#0ad

Now that I have entered the realm of 3D. Many exciting avenues have opened up. So in order to improve the quality of the end-of-year project showcase. The miniatures ideas has been extended:

Noises have been made about creating a collection of miniatures to compliment the game we are creating. The intent is to allow people to change the locations of these miniatures, so that they can create their own miniature village.

It becomes one of my favorite games.

If you like to play with me just dm me.

(That’s a Third Eye Blind lyric, for the youngsters out there.)

I thought this week a little about the physical weight of all my written words. In one respect, the weight lessens by the year, as data storage devices grow larger. Perhaps it should be standardized -- 1 nanogram = 1gb, regardless of future advancements. No, not really, but what I was thinking was how much space my thoughts take up. I’m a professional writer, after all. My thoughts mostly wind up somewhere. In my younger days they were written lists, fiction stories, journals, all handwritten, because I was able to focus better that way. A decade of booze, drugs, and women made it such that I was going to be somewhat distracted anywhere, and plus my first real writing job was online, so I got the hang of doing all drafts on the computer. Currently I even write my drafts in a virtual word processor called Google Docs.

I’ve got a lot of problems in my personal life I’m resolving. But my bills are paid, so there is that.

She sometimes laughs to herself all day.

I’m still sober. Over five months now. May 17th would be the last time I had a drink.

I have a programming project I want to execute. The cool thing is I feel prepared to do it. It’s going to pay some funds. In Bitcoin. So that makes me happy. Good to have side projects. I’ve been playing a lot of OpenTTD and 0AD. Truly I need Windows for nothing. I had purchased the new Age of Empires reboot, but no one is online there. 0AD has a better game play at this point. That makes me feel good about open source.

It is nearly ten days since I posted my last blog post. I just have not had a good chance to write. Most of my time has been spent working on my University project. An RTS game with a focus on city-building.

So far, I have implemented hunger, happiness, and the unique resource system (more realistic resources which are finite & localized).  The game is now “playable”.

This post is just a quick overview of the changes that I have made to the editor since I last worked on it.

I changed the name to “RTS EDITOR” as we plan on releasing this to the general public, and 0.E.D. even though interesting, didn’t really stand for anything.

I also added a settings ribbon, and descriptions to the selection cards.

Mostly finished the entity page. I will need to add a button for creating new entities from a template, however Quentin has made sure that for now at least you can edit existing entities.

In order to work on my university project for the semester, there needs to be a base to work off. I have decided to start with the Pyrogenesis engine. It was developed for the game, 0AD. 

The main reason for picking this engine is because both the engine and the game is open-source (plus all the visual assets are creative commons). This provides a nice starting point for the endeavor, where a lot of the boilerplate work and visual assets are already there. This leaves my team members and I, to focus on what really matters, the concept, design, and mechanics of the game. The Pyrogenesis engine currently stores all of its modifications in text files. The documentation is not so expansive and each file can reference a different file in a different location. This can make it difficult to modify things as there may be five different files to create and edit just to create a new building in the game. In order to make this more efficient, I have programmed an editor for the engine, in order to make changes and additions much more user-friendly.