Real work tis gonna take a lil hold

as I'm now working on the interim report. Spose its gotta be done but I much rather be doing "proper" work.

Ray queries... sounds more exciting than it is

Been working on ray queries to give entities some way to tell what's near them. Bit trickier than I was hoping as the built in ogre methods haven't been implemented in the Polyvox Scene Manager. I don't think I have time within this part of the project to mess around in the scene manager to implement it so I'm going to have to hack one on top. I think I can get it pretty efficient, and I can still use the ogre methods to get fellow entities; the trick is going to be getting it to use both together efficiently.

Screenshots

Current screenshot of the engine;


We now have a lil program that takes a PNG heightmap and makes a voxel map to use in game. Works like a dream!

Render of early Zeit model

An early render of the Zeit model I knocked up to learn Blender;


The tail end glow will change color to represent Zeits current task/thought.

Colony Blog

I'm moving any stuff I wrote in personal blog to here so that people can read about Colony without being bothered by my crap.

Initial zeit design

Some initial sketches of Colony Zeit design;





for some initial 3D-models see bzr repo

Volumetric scene manager

Being doing some research into how to get the terrain right. I'd like to be able to dig down and build up to get the most out of the game. This is hard to do with traditional 3D terrain as the terrain is usually one big polygon so each modification requires calculating new vertexes which is tricky. Voxel based terrains draw everything out of "voxels" ( think 3D pixel ) so that individual voxels can be removed to achieve the desired effect. Therefore voxels is wot we needs .
Found a great little scene manager for Ogre which does what I need by representing voxels with a mesh so we get the performance of a mesh but with the ability to modify. Tis a bit rough round the edges but I think I can hack life out of it. The guys code seems pretty good and he's a nice bloke.. which should help.

About Colony

From my project brief;

Colony is a game where the player controls a nest of social insects called Zeits. A Zeit is an amalgamation of the characteristics of many different real life social insects, in particular Termites and Ants. The object of the game is to ensure the growth and success of your colony of Zeits against the elements, other insects and rival colonies. The game centers around players making subtle changes to the Zeits and their environment to implement large changes in their behaviour, nest and consequently the success of the Zeit colony. The game will also have a multiplayer aspect where two or more players can set their colonies against each other. In modelling the Zeit behaviour I will look to make use of the research done into Termite behaviour in particular the research done into nest construction.

Strategy for many years now have heavily reused the classic scheme of unit control where each unit has very little “inteligence” of its own and relies on the player for nearly all orders. With this project I intend to turn this idea on its head by giving the agents emergent intelligence. I hope that this will make a new experience which will be unique for players. It is my belief that there are few more resourseful than gamers trying to win a game, and that we can make use of this resourcefulness to further the research with agent based, self-organising, emergent behaviour.

GTD Tasklist here
Launchpad Page here (with BZR repo)