Happy pi day yesterday everybody!
So currently, I have finals. It may seem like an odd schedule at first, but it makes sense because I'm on the quarter system at college - 3 quarters per year (if you don't include summer quarter, which would make four). Anyways, once i get his final stuff out of the way (tomorrow I'll be done, yay), I can get some seriously cool stuff done in Xsera. Over the past two weeks or so, I've been greatly improving Xsera's interface, as much as to make it compatible with nearly all resolutions between 1024x768 and 19020x1080 (that's right, 1080p). I still have a little work to do to get this complete, but things will look very nice once this is accomplished.
The next thing that I'll get working on is stuff involving the mouse - all it can do now is select ships in-game. It should have a lot of new usefulness in the next demo, which will be coming up shortly. This is really starting to shape up nicely!
Due to finals, this is all I can get out for now, but hopefully there should be a lot of progress in the next few weeks!
Adam
Monday, March 15, 2010
Sunday, March 7, 2010
March! March on!
Hello again!
March is already upon us (doesn't it seem like February always goes by faster than the other months??), and things are rolling along smoothly for Xsera. The crew's just chugging along with the mundane tasks of creating one feature and fixing another. One notable exception would be Alistair's creation of text colour, which is great because Ares greatly utilized texts of different colors, and the white was starting to become a strain on the eyes.
My big project as of late has been working on Xsera to work in different resolutions and aspect ratios. Once I'm finished with this, Xsera will look clean and nice on all sorts of displays - even boasting support for "full HD" (1080p) monitors. Currently the only working resolution is 1024x768, but this will soon change, hopefully.
In other news, I've been starting to play StarCraft for fun more. I'm a big StarCraft fan (although I'm not that great at the game) and I can't wait for StarCraft 2 to come out. Even though I'm pretty rusty / bad right now, I think I may actually be improving ;) I usually play with fellow Ambrosians, who generally gather on #starcraft on irc.ambrosiasw.com - feel free to come if you'd like to play with us, we could always use more people. In addition to playing more StarCraft, I've been watching commentary on professional StarCraft games in the hopes that it will make me better (yeah, right). A really good commentator / player I've been watching is Day[9], who posts livestreams daily here. Even if I don't get better as a player, I'm surely getting better at understanding the game, at least.
Another cool thing that's going on in Xsera: Geek (from the Ambrosia forums) has been working on creating the missing sound effects for Xsera. The reason that we don't have some of the original Ares sound effects is because Nathan Lamont did not have the proper ownership of some of the effects to be able to release the sounds with the rest of the game, so we have to compensate by making some original sounds for Xsera. Geek is doing some great work, and sounds are already being added to Xsera for use in the game. It's nice to see the pieces of the puzzle fitting together in so many places, and it will be very nice to have these sound effects in place when the 3rd demo is finished.
That's all for now!
March is already upon us (doesn't it seem like February always goes by faster than the other months??), and things are rolling along smoothly for Xsera. The crew's just chugging along with the mundane tasks of creating one feature and fixing another. One notable exception would be Alistair's creation of text colour, which is great because Ares greatly utilized texts of different colors, and the white was starting to become a strain on the eyes.
My big project as of late has been working on Xsera to work in different resolutions and aspect ratios. Once I'm finished with this, Xsera will look clean and nice on all sorts of displays - even boasting support for "full HD" (1080p) monitors. Currently the only working resolution is 1024x768, but this will soon change, hopefully.
In other news, I've been starting to play StarCraft for fun more. I'm a big StarCraft fan (although I'm not that great at the game) and I can't wait for StarCraft 2 to come out. Even though I'm pretty rusty / bad right now, I think I may actually be improving ;) I usually play with fellow Ambrosians, who generally gather on #starcraft on irc.ambrosiasw.com - feel free to come if you'd like to play with us, we could always use more people. In addition to playing more StarCraft, I've been watching commentary on professional StarCraft games in the hopes that it will make me better (yeah, right). A really good commentator / player I've been watching is Day[9], who posts livestreams daily here. Even if I don't get better as a player, I'm surely getting better at understanding the game, at least.
Another cool thing that's going on in Xsera: Geek (from the Ambrosia forums) has been working on creating the missing sound effects for Xsera. The reason that we don't have some of the original Ares sound effects is because Nathan Lamont did not have the proper ownership of some of the effects to be able to release the sounds with the rest of the game, so we have to compensate by making some original sounds for Xsera. Geek is doing some great work, and sounds are already being added to Xsera for use in the game. It's nice to see the pieces of the puzzle fitting together in so many places, and it will be very nice to have these sound effects in place when the 3rd demo is finished.
That's all for now!
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Finishing touches to the interface, text manipulation, and symbolic linking!
So along with my 3000th post on the Ambrosia Software forums being an Xsera progress post a few days ago, I decided to post an update on the most recent happenings in Xsera (including the fruits of some arduous labor even today).
Firstly, I'm working on wrapping up some of the most basic features of the interface - namely, those tutorial boxes and messages that popped up from time to time in the original Ares. I've even got the blinking pointer part working. I'm also working on polishing up the interface, especially the side panels, in order to make it look better as a whole, and also to address Xsera working on different aspect ratios and resolutions. It's good stuff!
Second, I've been creating some neat little tools that allow me to do some fancy text manipulation - although it's stuff that we take for granted, like text wrapping in lines. Today I finalized the primary wrapping function, and it appears to limit the text fairly well.
Third, I've been working on a special way of building Xsera called "symbolic linking". All this means is that I can edit Lua scripts in Xcode and see them update in the Xsera application without rebuilding the app. This is a huge time saver - although it did cost me about 4 hours today, it will save me, and the other devs, a great amount of time in the future.
Sure, these recent updates are fairly technical things that don't really show any improvement moving towards a Demo 3, but polishing Xsera up a little bit right now will make things that much easier in the end.
That's all for now!
Firstly, I'm working on wrapping up some of the most basic features of the interface - namely, those tutorial boxes and messages that popped up from time to time in the original Ares. I've even got the blinking pointer part working. I'm also working on polishing up the interface, especially the side panels, in order to make it look better as a whole, and also to address Xsera working on different aspect ratios and resolutions. It's good stuff!
Second, I've been creating some neat little tools that allow me to do some fancy text manipulation - although it's stuff that we take for granted, like text wrapping in lines. Today I finalized the primary wrapping function, and it appears to limit the text fairly well.
Third, I've been working on a special way of building Xsera called "symbolic linking". All this means is that I can edit Lua scripts in Xcode and see them update in the Xsera application without rebuilding the app. This is a huge time saver - although it did cost me about 4 hours today, it will save me, and the other devs, a great amount of time in the future.
Sure, these recent updates are fairly technical things that don't really show any improvement moving towards a Demo 3, but polishing Xsera up a little bit right now will make things that much easier in the end.
That's all for now!
Friday, February 5, 2010
Holy Macaroon, Does Time Ever Fly!
Doesn't seem like I last updated this blog over two months ago. I apologize for letting it fall into such a state of disrepair ;)
Major work is going on - inside and outside of Xsera's source code. First, we're polling the Ambrosians on what font we should use for Xsera - we have a few great fonts picked out, and we need help deciding which one is decidedly more Xsera-like. (check it out here)
Another great thing that's going on is the team's focus on the development of the original Ares level "Space Race, The Musical". This level is our goal for when we release our third technical demo. More details about how that's going along here.
Another interesting thing that I'm personally developing is IRC support through Lua. I'm doing this in a different way than you might expect though - through an IRC bot. I'm currently developing an IRC bot, which is written in Lua, in order to be able to connect to an IRC environment. I hope to be able to use the knowledge gained to add IRC capabilities to Xsera. More exciting details to follow.
Other than that, crazy stuff is going on in Real Life™. I find myself signed up for beta testing two games (Xenos and Frozen Synapse are the two games; the former is in closed beta while the latter is not). While this may take some time away from working on Xsera, it also helps me to see what aspects of a game are good and what could be improved on - essentially, helping me to see the game from the user's perspective, which is invaluable to a developer.
Alright, I think this spiel's long enough, and it's pretty late anyways. For those who feel like "tl;dr": in summary, lots of exciting stuff going on, check out #xsera on irc.ambrosiasw.com, and hopefully I'll update this blog more in the future!
Major work is going on - inside and outside of Xsera's source code. First, we're polling the Ambrosians on what font we should use for Xsera - we have a few great fonts picked out, and we need help deciding which one is decidedly more Xsera-like. (check it out here)
Another great thing that's going on is the team's focus on the development of the original Ares level "Space Race, The Musical". This level is our goal for when we release our third technical demo. More details about how that's going along here.
Another interesting thing that I'm personally developing is IRC support through Lua. I'm doing this in a different way than you might expect though - through an IRC bot. I'm currently developing an IRC bot, which is written in Lua, in order to be able to connect to an IRC environment. I hope to be able to use the knowledge gained to add IRC capabilities to Xsera. More exciting details to follow.
Other than that, crazy stuff is going on in Real Life™. I find myself signed up for beta testing two games (Xenos and Frozen Synapse are the two games; the former is in closed beta while the latter is not). While this may take some time away from working on Xsera, it also helps me to see what aspects of a game are good and what could be improved on - essentially, helping me to see the game from the user's perspective, which is invaluable to a developer.
Alright, I think this spiel's long enough, and it's pretty late anyways. For those who feel like "tl;dr": in summary, lots of exciting stuff going on, check out #xsera on irc.ambrosiasw.com, and hopefully I'll update this blog more in the future!
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