Blog for Josef Jahn at GarageGames.com

Project Indigo MMOFPS updates

Josef Jahn — 2007-02-05T00:12:38+00:00

A major milestone has been achieved for Project Indigo - Account handling and warpgates are fully operational. Best of all, the interconnections between warpgates can be changed on-the-fly on the main database server!
Also, no cleartext passwords are being sent from client to zone-server or from zone-server to main db server. It's all rather clean and encapsulated.

A short sequence showing warp travel in action, using two separate zone-servers and the real account db server, can be seen here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnxMAWIeQ0Y

Project Indigo is still hiring of course. If you're a script coder or modeler and want to help with an MMOFPS that has a realistic chance of seeing completion, feel free to contact me. I'm still looking for capable scripters to help get this into playable alpha state.

The website is at http://www.playspoon.com , be sure to visit our forums if you want to see screenshots or just get in touch.

Tuesday Nov 12 8:36

Josef Jahn — 2002-11-12T08:36:50+00:00

Ever wondered what's happening over at the Stargate project?

Ok, so a quick visit to www.planetstarsiege.com/sg1 will show you that the Stargate project is not dead. I've joined and will do, among other things, the AI. My experience with Spoonbot and BotPilot hopefully will be useful to the game.
Also, I'm completely re-doing the whole sky for torque. I've scrapped the skybox, and am in the process of adding a truly parametric sky that doesn't need any pre-rendered textures whatsoever. And oh, Torque looks *so* much better with a proper sky. I'll post screenies when I'm satisfied with the look of the sky.

In other news, of course I'll post all my changes to the engine according to the licence. I noticed that several individuals choose to not share their source, either because they "can't because it affects so many files" or the plain just don't want to. EDIT: I was under the impression that the torque license makes sharing engine modifications obligatory, but I was wrong. However, I'd like to see the already good percentage of shared code to grow further.

Come on and share your code.

For those who wanted to see a screenshot of the sky in it's current form, here's one:

What you see here is a fractally generated cloud texture. Please note that the alpha channel is still set to zero, hence the black sky.

The goal is to make it look like this:

Wednesday Oct 23 19:38

Josef Jahn — 2002-10-23T19:38:31+00:00

The plan in which I rant, among other things, about GCC3 and the implications for MinGW-users...

Um, hi all.

If you happen to have downloaded MinGW just recently, and tried to build torque with it you might - depending on whether you're still waiting for the compile to finish ;) - already know it: It won't work. And no, it's not a simple matter of copying conf.GCC2.WIN32.mk over to conf.GCC3.WIN32.mk - although this is a good idea so you can set the gcc3-options properly. Heck, even removing "-fvtable-thunks" will only save you some warnings, but won't resolve the problems. You might guess the nature of the problem, it's the dreaded GCC3 itself. Not that I blame the compiler for everything - you basically just get what you deserve for not writing clean code (i.e. typecasting properly, etc...)

Ok, maybe I'm exaggerating things a bit.

In other news, a while ago I gave up trying to merge my sky and weather "engine" into Torque. The reason: Lack of true dynamic lighting for the complete terrain and all buildings. The major item I wanted to add was a day/night cycle like in my previous game, Deranged Raid. I hope that someday, someone will just commit a small piece of code into the CVS which miraculously render lightmaps obsolete and do everything in true hardware - but then again, I'm pretty much the pessimist.

BTW, "Rangers" is dead. However, chances are that the existing code and script will be put to use in another Torque project, who knows ;)