Terrain Editor

As a side project and yet another excuse to learn more Cocoa I've been writing a terrain editor. It can generate heightmaps using a faults, hill or perlin noise based algorithm and create a terrain texture by blending seed textures based on elevation or slope. It's kind of a work in progress but the 3D preview is pretty cool.

Physics

I spent some time looking at physics libraries and decided that Newton would be the best for my needs. The API and documentation all lead me to believe that I could accomplish 'physics' based vehicle movement with all kinds of fun skidding. But it would also be nontrivial - shimming in a physics layer this late in the game wouldn't be very pretty. Everything else already moves based on a greatly simplified model which focuses on gameplay over realism. And to integrate my terrain layer I would need to write my own collision and raytracing code.

Oh, and my subversion repository exploded. This will be at least the 3rd time. No more berkley database for me. This is what you get when you give boring problems like databases to hippies. Exploding subversion repositories.

Assault by rainbow

I've been cranking this one out all day, and the screenshot doesn't begin to do it justice. But here they are, some crappy little tanks driving up a hill. I had to strip out all my turret code from the structure subclass and generificate it to work with anything that can use weaponry. But it's much better now.

The decision to add ground vehicles created a huge pile of work, but I feel a lot better about it. There was just something missing from all air to air combat. It takes a lot of the meaning away from the terrain, and there's no way to strategize with base placement. Assault by ground will add a much needed game play element, at the cost of an entirely new set of AI logic, amongst other things. There's also the possibility to do some pretty cool physics with ground objects, so I'll have to investigate open source solutions that are trivial to integrate. Suggestions in the comments make you awesome. Really.

Weapons Display

This is kinda minor, but I just added a weapon display grid thingy. The box borders change colors when the weapon is firing or reloading. I was thinking about creating GL_LINES based weapon outlines, but rendering the actual projectiles ended up working a lot better.

Eventually I will need to add functionality to change key bindings, or possibly even add and remove weaponry using this magicks.

I'm having difficulty making progress as I find myself less sure of what the most important thing to work on is. I'm trying to balance a feeling of completeness and a wish to put a cap on new features. There are so many things that could use minor improvements.

RADARRRRR

Today I added radaring, with cached positions so it updates slower than realtime. The circles are all drawn with GL_LINE_STRIP using a sin, cos lookup table, and I'm using FSAA which makes them look amazingly better.

I'd like the update the target system so it's really easy to follow a single object. I intentionally kept the radar entirely 2 dimensional with no information about height because that extra information makes the entire display much harder to read.

Terrain Collision Avoidance

REPORT on the effects of PRIMITIVE TERRAIN PROBING

Subjects reported feeling nauseous with occasional exploding. Measured temperature and expunged vitals.

Additional funding requested.


:wq