Bulletholes

I finally got around to implementing bullethole decals that are blended into the vehicle skins in Darkwind whenever they are hit.

The code is just a slight rework of that already used for custom decals; the major thing holding me up on this one was the problem of how to know where in the vehicle’s texture they should be blended. I have been in possession of some experimental ‘3D world to texture co-ordinate’ code since being given it by a developer on Garage Games a few years ago, but never got around to delving into it.

What I ended up doing was much simpler: place the decals into a random position within the region assigned to the vehicle facing (front, rear, left, right, top, bottom) that took the hit. As always, there were several players very generously offering to help out with the legwork of definining the pixel co-ordinates of these facings in the skins of each chassis type. Thanks to Tinker and FireFly who came up with the goods ;-)

Gravity Games and Zombie Survival

Here’s a few other game ideas that I have been thinking about and running technical tests on Shiva/iPhone:

An Ant Attack / Zombie survival game where you live in a ‘block city’, with moveable blocks and maybe some limited crafting. You need to eat to survive, esccape the zombies etc. Early tests indicate that the iPhone is incapable of maintaining a reasonable framerate with a realistic number of separate blocks in-game. Although Shiva does have a nice mesh-merge feature, it is limited to static objects (for obvious reasons). I experimented with the idea of having the separate blocks stored offscreen and then merged to create a new single onscreen mesh every time a change happens, but you’re looking at a substantial processing hit each time. So.. non runner, for now.

A solar system ‘Gravity Game’ – you have some kind of target that you need to try to hit. There are planets in the game, which influence your projectile via gravity. You place additional planets of varying mass in order to get your projectile’s trajectory correct in as few moves as possible.

A 3D/pseudo-3D space flight game where you fly around the solar system, perhaps doing freeform activities such as defending yourself against pirates/asteroids, mining, trading, perhaps doing some scripted missions. The planets and moons could move in their orbits, so to get fuel- and time- efficient travel you need to time your flights well and your trajectories correctly.

Modifiable Meshes

One of the coolest features on Shiva that I have been playing around with is the modifiable mesh. This is something I always wished I could do in Darkwind, but Torque really didn’t make it very feasible.

With Shiva, you can iterate through the individual vertices and even their uvs, and edit them. I’m working on an explosion system for Block Rockin’, whereby certain ‘exploder’ power-ups will blast nearby vertices away from them, causing a warping of the game platform/walls etc.