I'm still here.

Hello everybody.

I realize I've been a bit of a recluse recently, and I apologize. As usual, school and work are keeping my development schedule tight. My OpenGL class is a ton of fun though, and if I'm lucky I'll be able to do some undergrad graphics research over the summer under my professor. I also discovered that I'll most likely be graduating a bit earlier than I thought I was going to (I planned for 2 years from now, but it'll probably be just over a year), so I should start preparing myself to enter the "real world" pretty soon. My ideal is to get a respectable gamedev job right out of college, but if that doesn't work out I'll continue my indie dev time on the side while working at a "real" Computer Science related job.

Anyhow, I recently ported the Adventure Core to TGB Beta 3. There were a couple minor tweaks that needed to be done, but it was a mostly flawless port (Thanks again GG!). Now, since the Adventure Core has been in development since 1.0.2, it currently has a heavy reliance on TileMaps and a several algorithms that were written when I was still learning TorqueScript. Now that I have access to the Level Editor scripts, I've started the process of reverse engineering the Level Editor to allow users to drag and drop the objects that the Adventure Core is reliant on directly from the Level Editor sidebar. This will of course also require me to make pretty significant modifications to my current code to load .t2d files instead of TileMaps. I'm hoping it'll be a smooth transition, since using the Level Editor will both increase the user-friendliness of creating levels and take away a lot of the overhead that TileMaps are currently supplying.

In addition to my optimizations, one of the last "little" features I added one night was automatic shadow generation underneath the characters. A "light source" can be defined at any point in a level, and all of the characters in the scene will have a shadow underneath them that changes size and direction as they move closer/further to the light source. Since this is 2D and I'm not doing any ray-tracing or any "real" calculation like that, it's just an estimation. Regardless, it adds a nice little touch and was fun to write to break out of the monotony of code restructuring/GUI touch-ups.

Ooh...shadows.


As for now, I'm still shooting for mid-summer for a playable demo of Issue #37 and at least a beta of the Adventure Core to be released. This project has been a great experience so far, and hopefully in the end our feet will be a few steps closer to the door.

I just need to make sure my shoes are tied.
/Jared