Tidbits from January Week 1 /urlIn Brief: Nathan's hard drive goes kaput, so we decide it's time we upgrade his dev PC (loads BR in a split second now!), Zack upgrades our version of SharpDX to latest dev committing, Gabe progresses through textfields despite a nasty cold, the 'Founders Club' is added to the forums; accessible to those who purchased Blockade Runner before January 1st 2014. Zack and Nathan resolve an issue with entities disappearing due to 16-bit indexes on the GPU causing 3D surfaces to not draw, and Nathan gets his new slopes to render using our new moddable slope files. Tidbits from January Week 2In Brief: Nathan's next step on the slopes is straightening the tangents on the dynamic slopes, and otherwise continues fine tuning the process of making slopes. Gabe discontinued work towards IME keyboard support, and gets the visual portion of textfields for debugging. Michigan freezes over.
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Zack reduces loading time for BR significantly, fixed SharpDX having switched to right-hand coordinates borked our collisions, and among numerous physics and graphical issues also solves a problem where only single chunks would draw. Micah meanwhile experiments with 'mothership' concepts.We also re-order the way diffuse/specular/normal maps and glass will be modded in BR, Nathan begin a new DDS converter to convert bitmap images into DXT3's in-game, makes sure mirroring geometry will work, and by the end of the week prefabs are working in the game again! Tidbits from January Week 3In Brief: Over the weekend Gabe gets mouse selection for textfields done, remarks on how awesome it is to work with UI in BR now, and progresses with the Log-In screen. Nathan's on to the next stage of the dynamic slopes and makes sure slopes and their edges work with each direction and interior directions appropriately. Zack & Nathan resolve a myriad of rendering issues, including gradient shaders and backface culling z-fighting.
VengantMjolnir becomes our first 'Bounty Hunter' and solves an issue with our specular! Tidbits from January Week 4In Brief: Zack sets BR up with SmartAssembly, Gabe and Zack clear the old W71 UI code out entirely of MP since it'll need to be replaced, Gabriel condenses the unneeded UI to only the necessaries, fixes issues with clipping not functioning properly with scrollbars, fixes fonts, and generally cleans up the UI.
Zack cleans up character physics to cut its CPU usage in half, fixes issues with Lidgren (problems we'd had since last year!), and re-factored W28 thruster code in the new engine, tracks down huge lag spikes, among other bug fixes. Nathan continues debug issues the dynamic slopes, correcting each direction one-at-a-time. Micah experiments with 'hangar' visualization concepts in 3dsmax.
Tidbits from January Week 5In Brief: Nathan uses a debug corner model to help finalize debug issues with the slopes, Gabe and Aaron work on prettifying parts of the new Login screen, Zack continues debugging issues with the physics in multiplayer. We test the new SmartAssembly error reporter, makes spotting user-submitted bugs much easier since it highlights where in the code the error came from. By the very end of January, the first release in 78 weeks was made available to Founder members! The first release is simply a test of the 2D pipeline, but represents a huge development milestone on our end! SynopsisIn the previous month.In December we'd finished off the voxel mesh / texture atlas upgrade and decided it'd be for the best if we lumped the dynamic slopes into the schedule before releasing to the Founders.
This unfortunately meant that if we were to reach our deadline of 'before the end of January 2014', it'd have to launch rough and without the time for polish (/things to do)!Dynamic slopesThe dynamic slope system took Nathan most of the month to debug and correct for all graphical issues, but by the end of January it was ready to go and is now a powerful piece of BR's feature arsenal. To put it simply, the dynamic slopes allows us (and the community) to very easily add new types of slopes to the game. Need a chamfer edge? Need a reverse-double-twist pyramid? It can be done! There was a lot of work to make sure it'd operate 100% of the time and properly remove unnecessary polygons (a staple of voxel games), and are very happy with the results.Founders ClubAfter being recommended by some folks on the forums, we've introduced the 'Founder's Club' where we can keep the original community together, give back to those who supported us since the beginning, and not lose sight of those who helped us get where we are. Anyone who'd purchased BR before January 1st 2014 is eligible, and you can access the Founder's Board on the forums:The first build is released to Founders!Squeezing its way in (and barely making our target estimate from November), we make our first release since W71 to the Founders in the Founders Club!
The new engine is still in a bubbling primitive state however, so our first build is just a (successful!) test of application dependencies and the log-in screen to make sure everything's working on other machines. What's Next?Now that we're able to release raw private builds to the Founder members, next month is continued debugging by the Founders of the engine's pipelines; 2D, 3D, UI (command buttons, scroll bars, etc). The plan for the next few months is to hit each of the game's pipelines one at a time until everything is running A-OK.Stand by for February in Review!To follow the daily development resource postings, head to the forum, sign up for the newsletter, follow the Twitter, or check out the Facebook page! We're also on the Dev Chat from 9:00am-5:00pm (EST) almost every day, so if you've got a question or comment fire away!- Aaron. For development news throughout 2015, we're primarily updating via the main website!The Blockade Runner project is a from-scratch space voxel prototype designed by a six sibling family of developers!
A true labor of love, our continued goal is to make Blockade Runner a fun, quality, community-oriented game by taking an iterative approach and evolving it as it goes.Rather than rush together the 'Minecraft in Space' bullet points, we've been steadily designing a solid workspace that could easily support an evolving game universe with its own vivid atmosphere and style. A game where a hybrid of genres, from trading, to mining, to combat, could function together in a tight and clean multiplayer environment, and where community modifications could lead the way into expanding the game's capability.There's only six of us at ZanMgt though, which means our task is to get the core of the game down, and otherwise be a shepherd for its growth! @charlespayne2011We've condensed the primary updates to be coming from the main website, forums, and twitter.
We're still building a new engine for the game and are a long ways away from releasing on Steam, so updating the Greenlight page took less priority.That said, I keep forgetting how many people still stop by here and will get the page updated to redirect everyone to where the news can be found!@DoctorSchema worked hard and did a good job with Star-made. If you're someone who's into space voxel games and haven't heard of it, you should definitely check it out! ^.^@HazardrarYeah doing a 6,000 e-mail update might be warranted at this point.
But I tell ya, you need to work twice as hard to bring down hype! I almost have to repeat three times: 'Engine being built; there is no big release, engine is being built; there is no big release, engine is being built there is no big release'.;D.
Originally posted by:it, quake champions isn t cpma it have character that give different statsisn t reflex CPMA: 2014 eddition?Of course it is! However, the thing that eludes a lot of people (for some unknown reason) is that arena FPS fans are more or less ONE community. It's not like CPMA fans don't play anything else or vice versa.
I used to play CPMA, but now I play Quake Champions. It IS possible and I assume I'm not the only one - quite a large number of people play all 'Quake-like' games and choose whichever is the most popular at the moment.Apart from hardcore fans of one type of gameplay there is also this middle ground, and the drop in popularity you noticed were probably people from this area who migrated elsewhere (probably Quake Champions). Originally posted by:Yes please make it free to play. Many people just dont know if its worth the 10 bucks when in reality it is! Making it free will certainly improve the community playerbase.
All they have to do is add more cosmetics to make money off of it. The game is close to perfection in my book. But needs more people to realise it.don't you want the devs to make money off the game? I dont have the numbers but do you think that they're selling many if any 10e copies a day currently? Also the refund rate is probably close to 100% on them.
Originally posted by:Yes please make it free to play. Many people just dont know if its worth the 10 bucks when in reality it is! Making it free will certainly improve the community playerbase. All they have to do is add more cosmetics to make money off of it. The game is close to perfection in my book. But needs more people to realise it.don't you want the devs to make money off the game?Well they do already have a cosmetic transaction system in the game so it would be easy enough. As someone else said, they probably aren't selling copies anyway so they really wouldn't have much to lose.