Dominium updates

[Pinback]

Been about 4 updates to Dominiums blog about different aspects of the game along with a couple of WIP videos. http://dominium.maksw.com/devlog/[/url]  

[Pinback]

Another blog update from Mak http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/08/15/shadow-rings/[/url] A mini-update this week I’m afraid…I returned to integrating Shadow Mapping, and finally resolved a couple of the ‘daft’ issues I was seeing. I can now render the Planetary scene into a shadow map and cast shadows onto the planet from it’s ring system. But, there’s a but… the quality is – frankly – poor. I’m not happy with it at all – despite using a 2048×2048 shadow map, the quality in scene is dire. So, I need to do some digging about.For those interested in the techie side – the plans I came up with for implementing shadow mapping in Dom are already known (surprise) and are detailed here much better than I have time to do! I also figured out how to apply shadows at various levels of details – and it turns out that’s called ‘Cascade Shadow Mapping‘. So, at least someone else who can do it better has been here before, and kind enough to put up ‘lessons learned’ But, it paves the way for the local scene (ship to ship/station) shadow mapping at least!Book wise, I’ve moved onto chapter 5 now in the ‘pre-proof’ revision. So far I’m making minor edits and blazing ahead – but it’s still scary how many tiny and repetitive flaws make there way past even 20 very careful ‘self reads’! I’m glad to have some help at last In other news – the tiny “other game project” is progressing well, it’s such a simple idea that even 10 minutes coding has a major impact on it, and it’s shaping up really well. I’ve got someone else lending a hand on this one, so it may actually get completed this year…

[Pinback]

Video update for the WIP of the planet rings. :good: 

[Pinback]

Fascinating Wip video and blog about getting down onto the planets.http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/09/03/wake-up-maggy/[/url] In an idle moment, I found myself browsing youtube (the saner parts) and looking at ‘planetary rendering’… having recently worked on the Celestial Bodies in Dom it ‘set the scene’ for my browsing. The youtube videos show such fantastic work being done, with various techniques at play… and I actually have some full-time, solid dev-days I can set aside… I wonder…I gave myself a goal. A single, full-time day to do a prototype ‘infinitely tessellating spherical renderer’ (called Maggy), just to see how well my past thinking would gel with my plans. I also decided to do a ‘dev video diary’ (of sorts).The result is quite long (10min!) and feel free to skip through, as it’s fairly dry on the visuals – but if you’re interested in the techy stuff, this is hopefully worthy of a watch! 

[Pinback]

Another video about the wip of the terrain engine http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/09/08/more-maggy/[/url] 

[Pinback]

Part three http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/09/14/maggy-on-the-gpu/[/url] 

[Pinback]

Part four out about planets. http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/09/24/making-noise-with-maggy/[/url] 

[Pinback]

couple of more update from Mak http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/09/30/another-ping/[/url] My brain is fritzed by the vis-testing fiasco I’m experiencing with Maggy. I’ve spent a week straight doing ‘what it should’ and almost getting it right, then some patch disappears under my camera’s virtual nose when it shouldn’t, and I start venting. And part five http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/10/02/maggy-can-see/[/url] 

[Pinback]

Mak seems to knocking these update out. :good: part 6 of maggy http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/10/07/progress-ping/[/url]  A pre Alpha road map for the game. http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/10/10/pre-alpha-roadmap-released/[/url] Pre-Alpha Roadmap ReleasedPublished on October 10, 2014, by Mak - Posted in General[/url] News[/url] Roadmap[/url] 0[/url] better or for worse, I’ve put up my intended plan for an early alpha. This is subject to being largely untrue! But, hopefully it will show things are moving along, with luck!It’s available from the site menu “Roadmap”, and there’s a widget on the right with the overall progress shown. But, you can take a peek from here I’ve also created one for Insurmountable Odds, for those interested.Sadly the plugin I’m using doesn’t adopt the site theme, and there’s no way I can find to put in a “link back” to the main site, but it will do for now.And, in a planning/organisation-fest of epic proportion, I have now also finally created a public Trello board for the “I Wants” that are driving the game Alpha at the moment!Check it out here! And finally a quick look at planet terrain http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/10/11/ground-control/[/url] 

[sscadmin]

Slow and steady, don't see why it couldn't be done for end of next year. Thats only if the devs don't get to play all these new space games coming out Been a while since we have seen maksw around.

[maksw]

Hey Pinback/DarkOne et al... Yeh I'm still skulking in the sidelines if I could I'd hire Pinback as my PR Officer! He's been doing a grand job of shunting my blog updates up here! I'm still aiming to get something to show off the SCC space station Sol did - do you know if anyone else has used it btw? It'd be cool if someone has. Speaking of which - has anyone heard from Sol of late? I've not heard anything from him for 6 months or more... I hope he's ok?

[Pinback]

Have you tried to PM SOL?Quick question, well more of a suggestion for you about traveling, at the moment I am playing SP2 and have been impressed by the number of different methods you can use to get around the universe ie jump gates, wormholes, rift ways or just turn your engines on and go. The suggestion is this, that Dominium should have both a Jump gate network for smaller ship to use and bigger ships would be able to form their own jump points as well as using the jump gates if their jump drive was damagedThe jumpgate network would be limited in scope but it would take the player further and also it would also give the player an incentive to get a bigger ship so they can get out and explore the galaxy. Update from the blog. http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/10/22/prototype-lancer-mkii/[/url] Howdy… not much on the dev front this past few weeks due to RLAWL (Real Life And Work Life) getting the upper hand. However, I decided to dabble in a spot of 3D modelling, as I haven’t had my hand in for a number of years. This fighter has been tootling around my sub-concious for a couple of decades(!) and it’s about time it saw the light.Excuse the pastel colour scheme – default colours in the modelling package I’m afraid Yet to be finished, or textured.This baby is a Lancer MkII, the super-tooled follow on from the original Lancers which helped build the Sulranian Empire back in the day. Currently in heavy active service throughout the Tactical wing of the Imperial Navy.

[maksw]

Hi Pinback - I've got Sol's email address, having had him make quite a few superb models for me in the past - but I've not heard anything for a while, even his own website is dormant. I'll try PM'ing him through SSC though. As for Dom's 'drive technology' - any and all largely dependent on your location in the galaxy / which civilisation you are "in" - so one civlisation may have a wormhole gate network, another doesn't. Various FTL drives will exist, each with pro's and con's, again depending on the race/tech level of the civilisation you are in. Naval ships in the Sulranian Empire are trialing 'wormhole-on-demand' systems as we speak... Highlighting one point you made though - which I wanted Dom to do from day one - is to allow you to point your ship in any direction, and say 'Engage!'. You can fly wherever you like, no waypoints or targets needed, and provided your ship can handle it. You can even fly outside of the galaxy... though there may not be much point... or might there...

[Pinback]

New blog update and hope you are feeling better Maksw. http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/11/19/off-the-scanner/[/url] One major achievement I made was to finally track down and nail the shadow caster matrix issue I left lying around. As a recap, I was having to compute this matrix on the GPU in the vertex shader for every vertex in the model being rendered, purely because ‘the same matrix math’ on CPU in my own code was producing lots of horse crap. This matrix only needs computing once per model, and then handing it to the GPU shader. So, this ‘bug’ meant a bucket-load of extra workload on the GPU for no good reason. By methodically reverse engineering it on the CPU side, I finally tracked down what was going wrong. My matrix multiplication order is the reverse of the OpenGL matrix multiplication order. As matrix multiplication is non-commutative (A x B != B x A), even though my code read identical to the code running in the shader, my code was producing the completely wrong result. So, fix = goodness.I also added a check to the scanner so it can identify planets with ring systems – which now get a diagonal yellow line through them once scanned. This made testing the planetary / ring system shadow mapping a tad easier (as I kept forgetting which planets had ring systems and kept jumping about trying to find one) but also lead to a ‘nice-to-have’ feature for the player in the UI!So – not much dev there (about 3 hours of normal-speed dev I’d say, but over nearly 3 days!) – but good dev never-the-less. I need to pick up my pace before next week!In other news, Chapter 5 of Insurmountable Odds is back from proofing – and I’ve begun rolling the edits in. Only 9 more chapters to proof! After mulling over my proof readers suggestion for some considerable time, I am going to take her advice and break the chapters up into much smaller chapters once it’s all done. As long as I can preserve the pacing (and she’s made a number of good calls on where to break) then I’m happy. Hopefully you will be too I’d say at this pace it’ll be the latter half of 2015 before I e-publish, but we’ll see.Right, signing off, brain out of gear, and tomorrow I intend to hit the Dev PC a bit harder and sort out all aspects of shadow mapping in Dom (dedicated maps for Stations, and maps for near/mid/far objects in local space).

[Pinback]

Small update about a new ship. http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/12/21/new-gem-corp-cruiser/[/url] A new contribution from PixelDad, fully textured to boot. Shamefully I can’t grab an in-game screenshot due to the half-finished shadow-mapping integration, but here it is in the model viewer looking fairly beefy!Equipped with five double-barrel plasma turrets by default, with an optional four rear mounts for other toys, as well as a high powered energy lance on the rear ventral section. This beast is designed for long range recon missions, and is capable of standing up for itself if the need arises. Nice lets see a turn table vid Maksw.

[Pinback]

Maksw back in the dev trench http://dominium.maksw.com/2015/01/31/slowly-slowly/[/url] Slowly, slowly…Published on January 31, 2015, by Mak - Posted in Dev[/url] General[/url] News[/url] 0[/url] finally trying to get back into the dev-seat, again. So without belabouring the point… onward with the post!I made a small tweak to the HUD scanner, so now contacts are scaled based on their overall ‘presence’ in the scene. This works really well to give you an at-a-glance idea of how far away an object is relative to you – or how big it is. I also fade them when they get too far away, so now the scanner isn’t dominated so much by all the contacts and you can see by eye which one’s are most relevant. It’s a work in progress, for sure – but I’m happier with it’s current state.I’ve also returned to the Trello Development Board’s ‘Doing’ list and began working on navigating the galaxy again. Diving back into the code after so long has shown me how long it’s really been since I touched the game code – I’ve forgotten the intricacies of quite a lot! Returning to the Autopilot and Course systems – I’m not sure if they are subtly powerful, or overly complex… I was aiming for ‘powerful’ when I wrote them, so I have to trust my past-developer-self!

[Pinback]

Short update on the blog about navigation http://dominium.maksw.com/2015/02/12/mini-post-navigation-wip/[/url] Just a quick update to keep the cog’s whirring…I’ve continued working on the auto-pilot/navigation/scene management this week, chipping away at the iceberg that is neatly analogous to the systems I’m working with. One third of it ‘visible’ to the player, the other two thirds lurking under the surface and hidden away from sight.I’ve made great headway, and now can plot a course across the galaxy that neatly exits the current system, and the hops from star to star, entering and leaving each star system until it gets to your chosen destination.

[Pinback]

Nice video from MaSW demonstrating the navigation concept. http://dominium.maksw.com/2015/02/21/navigating-the-galaxy-part-one/[/url] 

[maksw]

New player ship model. http://dominium.maksw.com/2013/12/27/tiny-update/[/url] Malsw how about showing the new player ship in technical drawing format ie top, side, front, back ect as you can't see much in the screen shots. My shame Pinback! I didn't spot this request - I'll see what I can do  And here I'll do a round up of all other queries/suggestions I've neglected on this forum to date - my sincere apologies, but my time/health/life et al - no excuse, but a reason... And thanks for keeping tabs on the old project here - again - it's still appreciated Hope he goes with some self illumination on the ships ie ship lights as Star Trek TMP or Babylon 5. You're darn tootin'! The intent is also to hook these into the ships power systems, so when damaged, they start flickering, and go off altogether if the power system fails. This will take some doing as daft as that sounds - due to the way self-illumination is handled at the game asset level for games. But, I have some ideas Nice lets see a turn table vid Maksw. Coming right up sir... 

[maksw]

Nice lets see a turn table vid Maksw.  Still uploading though - so check back in an hour or so. Got a problem with the shadow rendering on this one... * * Notes down in bug list...