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I’m sure some people have seen a picture of me with a klingon knife or a jem h’adar gun or my bow and arrows and think I’m some weapon obsessed maniac. This isn’t true.  It’s just con-incidence that I spent yesterday driving Chieftain tanks, self propelled guns and APCs. It was a Christmas present…

Here’s me checking out my new vehicle. It has worse mileage than my peugeot, but I suspect parking is easier, or at least more flexible.It was the most comfortable vehicle to drive, you actually have room to move your legs. Its also the the only one where you had to do gear changes as you drove.

This is me driving an APC. It was a total bitch to drive. The tank was way easier. I almost sent the thing tipping on one side during some particularly excitable cornering.

And here was my fave drive of the day. An abbot Self-propelled gun. It was much easier than the APC, and it actually shifted pretty fast. It’s weird driving something that has a big huge fuck off gun barrel clearly in your line of vision.

So tank driving is another thing I can now cross off my mental list of silly things I need to try.

Jack (my youngest cat) was in fine form today. I opened a bedroom window and he was looking out of it, then decided to leap out and grab the top of the open window with both paws. I don’t think he had planned ahead as he now dangled by both front paws from an open window with no easy escape route. Almost immediately he lost it and fell.

Thankfully he fell maybe 5 feet onto the conservatory roof. and he seemed fine, albeit slightly baffled. I’m sure it’s all in a days work for him. He should concentrate his energy on defending the kitchen from the black and white cat that comes in at night to eat his food (caught him twice). That cat can sniff food through TWO catflaps in an airlock-style setup, so he must be hungry.

Today I’ve tried the worringly slow-loading Empire:Total War demo, and started work on making those fiddly German language characters show up for a potential German-language copy of Democracy 2.

That’s the name of the new game, as officially announced here:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/02/13/gratuitous-space-battles/

I’ll have lots more to say about it in the next month or two :D

It seems small indie companies can still turn out very competitive space sim games. check this out:

http://starwraith3dgames.home.att.net/evochronlegends/about.htm

I tried the demo earlier and was very impressed. I’m not sure how big the company is, but for a non-famous developer this is pretty awesome stuff. It’s good to play new space games right now, when I’m working on artwork for my own space game. BTW, finally got zooming in and out working fine, so the game has a bit more visual depth to it now. All I need to do now is make sure everything still looks good at twice the size (or four times the size), which probbaly will take weeks…

All my previous games have had quite a simple main loop to them, in theoretical terms, because mostly they were turn based, so you are responding to GUI events or doing end of turn processing. Even my old space game StarLines INC adopted the simplest system in each loop tick which was this:

ProcessStuff()

DrawStuff()

over and over again.

The new games ‘real-time’ bit, has a LOT of stuff going on, and there is a whole bunch of stuff that really doesn’t need to be processed every frame. Lots of it only needs doing five times a second at most.

So today I split things up into

CheckIfWeNeedToProcess()

DrawStuff

CheckIfWeNeedToProcess()

DrawStuff()

etc. of course, the stuff like ship movement and animation all gets processed every frame, otherwise there is no change and you are wasting time, but stuff like updating target selection and checking shield status is now only done 5 times a second. This speeds things up a lot.

The problem I still need to solve is that I do all that processing in one chunk, which might stutter older PC’s. ideally it would be a seperate thread, but that might be a total nightmare to code and debug. I’ll probably split the data into chunks and manage it in discrete subsystems at some point tomorrow.

I also added a new spaceship graphic, and I’m getting the hang of making them look less like stock models now :D