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[Rayblon]

"The tapestries of this world are woven with death. Horrors ravage villages and cities, terrors stalk the deepest wilds, night is a time of fear, and the world knows no true peace for it. It is not politics or the machinations of man, but something in every working of the world.

If nature would refuse itself solace, the blessing of sanctuary will be bestowed upon it by force. If nature cannot love itself, then it will be made to be loved, and if nature cannot yet live with itself, it will learn to share hearth, home, and nest in time. These Gardens, My Gardens, are sanctuary to all, home to everything, and family to any that find comfort in it. Peace shall reign, if only in these meagre, resplendent havens. I ask of those that hear, though, look up from these havens. Turn to the skies so the Moons in your eyes may meet My own in a single, intimate moment.

Do not worship or thank Us for this place. Knowing happiness and comfort is enough. Knowing love for the Gardens and their Custodians, Our greatest honor. Defending and caring for it beside Us, Our greatest debt. And though We cannot protect all of this worlds creatures, nor return those that are no longer, We can create a living tribute to the beauty of their journey, share the burden of their loss, and continue on in unending remembrance."

[Rayblon]

This'd be neat to see in game as a random structure.

[Sean]

ooooo very pretty

[Moonkey]

Quite an interesting structure... Not sure I've even seen that in other games yet. Maybe a couple times in a mod for Minecraft.

[Rayblon]

Got sidetracked with another writing project. :x

[Rayblon]

The spam...

[pspeed]

The spam...

Yeah, lately the forum has been sending me e-mails about every new post again.  That was broken for a long time.  The past few days it has not been... so I haven't been able to keep ahead of it.

[Rayblon]

*cough cough*

[Rayblon]

A few notes about this.

1. They aren't necessarily right about what they're talking about, even if the evidence seems to support it. It's a glimpse into how we can present empirical inquiry within the constraints of the game world, not necessarily fact. As a piece of lore, it's a document operating within a certain school of thought.(in this case, that school of thought is of a cult of Niddhyl, that may base their understandings of the unseen side of magic on whispers heard by their higher ranked members, likely during a time when the gods were more closely intertwined with the world of men(or believed to be)

2. You'll know what the 'coming threat' was soon. Or maybe not, idk.

3. The core of their interpretation of this information is that life energy = decomposition, whereas a lack thereof inhibits or halts it. It evidences, for him, that a delicate balance must be struck for an undead to last for a long time.

[Rayblon]

This would be a neat weapon.

[Rayblon]

So how are things going Paul?

[pspeed]

So how are things going Paul?

Ok.  I fell off of my productivity spreadsheet because of travel and the kids' school starting.  I had no broken chains at all up until August.  I still have a few chains I haven't broken at all (like playing guitar every day) but game development dropped off.

The problem is that this year I have to get up at 5:30 AM to get my daughter up and walk her to the bus stop.  I'm still trying to find a good battle rhythm that gives me time for sleep and working on games.

Over the spring/summer I started working on a jMonkeyEngine showcase game with one of the other team members.  Just a simple FPS to show off some tech.  I was able to solidify a lot of my thoughts about AI, pathfinding, etc. and get familiar with the new physics-based-rendering (PBR) in jMonkeyEngine.  All of these will have Mythruna consequences.  The other developer was helping with the character art and has since become distracted... so now I'm trying to decide if I clean up what I have and publish it for the community or wait.

My next Mythruna related project is to push the libraries I want to open source a little farther along and make a third-person resource+building game to work out town dynamics and stuff.  It would let me publish the mblock block library and the mblock-based physics engine integrated with the SimEthereal networking library.

I've also been 'wasting' some time playing No Man's Sky with the latest updates. 

Random images to whet your whistle...

SpaceBugs splash screen:


SpaceBugs title menu:


Debugging path finding:


Stand-in graphics for soldiers, creepy head-crab space bugs:


Plasma pistol I made myself in Blender... did a lot of good blender learning this summer: (And learning Substance Painter)


PBR is cool... at the right angle you can even see the smudges on the door panel screen:


Testing random level generation early on... that is left as a future feature at this point:


Reminder of where we left off on the Mythruna open source library projects:



...which is what I'll be getting back to soon I hope.

[pspeed]

And for what it's worth, I also poke at a simple puzzle game from time to time.

It's very bare-bones at the moment and the graphics are basically stand-in.  There's no menu, no animation, etc... but it's playable:
http://simsilica.com/Downloads/balance-desktop-1.0.jar

Clicking a node either gives or receives from all of its neighbors.  The object is to get all nodes to 0.  When one level is complete it unceremoniously pops you into the next level... and it loops back to the beginning when done.

I designed it as a mobile game which is why the aspect is vertical.  I can't decide if it's worth pursuing or not... but every time I put in 30 minutes or an hours worth of time into it, I feel better about it.  So who knows.

[Rayblon]

Neat stuff, especially the PBR, as I've had some experience with it in Minecraft and can't be happier; it really brings the world around you to life. On the note of surface mapping, is there any plan to include POM or native POM support for Mythruna in addition to that? It's my understanding that POM is already implemented in jmonkeyengine with the main issue being performance. Would be nice to see the world with that kind of depth at any rate, even if I lose some frames.

The puzzle game seems neat, certainly nothing I've seen before. I can see there being different elements like charged tiles that send out more units, one way circuits, and maybe even pathways that can only be unlocked by charging certain tiles to a certain point.  It would make for a pretty cool timesink... but then again so would Ethereal Space... or anything else that gives me an excuse to throw money at you. ;p

Also I dont emember if I asked you this before, but I've been using SEUS shaders on Minecraft and colored shadows have completely spoiled me. Are there plans for certain translucent blocks having colored shadows at all?

[pspeed]

When I added color lighting, the light propagation added color when going through colored transparent blocks... but colored transparent blocks have other issues.

Not sure what POM is.

Note: the latest version of the "balance" puzzle now has particle animations and stuff.