We’ve had our noses to the grindstone completely these last few weeks. A demo is incredibly close to release. Stay tuned.

So I haven’t posted in a few days. There is a good reason, I assure you. Among about fifty other things, I’ve been laser focused on getting my planets looking good. The biggest problem I’ve come up with is how to compress the normal maps and have them still look good. For those who care, here is what I’m doing now.
Use a DTX5 compression / format for the surface format of the texture. I know, I know, this leaves artifacts galore. Now, change your normal mapping shaders to re-normalize the texture lookup values. I went from “your moms so ugly…” to “Wow.. she’s hot” in one line of shader code. Also, my file sizes went from 16 megs with NO mip maps to 5.4 megs WITH mip maps.

I think I’m happy.

Dan

I’ve have a banner weekend polishing up Colony Defense. Everything was smooth sailing except for one little thing. I could not get XACT to act the way I thought it should when trying to fade out a music track. As it turns out, the way I thought it would work was way off base. It’s really pretty simple and I’m posting this in hopes that someone else will get some use out of it. When you create a music category, limit it’s instance to 1. Set the fade in and out times to whatever you want. Now, in code, just play a piece of music any time you want. If a track is currently playing it will “automagically” fade out and the new music will fade in. Where I was getting tripped up was I kept stopping the current track before I played the next one. This gave the effect of an abrupt stop on the current track and an immediate, full volume start of the new track. Other than doing some RPC variable craziness, the way this works turns out to be a very nice way of not having to worry about whats currently playing. It “just works”.

Dan

I’m spending the day getting the talent point system in place. I thought it might be a good idea to share what we’ve come up with so far so here goes.

So, you can get up to two talent points per level if you can keep all the planets population safe. You will be able to fill up the entire tree if you can keep ALL your population intact for the whole game. Good luck with that by the way.

The talents are divided up into four distinct tracks. Each talent in a track can be upgraded a maximum of five times. You will need to max out the first item in a track before you can reach the next.
Track 1

Track 2

Track 3

Track 4

So there you have it. These values are what we are starting with and may / will get changed during out play testing. But at least you can see where we are headed.

Dan

Our good friend Mark over at 31abunch.com did a great job on the new site theme. Thanks Mark!

By Krom, I think I’m done with menu UI stuff. That single tear in the corner of my eye is a tear of joy my friends. Now I can get on all the game play stuff I’ve been WANTING to work on. But first, I believe a frosty import is in order! *cheers*

The temperature is cool, and there is a light constant rain. Perfect “chill” weather. However, I’m not “chillin” at all. Instead, I’ve been coding menu and option screens for like a week now. This is about as much fun as having a wolverine eat your eyes out of your head. Sick? yeah, but also true. I may have to take a break and play some games before I snap

Looks like we are getting quite a few new folks checking out the gameplay video we posted a while back. We REALLY need to get some updated footage together that shows some of the progress that’s been made since the first video was posted. Not that I’m apologizing for the graphics in the video, it’s just that a lot of what you see there was / is purely development placeholders. Things are progressing great! Maybe we can take a pause sometime soon and get some more “up to date” footage to show. I want to show off some of the crazy levels

Past me: “I’ll worry about resolutions when I’ve got game play where I want it.”
Present me: “What in the hell was I thinking putting this off. This stuff is scattered all over the place!”
Future me: *Doomed to repeat mistakes of the past due to laziness*

In a pure stoke of luck, we have been blessed with the help of an excellent sound and music man. Daniel has wasted no time delivering the goods with sound effects and music for Colony Defense. I had to look in all the nooks and crannies of the interwebs to come up with some good, solid information on using XACT in XNA. I did manage to put together a fairly robust sound and music system though in short order. Code design nazi’s the world over will no doubt let out a collective shriek of anguish, but I decided to make a static class that interfaces with the whole sound subsystem so it can be called easily from anywhere in the project. Neener Neener Neener… It works! (and pretty damn well I might add)