Word Zen Reaches 1000 downloads in 24 hours!
Saturday, November 27, 2010 at 9:10 AM | 0 comments - [Click to post comment]  
Thanks guys for the support ! For those who has not tried out Word Zen yet, get it from the official website. :D

http://wordzen.liquidrockgames.com/
Posted by Prometheus
Word Zen - Android Word Puzzle Game
Friday, November 26, 2010 at 1:10 AM | 2 comments - [Click to post comment]  
Hurray its finally finished! Liquid Rock Games is proud to present Word Zen for Android phones and tablets. :D

Official Word Zen website: http://wordzen.liquidrockgames.com/

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.

Screenshots:
Posted by Prometheus
Physics Data Format Reconstruction
Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 12:58 AM | 0 comments - [Click to post comment]  
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. *_*
Posted by Lf3T-Hn4D
Grapple With Animation Revision 2
Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 12:04 PM | 2 comments - [Click to post comment]  
Updated the grapple machine with 2 rotating rings.
Posted by Prometheus
Disruptor Weapon FX test
Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 10:14 AM | 1 comments - [Click to post comment]  
Very early weapons FX test for the disruptor weapon.
Posted by Prometheus
Effects System
Saturday, September 25, 2010 at 3:52 AM | 2 comments - [Click to post comment]  
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. ;-)
Posted by Lf3T-Hn4D
2nd Craft Update
Thursday, September 23, 2010 at 2:06 AM | 4 comments - [Click to post comment]  
Finally another update after a long holiday and some projects and it's back to Aftershock :D

Shown here is an in game shot of the 2nd craft in progress.
Posted by Prometheus
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