Monday, June 23, 2014

Setting up Server and Client

Hey! Daniel writing,
Today’s post is mostly technical, again.

Possibly I will have a second programmer soon, who will help me do stuff quicker, so I can focus on more aspects of the game, rather than just programming.

In the last week I've been focusing on core aspects of design and efficient server architecture. So far, I've set up gitbucket and dynamic library dependencies for client and server. I've chosen Kryonet for simple tcp/udp object sending between server and client. It is easily scalable through a great and simple API with really quick serialization. Tomorrow, I am going to focus on connecting and sending map data over TCP.

Below you can find some trees in their current state. They are placeholders and will change once the art style gets chosen. This will be decided after pre-alpha I think.


Well that's it for today.


Have a good day~!


Friday, June 20, 2014

Rewriting the game


Hey, Daniel here,
Yesterday, after battling with lights, XNA/MonoGame, shaders, and GUI, I've decided to switch back to LibGDX. Dunno why I’d decided to use XNA/MonoGame in the first place...

Below you can find the list of reasons for switching over to LibGDX from XNA/MonoGame:
MonoGame uses terrible shaders.
MonoGame is DirectX/OpenGL, so I don't really have control over these, unless I really exhaust myself searching through their code. I have also never used DirectX.
No GUI in MonoGame/XNA, LibGDX has one of the most awesome GUI systems I've ever seen.
I have more experience in using LibGDX.
LibGDX allows me to use low level functions of OpenGL, while still having big, high level API.
Once again LibGDX GUI.
I can use box2dlights in LibGDX.
I had experience with box2dlights before.
LibGDX API ++++++
MonoGame/XNA content pipeline...
I would find more reasons but I don't really want to waste time, going to code~!

See ya

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Air and its' effect on gameplay



Friday, June 6, 2014

Millions of blocks


I have just tried to generate an island the size of Graham Island. Just a little more than 150km in length. Aaand I have cancelled the experiment after 2 hours of waiting.

Stats:
blocks in total - 145010400
blocks width - 241684
blocks height - 600
block generated ~ 24506758
RAM usage - around 6gb
parsed 40859 out of 241684 lines (16.9%)
time taken to generate - experiment cancelled after 2 hours

estimated complete time - 7h 6m ~ 9h

Init Post

Hey,
I am Daniel, the creator of The Islands. I have decided to create this game due to the lack of real survival games in the game industry. I have been inspired into making it thanks to games like Stranded 2, Terraria, Starbound, The Forest, and the movie Cast Away.


My main goal for this game is to make it fun with kind of real aspects of survival, while at the same time keeping the world mystic and open to travel, well, at least after beating the hell out of dangers that will try to stop you from doing it.