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hamsoft - the second comingRecent Entries | ||
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21st April 2006Ok so no flashy screenies this time but the pview terrain is now generated entirely fractally, and you can walk around the whole planet. Working firstly on different ways of selecting areas of terrain and then later tarting it up for worlds with vegetation and atmospheres. Have fun you crazy mofos. 3rd March 2006Ok my inbox has been flatlined with the amount of requests for a shot with a better texture. Technically actually that's a lie. Well here's one anyways, apologies for anyone still using dialup.  I'm working on getting these textures generated at the moment. ETA in the next couple of weeks. 15th February 2006I've put up the new hamsoft website that i've been working on. It should be a bit easier to use and a bit more browser compliant (although it looks better in firefox than ie. Also in the tradition of most things i do it's not completely finished yet, although you should get some idea of the final product. Anyway it's easily skinnable so if you don't like it or think you could do a better job let me know... The main addition to the site is an rss feed to the titles of our development posts on the official Hamsoft LJ which should help keep you up to date with the latest developments. Over the next few weeks inbetween working on Hamwars i'll integrate the hamwars website and start work on a user registration system. Anyway it's back to work on the universe generator for me, hope you are all well and as excited as us about hamwars as we are (well maybe not as excited as Mark). 13th February 2006No pretty screenshots i'm afraid, but some good news. This weekend we managed to get the server/client working cross network and the performance was not all that bad either, further to that i've meddled a little on the server side and it now accepts http requests! This means that players will be able to request game infomation from the server through their browser (more info on the uses of this at a later date). I've also setup the basic architecture for in game messaging and player structures. So things seem to be picking up after an extended christmas lull... ]... oh almost forgot, i'm working on a new hamsoft/hamwars website that actually doesn't suck...more soon 10th February 2006 Look at the cockpit to see the specular lighting. Bumpmapping is also happening in this picture if you look at the back of the model. Frankly I was expecting it to look a little better than this. I'll keep tweaking it although I will be working on the planetary view for the next week or so... 8th February 2006Hi, I'm EA, the foolish mortal agreeing to do most of the art and music direction on the Hamwars project. I thought I'd update this journal today, as the last couple of weeks have been pretty landmark in the development of this game. I need to pay tribute to the two coders; Zombiepron and especially Slaytanist for his graphics engines. It has dawned on us only recently that this game will not only *be* good, but *look* good. Very good. Not like Doom 3 good or UT2004 good, but technically better than Quake 2, better than Civ 3 good. Best full freeware game out there good. And for a three-man team in their spare time, it's going to be pretty impressive. Slaytanist is sorting our bump and gloss mapping as I type. The voxel engine he made will blow Civ 3 out of the water. Yet the game itself is still so open-ended that the player will be given complete freedom. Not only in the way it's played (Zompiepron's web interface will allow much of the game to be played remotely), but what you do while you're playing. Can you name me another game in which it is possible, yet not obligatory, to genetically engineer, train and weaponise the wildlife on your planets?   Giant Spider model (Feb 2006, 213 vertices, 256 colours) This is the game we all wanted to play as kids. So we're not going to be skimping on the small things. You have been reading a propaganda message on behalf of Hamsoft, by EA (the untouchable). 7th February 200623rd October 2005Work is picking up pace again on Hamwars. We now have timelapse buttons to show the dynamic orbits.. hold them on to watch the planets zip about :) Lots of work is planned for the coming days.. largely tarting up the GUI but a great deal of structural work too.  Here's another one for all you phanz.. 
5th October 200530th September 2005Yey! hamsoft now ranks 14 on a search for 'hamsoft' on alltheweb.com which is more than can be said for google (boohiss). alltheweb is my new best friend 28th September 2005Long time no comment...etc.etc Okay so hamwarz is still alive! yeyboo.... We are on the verge of completing the underlying universe model although when i say on the verge i am actually lying but, you know, it's pretty close. I dare say within a week or so we may have some screenshots to show of our trips through the hamwars universe!
once we have the universe model up and running it's time to get down to the game mechanics! and once we have some kind of basic game ready we will be releasing it for testing. WOWZ!!!!!1 anyway i;ll stick and updated site up soon and stuff when i get time...
20th September 200515th August 2005I doubt it's exactly secure mate but it would be nice to have somewhere to organise our thoughts, we have like 80 pages of craptalk between us and there must be a fucking design in there! Sign ye up and I'll fuckin admin ya! Oh aye.. my idea for the title screen:  Or something :) Bad news with the Hamsoft samplie - leHam was using software he though was pretty distinctive (and, errrm, hot) so he's gonna have another bash with PD stuffs. TBH it doesn't even need to sound half as good as it did but he's a fucking perfectionist so it may take a while :( =======================================>E Got a fullbright-when-selected toggle button - it would be cool to have this actually greying out when it's selected. I'm thinking in a bit of having a list of buttons like sprite data and either writing to the back buffer or the actual background we're blitting depending on whether it's a toggle button or not. Pretty confident about this. I do need to overhaul the way I'm handling buttons though, I reckon we'll have problems with this system when we have a huge number of nested menus. Seeing now why all the old games had icons a fixed size and position (oh yeah, and they could just right-shift the mouse x and get the button number, I get it).. Orbiting: dude I'm guessing the axis of rotation remeins fixed while a planet is orbiting, rather than rotating with it. Because of gyroscopes or something. Do you know if it does? 12th July 2005Did a bit of werk on the HAMWARZ client today. The display is now confined to a box (400*400 I think) although it's certainly changable, with some shitty pixor in the remaining screen as a placeholder. There's a quit button and the name of the planet your mouse is over is displayed. Also the shitty pixor contains a rather badly spraycanned 'starfield' if you can call it that.. I hope I'm handling the buttons sensibly; I realise we will need a fuckload of different popups and other crap so we probably need it a little more versatile. Popups I will do soon but I'm knee deep in this shit and have a fuckload to do! Files in teh usual place. 9th July 2005Fialz in the usual place or will be when I upload them. Right.. after I fix this frigging rotation issue I can see a few directions to go in: Tart up Solarpanel (selection/hovering messages, "Talking to server" message, skybox, confine it to a 'window', controls at the side and crap) <-- we need a gui sketched out for this and pretty much everything else!! Hamwarz Message Protocol(R) Recycle a bunch of crap and start on the Starmap Player data structures Unit structures, and incorporate these into the maps Further screens for the units Fractal generation of planet maps Server-side simulation Any/all/none of the above? Most of these should take a day or two each max but at current rate will be more like a fortnight :) The bottom one will likely take months; probably best to get something mediocre running pretty soon then dip into it when we feel like it. I need a fucking drink :S EDiT> HURRAY! The Y/Z rotation appears done (like, the poles look like they're where they're supposed to be) I'll tell you the truth mate I HAVE NO FUCKING CLUE how I'm gonna get them to spin right. EDiT> X-rot is working. Rolling (7 and 9 on the keypad) seems to have the opposite effect on the angles you would think, which is weird, and 'fixing' it fucks the rest up. How queer. Maybe the matrix ops are wrong? 26th June 2005A fair bit has changed with the ballmapper, phong is now looking a lot prettier and I've set up a nightmap for Earth. Also changed the pallette shading so it doesn't look so 1995 ( :( ), a problem with this though is now the moon doesn't look bumpmapped anymore! And since I liked the effect I might go and code some bumpmapping :) This will add a couple of ops to the innerloop as well as creating a smallish texture (720*360*2 bytes) and a smallish table, should this chew up bandwidth or clientside render speed we could certainly make it togglable. Oh aye I've jacked up the envmap to utterly obese proportions, it will take a minute or two to calc (generation is still unoptimised and it's a 128meg table :O ) so go make a brew or something :D. I've set it so you can change the lot at compilation just by changing PHONGRSBITS and PHONGRTBITS to something a little lower, if you wish. The changes I've made to the phongmapper don't stop there.. you can change it back to an 8meg table and it still looks infinitely better (the way the lightangles were calced was a little fucked before and it was jerking about like an electrician with Parkinson's) //Wondering if we could generate this envmap while the client is DLing stuff? Source, exe and textures are in the same place. UPDATE: exe with 8meg table and two with 32megs for comparison in the zip too. UPDATE: Precalc MUCH faster now; I've not even optimised it, just built sin tables. UPDATE: Added clipping which sort of sets me up to represent this shit in real space and not just screen coords. Grr :) Also I've had an idea for selecting planets (rather than the map painted on them) - create a list of bounding boxes sorted by distance from camera. It will then check the boxes in order and edge-detect if you're in the box (for planets a check by radius would be enough) and give a hovering planet name if you're over it, and set a global pointer to the object. When you click it it will set the planet as selected, zoom you in, let you select shit on the planet and all that good crap. What do you reckon? Getting crap off the planet once it's selected will be another one of those spherical cord transforms I'm starting to really love. Yes that was sarcasm. What the fuck am I talking about we can use the mapper tables which will be better anyway cus we can brush over any, ahem discrepancies between the mapper output and what should actually be there. Since all the distances are crazy in a spacegame I don't think we'll need a z-buffer except a sort of localised one per spaceship but if you think it would be useful it's your call. If we're even representing spaceships as models in the planetary grid (they're gonna be fucking tiny! Except for like orbital superbarges and Death Arks and whatever crazy shit we want) Maybe just a red circle for enemy units, yellow for neutral/non-combat and blue or somshit for friendly. These circles could also represent large ports and cities on the map. Whatever. Not so worried about potential Java speed issues now; so long as we only draw the screen when we have to I'm sure we could get away with 5-10fps, less even. It's gonna be pretty static as games go, wherever we go with it really. Mem is starting to frighten me a little :) How much can you realistically use in a browser applet?!? Of course if we don't go that way it's not an issue. Holy fuck I'm gonna go draw some Death Arks :D 22nd June 2005hamwars is following it's usual stop start momentum, however it current appears to be in the start phase.
Some major things that are changing:
Anyway that's all i have to say for now, other than the screenshot on the main site is no longer a proper screenshot of the planet view. Java3D sucks, however i have seen 18th June 2005Omfgazm!! Dude I don't believe I actually did something resembling useful. What do you think of speed and shit? I mean will it be acceptable runing in Jarvar etc? The innerloop needs a fuckload of work but I don't want to go overboard cus I know it has to be portable, erm yeah that's it. Speed aside I really need to put in some clipping so I can see it moving about. I speak Klingon in all formal dialects and 37 coloquial forms. ( teh coed ) Errm.. btw there is utterly NO error checking so the texture needs to be in the same folder and in the right format. It DOES work with other textures tho (720*360*256 bmp, no compression). I'll stick a moon in in a bit :D //If ye want the source in it's current unfit state give us a shout. Ta mate. 2nd March 2005( A small extract from my AI Wars bug 'Skorpitron', for adult viewing AKA 'How I spent my Sunday' ) 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 19 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 20 rofl Hamsoft Trivia #30739: Mark is a teribel codar! I will post some REAL CODE soon, just fannying around with Directdraw which has no relevance to Hamwars at all but there's no point sending it ya if it doesn't work! 14th January 200517th November 2004Okay i've stuck the screenshot on the website, i am planning on sticking a few more on later. I've also put a couple of links to infomation regarding star and planetary types. makes for interesting reading. Currently working on a system generation program which will encompass this infomation. Within a couple of weeks i hope to have a working server app running on a machine which will allow users to explore the 3d universe it is dynamically creating. I guess you'll have to wait and see :) 28th November 2004greetings troops. Yes it's finally here the very first screenshot from Hamwars:
10th November 2004good news peeps google now lists the hamwars site when searched for: H A M W A R Z 9th November 2004 |
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