Octrees, networking and UI

Hello again. Nothing much happening this week. The first stage of the octree revamp is getting ready. A lot of time will be spent on that and the networking in the near future. It’s really important that it’s done well so we’ve reserved as much time on that as it needs and we are delaying everything else.

We ditched the simpler SpiderMonkey in favor of Netty which is a bit more tricky and doesn’t do much hand holding but it has a lot more features that are going to be very useful for us.

The basic UI is soon going to be put on hold and we’ll shift our focus on coding the central login and user verification server which is essential to get done before we can take on board the first select few alpha testers.

There have been some delays with 3D modeling and we are currently almost one month behind the schedule with that. We’ve now been through 5 different candidates for the graphics designer / 3D modeler position and unfortunately none of them turned out to be right for the job. This is one of the main reasons why we’re lagging behind our schedule. It’s also likely in the future that we’ll be having even more delays if we don’t find the perfect candidate for the position. I would estimate that without a second 3D modeler it will take us at least a year longer to get to v1.0.

Another reason why we’re behind our schedule besides our 3D modeler doing the job of two people is quality assurance. It takes more time to get things done absolutely right and right now we are at a critical phase which will define the work we’ll do in the future so we’ve spent extra time on getting the designs right.

If you take a look at the old first draft of our campfire test scene:

And then you  take a look at our current version of the same scene:

You should see a giant leap forward.

We haven’t gotten to animation phase yet but it’s waiting just around the corner. Right now our 3D modeler is basically doing all kinds of blocks, items, clothes and details for a few renders for the website but at the same time we are doing work that needs to be done anyway for the game so it’s two in one.

After the renders are up and ready we’ll take the first stab at a walk cycle and various other animations for the player model and keep doing that well past the new year of 2017.

After the octrees, networking and login server are at a stable phase we’ll be focusing more on the world generation and navigating in the game world, ie. collision detection etc.

That’s it for now. Keep writing your ideas in the forums and tell your friends about us. For the next couple of months or so we’ll be busy with the code and probably won’t have anything big, new or exciting to show, but I will keep you updated nonetheless.

Looking for graphic designer/3D modeler

Do you know any good graphic designers/3D modelers with a lot of free time on their hands and passion for the kind of bloxel/low poly games we’re developing? Please let us know.

This article was updated on 21/10/18 @ 02:14