Securing work our PW - GG::IoM(Blog4);

This month there's 4 things I happily will share with you guys.

1st I have been accepted into a 2.5 years code based education. What the, aren't I 43 and what the does it mean. Well as it has been extremely hard to find coders willing to step in and work on a project as large as a mmo, I had to jump seats to do the game code. Doing this coding on the fly, reading tutorials showed that I needed to improve, and taking actual classes would be the best for me to get along in a steady pace. And it allows me a minimal monthly income to support bread on the table (A lot of other income projects are laying extremely low as I work on IoM) so that I can focus.

And this will time fine with the duration of the game development. And who knows, I might even find some additional teamsters in the classroom ;)


2nd We have talked a lot about our models and their skins (No. of Textures) and the planned meshes to be attached (gloves, greaves, etc.) in our team. And as we have understood TG(E/EA) both renders each texture on a model once and the meshes to be attached would be a animation pest. So we brainstormed for quite some time.
Result is that we will have 3 different types of player model meshes to resemble light dress, medium armor and heavy armored players. This makes the mesh animations more controllable we think and as the light player is dressed in 6 textures, the heavy is only dressed in 4 textures as this picture tells:



That does in fact mean that 10 light dressed players fighting a boss mob equals 15 heavily dressed players for the graphic card. As it is not the Pc power nor bandwidth that is the main problem for most players I think this is a good turnout for us.


3rd Code wise more and more things are falling into place for me. And something that is really simple struck me the other day. Player to environment interaction is in fact object-object-object and nothing else. Whether it's a sword planted in the skull of a goblin, an axe slashed at a tree or a shovel stamped into a bog.
-it's all Object::Player - Object::Weapon - Object::Monster or Object::Player - Object::Tool - Object::Resource or any other combination. And as if that was not brightening up the bulb enough the game mechanics that makes the above effort worth it are all the same.
No matter if its Primary::Default::Combat::Blades or Secondary::Learned::Survival::PickLocks skills they all work the same (I think the below example should explain it too)


And then move on to either the increase skill math function or the item detoriate function.

I have also a working broadcasting timer values for our Day/Night GUI are working but I have an idea for improving it further. Races beside human that the player can interact with are planned and structure is in with dummy models as place holder for the time. And I am currently also looking at making inventories so that I can have attached values to items stacked. (Type::Name::Purity). This is needed as the purity of resources is vital to our game.


4th As I would have loved to throw in a load of fluff. This quarter's blogs aren't going to be like the old ones. This is the time of hard and gritty work. So the loose hand spreading all those concept arts and smart words are steady at the keyboard. But as we did cross the first quarter line in the DG game contest leading the field we at least have proved that we understood that contest fully, and tried real hard to adhere to its boundaries alongside the hard work on the game itself. Not at all times the most wanted job, because you have to work real hard and be on the needles all the time, to actually have anything to blog about weekly. I do though think it would have been a good evaluating tool for us all in that contest, had we the option to see the actual point list so that we could evaluate our effort in said contests various areas.

But, shady placing or not we will keep up the hard work and try yet again to be crossing that line covered in yellow. How, quite simple by spending this quarter getting a load of game mechanics in place and at quarter's end show you some in game graphical and game mechanic descriptions and Flowcharting away.