Flying a desk in bad weather

I don't like this new "blogger" interface at all. Nonetheless. This is a post I kept putting off but it's not all bad news so I'm comfortable making it now.

As some of you are already aware my funds for this venture expired at the end of March when it ceased to be a full time enterprise. All time on the project is whatever I can scrape together (and justify) between other work. Currently I'm under contract to finish a book on terrain modeling for programmers and artists using GROME 3.1 for Unity, UDK, iPhone and Ogre3D. I have to say it's been a blast working on this. A wise man one put in his forum sig "Best way to learn is to teach others."

In it I'll be covering diverse topics such as world scales, FPS engines, terrain tiling and LOD, procedural generation of topography, textures, importing DEMs and exporting terrain so it will run on Unity iPhone and more.

Asynchronous terrain tile loading was something I was researching for the next iteration of the Combat-Helo engine which is why I ended up being asked to write the book. Hopefully I'll be in a better position to put it into practice (beyond the examples in the book) later in the year. Expect publication around end of August/September, if only for my terrible puns. Too bad nobody seems to be hiring to do this stuff.

Watch out for: Grome 3.1 Terrain Modeling with Ogre3D, UDK and Unity3D
ISBN# 978-2-849529-18-2

Coming to a bookstore this Fall.

But what about Combat-freeking-Helo?

Only getting a few hours a week to tinker is not enough. The problem is interest from debts incurred during development can no longer be supported out of my own pocket. Costs of hardware and licenses not to mention time (Dave didn't get paid at all, I owe him a massive beer tab and a luxury foot-massage - at least) need to be addressed. In addition legal costs of releasing can't be met, and they are necessary today, more so than ever.

It is a frustrating situation. Kickstarter has been mentioned by some readers. They are popular atm, seems every man and his dog is funding re-makes on it. Unless I can find a business development manager to set-up a US based entity it's not going to be an option for us. I don't have the time or experience of US business law to set one up. One UK developer (Carmageddon) recently had to do just that, I envy them.

From the start I clearly said I wouldn't work on the project unless it was funded, when that funding didn't appear I went ahead out of my own pocket but knew time was limited. If we could literally kickstart this thing and give it what it needs (business development, professional audio, animation library, second programmer, Dave's beer tab) to the tune of about $20,000 we're good. That's the sit-rep. When I get current commitments out of the way I can devote a little more time to fix pressing issues.

As for the work that is being done:

• I redeveloped the audio script for the Firing Range. It would be nice if we can at least get the minimum amount of voice work done to bring life to the cockpit.
• LUA scripting of mobiles is partly complete. Need to create nav-grid data, still outstanding.
• Flight model still down, forces are not getting updated and attempts to debug have not met with success. Will be something simple but like finding needle in a haystack, time intensive. Came up with strategy to deal with this thanks in part to the Leadwerks Community Project guys.

Mossie - "Victory Stings the Loser"

Paolo has been busy with his own family commitments and found time to finish off the game's mascot, looking excellent in my opinion. I hope to have some made up into squad patches for a limited edition release (if only because I want one on my jacket so I might as well get a bunch made up).

He's been brainstorming game-play record keeping ideas, some of which will make it into the game as they are way better than mine and as it turned out, easier to implement from an art point of view.



Moving on to other things. It's my personal blog so I might as well indulge myself and write about what else I've been doing.


Dungeon Crawlers

I started a small series on "Procedural Content Generation". A tutorial on building an old-school dynamic Dungeon crawler in LUA. When creating the combat-helo vehicle scripts I realised I was missing some subtitles of LUA, this has been a good opportunity to explore it. Here's links to the first 3 parts. The final two parts will be posted after I get my current book chapter off to the publisher.

  - Procedural Content Creation Part 1
  - Procedural Content Creation Part 2
  - Procedural Content Creation Part 3


Proland 4.0 goes OpenSource

Back on the subject of terrain, some great news this month as Proland 4.0 went opensource under a dual commercial GPL3 license. If you're not familiar with Proland it's the work headed up by French researchers Eric Bruneton and Fabrice Neyret. While they were at the time reluctant to license for militaristic applications we were quite interested in using it for a Search and Rescue application (the project later became tied to Unity and using GROME as a world data import tool).

Here's the text of the announcement:

INRIA is pleased to announce that Proland has been released in Open Source:

http://proland.inrialpes.fr

Proland is a C++/OpenGL library for the real-time realistic rendering of very large and detailed 3D natural scenes on GPU. It is capable of rendering entire planets from ground to space. Proland is released under a dual GPLv3/commercial license. You can try it by downloading the precompiled Windows demo at http://proland.inria...r/download.html.

ZOMBIES

The Leadwerks community recently got together to start building a Zombie FPS. I'm not doing much of anything except this time I'm doing it in C++ and using TinyXML to do all the game loading and saving. Just watching some of the guys put down animation code here, subway level designs, weapon code. Quite inspiring. Everyone seems to have something to bring to the party, even if it's just my two tins of Dutch lager.

I think the "Worst Case Scenario" game idea is a good one. Giant ants, a 53.5ft tall woman, amorphous blobs, zombies, walking plants and secret nuclear tests all thrown into one bad day in Smalltown USA is a Steam classic waiting to happen. Did I leave out the alien robot and killer rabbits? How foolish. I look forward to playing the LCP (Leadwerks Community Project) game which is already taking shape.

Parting Shot

As usual, if there's any major announcement it will be made here. My twitter feed tends to have a high signal to noise ratio.