond the assignment requirements, but I loved making this.
Basically I’m doing a bit of particle pooling, creating all of them when you first load it, then just recycle the dead ones (the ones that aren’t being rendered anymore). This allows for a really efficient particle system. I also used the linked list structure for the particles. Then I went ahead and created emitters and a lot of different features, which are noticeable in the demo below.
I learned a lot from making this, and as such, I’m going to be remaking it from scratch again and creating a new component for Verlocity: verParticles. It’ll have support with sprites and some other planned features I wasn’t able to create for the above demo.
This is my fan made music video of Jeesh’s amazing Nemo remix. I just loved the track so much I had to make a video to go with it.
You can find more about Jeesh by following his Soundcloud at:http://soundcloud.com/jeesh/
You can also find his Nemo song at: http://soundcloud.com/jeesh/nemo
Verlocity Engine Website
We now have a website for Verlocity! Here’s all the links to become part of Verlocity’s community:
Verlocity Wiki, Verlocity Forums, and Verlocity Code.
I’m still working on the main website and also the Wiki. Mind you the engine isn’t yet released, but you can easily track when that will happen very soon. I’ve also published an ‘indev’ version of the engine (on google code) if you want to go try it out before the official release!
Big thanks to my friend Foohy, as he has been helping A LOT with documenting Verlocity and its Wiki.
One of the coolest 8-bit songs I’ve heard in awhile.
A screenshot of my latest mapping project for Phoenix. It’s a large, new-age condo.
I’ll have some more updates on Verlocity later in the week. It’s gotten quite far - one of the reasons I haven’t been updating my blog is that it has been taking a lot of my time.
The demo previously mentioned now in video form.
Switched to Away3D yesterday, have been playing around with the engine for a bit.
Away3D is completely open source and also has a ton more features than Alternativa3D.
What you see in the picture above is Verlocity’s 2D layering system working with Away 3D.
Added Alternativa3D to Verlocity today. It’s an incredibly easy-to-use and straight forward 3D engine for Flash. It’s also incredibly powerful. I was able to integrate it into Verlocity in just under 10 minutes!
Either way, there’s still a few things I want to create wrappers around to make this even easier for Verlocity developers.
I’ll be adding a new component later today called verAlternativa3D. It’ll handle creation of cameras, controllers, textures, and handle all the rendering behind the scenes. That way with Verlocity - you can just focus on creating the 3D artwork and there’s no need for doing the same setup code over and over.
Of course in Verlocity settings there will be a toggle for turning off verAlternativa3D - if you want complete control of the 3D engine yourself or just don’t need 3D.
For my own personal use, I will be using Alternativa3D for background detail and 3D sprite animations.
Here’s a little demo of Verlocity. Just messing around, really. It’s a very simple shooter that spawns enemies based on the beat of the music currently playing, as mentioned in my previous post.
