Hey guys, just to let you know that Project Aftershock is now known as TrackVerse (http://trackverse.net) !Download the early alpha build from the website and start building your own dream tracks!
TrackVerse (short for Track Universe) is a game about
building your own dream tracks and racing on them with friends. Build
tracks from different building block themes and each theme will have its
own set of matching vehicles/crafts to choose and customize from.
Customize your own racing gameplay rules to make your own race
experience unique! Currently in alpha stage version 0.1, TrackVerse is
still a work in progress with many more updates and theme packs coming
along the way and does not in any way represent the final quality or
polish. What you see is what you get. Feel free to provide feedback on
helping us improve the game.
Currently available theme packs:
City theme pack
Post apocalyptic theme pack
Cartoon theme pack
Sunken city theme pack
Future theme packs:
Sci-fi city theme pack
Canyon theme pack
Industrial theme pack
Jungle theme pack
Each theme packs are currently work in progress and more building
blocks will be added to each of them as part of our future updates.
We have just released Word Zen Unlimited for USD 2.99 !
Features: * Advertisement free! No advertisement pop ups for Word Zen Unlimited. * Save and continue your game anytime you like and upload your high scores later.
Changes include: 1. Fix bug on ad buttons not showing correctly. 2. Apk install now installs to SD for froyo. 3. Solved certain input not responding issues. 4. Added return button to exit app in main menu.
Some tips on how to rack up scores in Word Zen quickly:
1. Make plural words. 2. Destroy obstacle tiles whenever possible by making them fall 2 tiles as they produce the most points. 3. Use shuffle often ! 4. If you're stuck in the bonus round, click on the Pass button to skip to the next puzzle fast ! 5. Know your 2 letter words such as: AD, AH, AR, AW, BI, ED, EF, EH, EL, EM, EN, ER, ES, EX, FA, HA, HM, HO, LA to name a few. 6. Know your 3 letter words such as: GEE, WEE, TEE. 7. Common word endings to include are: -ING, -ED, -ER, -IER, -IEST, and -IES.
About Word Zen Word Zen is a simple yet addictive word puzzle game from Liquid Rock Games with a relaxing zen-like theme which will appeal to players looking to test their word vocabulary.
With thousands of official crosswords words to form from, the possibilities are endless!
Features: * Swipe letter tiles in any direction to form new words! * Over 100,000 words to solve as seen in official crossword games! * Global leader boards for players to update their scores and to compete for world ranking. * Use special tiles to your advantage and form new strategies.
Over the past week I've been doing a major surgery on the core Solid State Engine to restructure our physics data format especially on the batching front. Due to the requirement of invisible physics meshes for certain simulations in Aftershock, I had to fix this long overdue feature. Previously, batched meshes from our editor are forced to be static physics meshes thus allowing us to do precise world collision. However, there are times when we don't require such precision or when we want an invisible wall to keep things within a boundary.
Being so, I've redesigned the internal batching architecture to take into consideration of invisible physics meshes. To improve efficiency, I made a new file format to define physics meshes which can both be exported from Blender3D or from our world editor.
After all said and done, a major surgery can be quite an issue. Unexpected bugs started to emerge all over the place. I've probably fixed about 20+ of them already. There's still some more to go at the moment. At any rate, with this new change, our fellow artists will need to reexport their prefabs to the new format. Fortunately scene structure still remains the same. So it's not too big a deal. On the plus side, we get a much more well defined physics system and a more efficient file format. In the process, I've also removed the need of physics definition files for visible static meshes. This will cut down a massive load of unnecessary files which would lower our level file size! Yeay!
Ok. Back to debugging and get this work ASAP. Major surgery sucks. *_*
Wow, this blog post is long overdue. The past few months had been a rather busy month for me. I had to juggle between a few projects which saw work on aftershock slowed down to a crawl.
However, I'm now back to speed. :-D
So today I'm going to talk about our effects system. The effects system has been in my head for a long time. I had been doing lots of thinking through making sure that my idea was sane and useful. I'm rather proud to say that the effects system is very well capable of complex effects that combines lighting, particles, ribbon trails and even animations.
The idea was not a revolutionary one though. What I came up with was a node graph system to define a behavior of a given effect. Imagine blender's material node system but instead of applying on materials, we apply on entities. If you're quick to notice, this idea is pretty much a high level primitive scripting system. Only that instead of using scripting, we build nodes. One could also think of it as shader nodes for effects.
However, to keep things simple, I omitted conditional nodes and forced all value type to be float. Hence we only have float, float2, float3 and float4 value type.
Bellow is an example of how a flickering light effect can be described with the node system:
Figure 1 - Flicker Light Effect Example
To aid the ease of node building, I've also made the node system do auto conversion between the defined types. This mainly means single float can be easily converted automatically to multi float type. Any other combination is not possible as that would be ambiguous as shown bellow:
Figure 2 - Value Type Auto Conversion
Adding on top of that, I've allowed nodes to support multiple slot mode. This is similar to the method overloading of C/C++. The only difference is that the number of input/output slot must retain the same. Only the value type can be different. With this, depending on how the node graph is linked, my node compiler will use the best fit mode for any node processing.
Bellow is an example of how it would work given a mock up node graph scenario:
Figure 3 - Multi Slot Mode Use Case Example
So why do we need this? This is very useful for primitive operations for example Addition, Subtraction and Multiplication nodes which requires different input and output value types for all possible combination.
Once the effect node graph is defined, we can simply bind them to entities that demands the given effect. :-) Obviously the whole implementation and design is much more complex compared to this. However I felt the node graph idea to be most interesting to report about. Imagine the possibilities of extending this into animation systems which interestingly is very similar to the animation blend tree idea.
Oh yeah, one nice effect of the node system is that when designed carefully, we can reuse the compiled node graph on all instance of the same effect in the scene. Also, if written properly, this is actually much more optimal compared to using a scripting engine which I personally feel should be left to handle less CPU intensive logic like game rules.
There, I hope this is long enough to justify for my lack of blog post. I will put up some programmer art effects video if possible when I get the effects system running and tested. As of now, I already have the node graph system and entity binding in place. However, I've yet to deal with all the possible node types I planned to add to allow complex effects. Still, having the base system means we're pretty close to a complete effects system already. So stay tuned. ;-)
Decided to go for simpler icon looks for the powerups which players can pick up along the tracks as the older powerups were harder to identify from afar.
Small real time outdoor test scene to test paging geometry as well as our new water shader materials. Several future wish list improvements include more material blending for terrain surfaces. Further stress tests and optimizations for dense foliage systems needed.
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