Feb 27, 2013

Blender levelup

Hey!

I took some kind of holidays last few days and didn't really worked on Alone in Space. Rest is as usefull as coding nights. Leave your project as it is for a few weeks and then come back with fresh eyes and ideas.

To be honest, last days I was very unmotivated by this project, repeating to myself that I would NEVER be able to go ahead and make this dream come true.

The amount of work to do on this project is... huge. And I have to learn everything but programming. As I have no money to spend in hiring a 3D artist, I have to create my own assets. Lucky me, I'm very creative, and tenacious.

I worked the whole afternoon and night in learning how to create spaceships in Blender. Thanks to Blender Sensei for his amazing tutorials. In about 6-7 hours I learnt enough  tips to create my first spaceship model.

This is exactly what I wanted for this ship so I'm particularly proud :

Front view

Rear view 

Side view

Bottom view


This space ship is a Shuttle. With this kind of ships, the player will be able to move resources between colonies in the same region. Notice the jaws under the ship : this ship will be able to carry 2 containers.


Feb 7, 2013

Fixes on the Research Tree

Hello there. Quite a moment since I talked about Alone in Space. I had hard days at work and no energy nor motivation to get back on code during nights.

But that's it! I worked tonight!

First, I made improvements on the tree rendering. I was wondering why the game was taking so much time to completely close before thinking about a memory leak. And there it was. I burnt this bug. Now everything is fine! :-)

I also corrected some placements in the tree viewport. Some nodes were rendering outside of the viewport zone.

Node now react on click. Clicking on a node center the viewport on the clicked node. Later, this will open the technology window as well. There will be a small drag animation instead of the current "teleportation".

This image shows debug zones in red. You can see the vertical line defining the tree viewport limit and the zone around the first node which is currently hovered. Nothing very fancy for now.

I still have zoom issues but I'll get rid of this soon (I guess).