Going Retro

Having gone over lots of my old code and effects looking for a project to work on and get finished, I struggled to find anything I felt inspired to code. So after spending more time going over my old code archives, I came to the games I wrote back in 2002/3 and while some were pretty good, others were never finished. The code for almost all of them is by my current standard very poor, there's no OOP at all but then the language they were in didn't support it, but there's no proper structure, no functions its all a mess of gosubs which while they work are not very well thought out at all. At the time I hadn't long come back to coding from a long gap stretching back to the Amiga days, so I can forgive the bad code style a bit. Anyway to get to the point, I have decided to recode some of the games in bmax taking advantage of a lot of the new things I have learned over the years and hopefully I can create so cool retro inspired games worth playing.

I still plan to put some of my recent opengl experiments to use in a demo related effort but it can take a backseat while I attempt to get a game done first.

Time to Code again

Well I have finally cancelled my WoW account, havent actually been playing for well over a month due to RL issues but was totally bored of all the content having killed 99% of it with in the first few weeks of the expansion. Dont know at this time if I will ever go back.

So now I have lots of free time I think its about time I got back into coding and to start with I think I shall finish learning OpenGL, move onto GLSL shaders and maybe take another look at Directx stuff once I have one that.

Will continue most of my coding in bmax since its a great little language, can always use c/c++ if I feel the need but for most things bmax is just nicer for me to tinker about in.

Going to try and get a little demo scene style intro coded, been a while since anything came out of the TTD stable since myself and zawran been busy with other stuff. Probably do some cheap retro thing since I like retro effects :P

A New Year

Well its a new year, a new WoW expansion and I already have 4 max level characters, been raiding for a few weeks and killed half the raid bosses. Dont think its going to hold my interest everyday anymore so I guess I will be trying out some more F2P mmorpgs.

On the coding and OpenGL front I have done nothing for months and months, tho I still check the forums and look what everyone else is up to.

Found a new interest in reading comic's and graphic novels, always read the odd one here and there but both DC and Marvel were hard to find were I live so I have been buying there black & white reprint collections of 60's/70's stuff. Enjoying it alot, wish I had full color versions but no way I could afford that, these collections are over 500pages worht for very little money.

More F2P MMO's and God Of War 3

Have played a few more free2play mmo's and overall they have mostly been good and enjoyable but the last week I have spent more time playing God of War 3 which I finished and enjoyed alot and I also decided it would be a good time to finish the second game on PS2 since i was near the end anyway. There great games and I hope to see more from the developers along these lines, maybe set in some other mythical era or age :)

Free2Play MMO's

While I am still playing WoW in the evenings for raiding, (7 bosses down on 25man heroic ICC), I find that I dont feel like playing it during the day leveling or grinding on my alts. While looking over forum posts to do with 3d modelling I came across shots and a video link for a game called Allods Online, after some research I downloaded it and gave it a go and found it to be pretty decent, good graphics and nice class design, but then a patch hit that for awhile made the game unstable so while I waited for a fix I started to look at what other f2p mmo's are out there. As it happens there are hundreds of them, from well known ones like Runes of magic and silkroad, to lesser known ones.

I have given a few a go, Runes of magic is ok but I wanted something alittle less wow like, enter Jade Dynasty, an oriental styled mmo with very impressive graphics for a free game and a nice clean interface design. Have found myself playing this a fair few hours and while I have basicly been soloing everything its felt fresh and new. Will be looking at more of these free2play games in the future as it seems some of them are very enjoyable even if you never go near there cash shops.

More Experiments in Blender

Been having some more fun with blender, made a sort of demon head sculpt then started to mess around with the materials and created this render, makes my basic model look pretty cool.

For a free application its a very powerful tool, there's far more to learn such as textures and lighting but its fun to mess about with and see what i can do.

Blender

Having been looking for a 3d modelling software and trying a few out, I decided to give blender a go since there working on a new version, while the 2.5 release is currently alpha 2 it seems abit unstable, so I installed the older 2.49 release. The interface is not like anything I have used before but after some hunting around for information and a few tweaks to get myself a quad view going, i have had a fw quick goes at making something. Havent yet worked out all the polygon modelling side but I already like the multi-res mesh sculpting mode.

Here's a shot of my interface and a quick sculpt test.

Hopefully given a bit of time I can learn to make more interesting stuff, but for a free application its fun to mess around with.