Omg. I have become a total slacker the last couple of days, no updates here :( I didn't had much time over christmas to code, but I read some more of my Rapid Development book (see last post) and it is still interessting and insightful. Yesterday I still was
in vacation land and had to force myself to get back to coding ^^
I also reconsidered some choices I made and came to the conclusion that this project was
originally started to make a quick little game with DirectX9 in c# and also to write a new
base engine for upcoming DirectX9 projects. I did obviously spend too much time researching
shaders (DirectX9 fx high shader language)
and saw last week there is no way to implement that nicely in 2 weeks (when the game is running
with all the other parts finished I will reconsider implementing shaders). For the engine part
of the deal this is still great work and I have a lot of base classes for any shader effect
development ready, but for the "quick little game" Lost Squadron part it is not looking so good.
It is a conflict of interests because finishing up something quickly does not work hand in
hand with researching and implementing new techniques. For this project I think it is better
to focus on developing a solid base engine, next project will be planed much straighter.
Yesterday I collected a lot of effect graphics and sounds and made some new ones. I got
now a nice collection of effects with graphics and some funny sounds for the effect engine
and made a couple of effect types (parameters, testing, etc.), but when adding more and
more effects it became very obvious that this would be a great think for scripts. Instead
of hating myself later for not using scripts right away, I just went crazy and implemented
the whole effect system in LUA scripts and can add new effects there without changing
any code of the engine. I did the base code for that a month ago (check out LUA.NET for
doing that in c#) and have read the great book Programming in Lua by Roberto Ierusalimschy.
LUA links in case you are interessted:
The effect engine needs still some testing and I haven't worked
with lunit yet (will do that tomorrow), everything should be up and running tomorrow and
I will post a new screenshot with some nice effects then. The rest of the base classes
except wayfinding and enemy ai is also pretty much complete, so I hope I can finish up
a small demo till New Years Eve (driving around, shooting at some stupid enemies).
Sorry for no screenshot today and sorry for the long pause. Fabian is ill (my intern
helping me out a bit with Lost Squadron), hope you get better till next week :)
Tomorrow the LUA effect engine should work and I will post a
screenshot of the actual gameplay finally (I want to kill some stuff).