Alpha 3
It's been about a month since our last update and we've been pretty busy putting together the physics and collision. Along the way we've upgraded the lighting a little bit as well.
Every object in this room can be pushed around and shot. It's a lot of fun barrelling around messing up the aliens office.
It's not likely that we'll have that many objects in a room but it's nice to know we can if we need to. We're using Bullet Physics which is basically the industry standard for awesomeness.
Releasing The Editor
Anyone who has ever written a video game editor knows that they are a lot of work. We needed a custom editor for Smith and Winston because both Unreal and Unity engines didn't quite work with voxels in a way we though would maximise Smith and Winston's potential.
There are many upsides to writing your own editor. We get exactly what we want. The engine is effectively debugged twice and both the editor and game share code. So despite it being a lot of work it's still useful.
We'd really like to release the editor to the public to let them edit and create new levels for Smith and Winston. The only caveat being that it needs to be rock solid so we don't disappoint and spend all of our time supporting players and not making games. Of course we'll only do this is players want it.... otherwise what would be the point.
Here is a video of the editor in action, editing the scene from the previous video.
Still time for Dreaming up concepts
While at the pub before a gig we were talking about Smith and Winston and one of our more sober friends said why not do a boss like Space Invaders but with skateboarding. We all laughed but then Charlie and I looked and each other and the Space Invaders idea was gold. So Charlie mocked up a desert level boss based around the idea of the relentless mark of space invaders. I can wait to code it up.
Anyway, that's it for this update. Thanks for reading this far or at least scrolling this far.
I thought you treat every object as a voxel set, so when a bullet hits one voxel element, it is deleted from the set, making possible gradual destruction of objects.
Realtime scanning of sets could be possible for object destruction if you would made the game turn based. Then only sets that were hit with a bullet or grenade should be scanned for hits and appropriately reduced.
Theoretically this should result in your voxel objects being gradually missing more and more parts, thus destruction.
Later: objects voxel sets breaking apart by defining tiny zones at objects center, these when hit would make the objects split in half or a third of a chair would broke off.
Certainly for bosses and set pieces (like the space invaders boss battle) we'll make everything voxel based but inside the rooms the collision becomes far to expensive on low end machines. It's possible but we're gonna need the CPU for other, more interesting, things.