The road to...

..hell is paved with good intentions. Yes we're still alive. I know we boosted posting weekly updates regarding the progress of the game.

Progress on the my end has been moving as steadily as it can. As I have been currently moving over the past month it makes it a bit difficult at times to get time to work on P & R. But don't worry I have been.

Currently I've been working on two things. The first being cleaning up and finalizing my design for the collision detection. Since this is the pin that holds the entire game together, I want it to be as close to finalized in design as possible.

The second thing is something new. Lighting. So no more plan old matted cubes anymore. Now it will be lighted cubes!

Lights. Pod. Action!

IGDA Detroit Sept 23rd.

I've been working pretty steadily to get an alpha level ready for showing at the IGDA Detroit. Hence the reason I forgot to put up a post.

Keep your eyes on the site for the next couple of days. I'll have something up soon.

Collision Detection Development Video

Back to the grind stone. I've been out of town trying to move most of my stuff to a new apartment across the state. It's been fun...

Anyway I've compiled the parts of the first collision detection video. Now I just need put them together work on the audio and upload it!

I'm hoping to have this done and be on the

way to the next video in the next couple of days.

Till then this should whet your appetite.

Mini Series: Collision Detection Development

Since I've been revamping the collision detection code of Pod & Rodney, I decided that it might be interesting to do a kind of mini series about the development and the process of implementing it.

These will be anything from explaining some of the basics used in Panda and how they work into Pod & Rodney

First I must acquire a new mic and then get some software installed to get this going. But watch the site for over the next few days I'll be updating with videos.

Ebb And Flow Of Code Design

Code is a sand castle on a beach. Code design is the rising and falling tides. Some times it will reach up and take a bit of the castle, causing you to rebuild part of it. Sometimes it won't even touch it, or it could completely swallow it whole causing you have to start over.

So why the metaphor you might ask? Because no code is ever concrete, not even when a game is released.

This applies to what I'm currently working on. A new type of collision detection system. I won't get into the finer details or than this. It allows for a greater number of different collisions to go on than before. This is useful considering the number of features that we would like to add in later.

How it works is each entity is assigned to a group. Environment, Stationary Intervactive, Movable Interactive, and Characters. Of couse I might add more to add more filtering. For example bricks, ladders and caged ladders are all assigned to the environment group with a bitmask to filter them. Before I was assigning one bitmask to each entity, the problem is that Panda only has 32 bitmasks for filtering.

New Collision Detection Setup

I should give a bit of background info on this before I get into what I'm creating.

How collisions work in Panda is this, a bitmask number is assigned to each collision solid. What this does is filter out collisions that don't match the bitmask number. How I had setup the collisions previously was to assign different bitmask numbers for each different collision.

September Week 1

This is the first post for the month of September! I know that I said that I'd be posting a demo of game and everything, but at the moment with everything like the new tile set coming down the pipes, it might be for this month's media release.

Environment Mapper:

More tiles than a deck of cards. Fifty-six to be exact. I have to create a function that will handle which tile to place and where. I'm trying a number of different methods to get this to function, anything from having it already placed into the map file or doing "on the fly" when the level is loaded.

If I get something function correctly I'll probably post a video demo of it. At the moment It will probably have about nine different tiles each represented by a different color, representing one of eight directions and center.