Plan for Thomas "Man of Ice" Lund

First plan ever, so go easy boys ;-)

Last week was quite eventful regarding TGE development for me.

First of all I finally got back on IRC. After a reinstall of my desktop, I forgot to grab xchat and get online again. Its great to be back, see some of the "old" names and a couple of new ones. With everyone still helping the newbies and chatting away - sometimes even about TGE, hehe. Expect to see me in there every day or so - you are warned.


Stephen Zepp had approached me earlier with some questions on how to implement an orbit camera in the Advanced Camera resource I cooked up. After a few mails back and forth with ideas, he ran into his coding bunker and started typing.

He then send me the code for comments, and I implemented it last week, released the resource and to my joy it seems that people are actually using the AdvCam stuff. Entropy even released a resource on top of the orbit part. It feels really good to spend time on a community resource and then seeing people using it in their projects.

After thinking a bit on whats still missing in the AdvCam stuff, I only see 2 camera modes still "open". One being a true RTS camera. Somewhat a cross over between the orbit cam and god view, where you control the camera by "pushing" the window edges. You know - the "red alert" kind of camera that doesnt look at anything special and can be moved in its x,y axis + up/down. The other camera mode needed is a Zelda type camera. One that stays in place (3rd person like) and rotates to look at the player. Once the player has moved beyond a certain point, the camera moves with him.

Both camera modes should be quite "easy" to hack up, so I might be taking a shot at that during summer time. Especially if the weather keeps showing itself from the ugly side.


Spurred on by the AdvCam resource I actually spend my weekend coding a completely new resource, that is already released but not approved yet. One morning I sat here at my computer and looked at my bookshelf - there was the good old Game Programming Gem series, that back in 2000/2001 made me try to code my own 3d opengl engine. In that engine I implemented quite a few of the articles from GPG 1 - the finite state machine and a message routing system. MESSAGE ROUTING!!! Hey - that was one part of TGE that actually was lacking really bad. Non existing in fact.

The day before I read Beffy and Phil talk about their AI stuff on IRC, and it seemed to me that they could actually use this in their code. Turned on xchat, got a hold of Bef and Phil, talked it over with them and yeah - they needed something like that, and no they hadnt yet coded it. Unfortunally Phil is quite experienced in messaging (unfortunally for me that is), and was looking forward to code his own.

We talked it over, and he pushed me on to actually port my old code (from Jan 2001 that I've completely forgotten about) to TGE, release as a resource and make people happy. Their AI pack will contain so much more that I wouldnt take away any of their business (my main concern). Giving it a few thoughts over some beers Friday evening, I started coding Saturday. Quickly I realised that the old stuff was totally unusable for TGE, as it more or less was pure STL and naturally lacking any TGE scripting interfaces.

So I started from scratch, coded Sat+Sun and released Sunday evening. Code is neither complicated or long - but boy its powerful once you start thinking about it.

My only worry is that not many in the community will value it and/or see the possibilities on first sight. Messaging? Whats that? - so you start explaining. Decoupling of interdependency of game entities, more clean code, easier to add new object types and evolve your game, way easier to implement advanced AI behaviour if you dump in a state machine etc.etc. Oh!!!! Coool!! people say. So there is hope if they give it a chance.

I really hope that someone can pick this up and create some of the really fancy stuff you can make. Faction systems, "intelligent" NPC AI etc. And who knows - I might even get my 5 mins of fame if its included in head, but everyone dreams of that one, eh? ;-)


Enough for today about the past - the future ahead.

I'm currently involved in 2 games. One is actually fairly feature complete, and we "only" need to play test and refactor it a bit to make it fun, and then level design and implementation. This game _will_ be released and done. My first finished title *sniff* *sniff*. Its a non-violent action adventure style game - somewhat like Zelda/Mario.

Recent ingame screenshot:

Its your typical pick up coins+items, beat the level clock type of gameplay. Nothing fancy or innovative as such, but its not a genre much seen on PC's. Besides that it does have some fun and new ways of entertaining, so watch out. Some day you might be playing this later in the year. Game is self financed, and we are 2 on the team (a modeller and me). We've grown to know each other quite well (live 20 km from each other) and we can now take an empty TGE and within a day create a demo of most any small scale idea we got. Fantastic, so if we can make a little money here and there, we will go full time into this at some point. Until then we do consulting next to the game dev, and that keeps food on the table

The second project I'm working on is purely on a demo stage. A good friend of mine knows this guy who makes golf guides - the ones that says "use an iron 6 on hole 4" bla.bla.bla. Those you can buy down in the club house.

Within half a day we created a small demo of a real life golf course that will be shown to that guide person very soon. If he jumps on the wagon, then we will have funded development to create a real golf game, with real courses. Potentially 600 clubs with 18 holes each........phew.......

I cant post any screenshots from that, as its quite .....ehm..... full of ingame commercials for that guide persons company. So giving away that name would not be too good at this point.

But I so much hope it to become reality, as it would enable me to hire a few guys to do the golf courses and I would code up the rest of the game logic. Instant full time game developer!!

I'll leave with another screenshot from the action game. Its a render shot of the well you can find ingame.


And yes - we will release a dev snapshot collage soon. Just a little more content first.

Till next time