By admin on
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Notice: This content is *still under development*, and may not be accessible in the next update for Blockade Runner! (You’ve been warned!)
We're still hard at work on the (secret!) next update for Blockade Runner, and would like to demonstrate another simultaneous feature that's being worked on!
Today's simultaneous development is... custom geometry! Legos were a big inspiration for Blockade Runner, so it's only natural we'd want some cooler “pieces” to use in the game! The custom geometry means you'll be able to use more detailed artwork (flipped in any direction) for things like radar dishes, blaster turrets, pipes, power generators, weapon's lockers, furniture -- anything that shouldn't be a block! This also allows for the ship's frame to use a variety of new shapes including, ramps, corners, and curves to further enhance the design of your ship!
The game up to W26 has shown nothing except cubes, but in reality we had designed the game engine from the get-go to support custom geometric voxel objects (with any orientation, no less!), adding in-part to the slow-down in development during the early weekly updates. With an engine built from scratch to maximize future performance, simple things like "loading a model" can be a rather involved chore (compared to say, making fun things like power systems, missiles, explosions and enemies!), but is a short term loss/long term gain we’ve made to put
Blockade Runner on the right foot.
We’re all very excited about the addition of custom geometry to Blockade Runner and can’t wait for everyone to bolt all kinds of new things to their ship! Oh, and for all you modders out there; Rejoice! You will be able to add your own geometric creations to the game. Disappointed we don't have your favorite Starfleet-issue chair? Download Blender and mod it in!
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By admin on
Wednesday, November 09, 2011
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By admin on
Wednesday, November 09, 2011
There’s an important upgrade for Blockade Runner coming up, however it might take an extra week or so to get out the door, so we thought we’d show some other simultaneous developments that are going on in the meantime!
Today’s simultaneous development is... Procedurally Generated Asteroids! Asteroids in the game need to appear in a hurry while still looking some-what like an asteroid, which means a simple sphere with some pockets wouldn’t quite cut it. To test our generation algorithms, we’d load in 3D meshes to compare the results, and just for fun, we’d load in some other weird shapes:
Smoothing the asteroids (diagonals, curves, etc), implementing crater noise, and generating internal layers, caves, and debri are the next obvious steps, but this definitely is an important step towards stellar exploration in the game! We can’t wait to start hauling out some iron out of the asteroid field to build our hand-made starship!
- Aaron
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By admin on
Sunday, November 06, 2011
Nerd 3 over at nerdcubed.co.uk has made a great “Let’s Play” video demonstrating Blockade Runner! His video touches on all of the major points of Blockade Runner up to Week 28, with quite a few hilarious bits strewn throughout.
If you’ve got a few minutes, give it a look!
We’d like to thank Nerd 3 for making the video, and can’t wait to see more as Blockade Runner blossoms into an actual game!
If you’ve made any videos of Blockade Runner, get ahold of us at support@zanmgt.com and we’ll see about getting them up. =D
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