Welcome to IndieZen.org, home of the Indie 2.0 Revolution

    Unless you have been living under a rock or in some wonderful world that we all need to move to you know that those of us in the US are in an economic recession. Even the long rumored recession proof game industry has felt the squeeze. In this article we can see that the game market declined in this past year.

    The economic decline has put a strain on the game development world for professionals and indies alike. As such, there becomes an emphasis on quality. Producing quality games is what has lead to successes like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which raked in something close to 500 million in cash during week one. Of course, I am not implying that one can easily create such a juggernaut but this is a valid example of what quality can produce.

   So what does this mean? In my opinion, it means that we as developers need to take our time in developing our games. Make sure that what we are releasing is a good game that we are proud to say, “This is my game! I made it and you should play it!”

Then again, I could be completely off the mark, but I don’t think so…

-- Jason 

This week I spent the bulk of the time working with CEGUI.

I integrated the Lua scripting so that I can directly access CEGUI from FracU scripts, but I'm being careful as to not add a dependency to Lua in the common Zen scripts.

I added some functionality to the StateMachine implementation so that it'll handle nested state machines, and then I created a new state machine that handles transitioning through a series of splash screens, and you set it up by defining your own custom splash screen Lua table.  The FracU one looks something like this:

local splashScreens = 
{
    -- State machine to which this splash screen sequence will belong
    stateMachine = game,
    stateName = "splashScreens",
    nextState = "loginScreen",
    sequence = {
        -- image is the image for the splash screen, can be nil if method is not nil
        -- duration is time to display the splash in seconds
        -- interruptable is whether or not the 
        [1] = { image = "FracU.jpg", duration = 5, interruptable = false },
        [2] = { image = "gbslogo.jpg", duration = 5, interruptible = true }, 
        [3] = { image = "IndieZen.jpg", duration = 1, interruptible = true }
    },

    showMethod =          function(state, splashItem)
           ... this method shows the splash screen
        end,        
    hideMethod = 
        function(state, splashItem)
            -- Clean up in the state's onExit function 
        end, 
        
    onTick =
        function (state)
            ... this method handles fading in / out 
        end
} 

12 December 2009

Working through the weekend…

We all know the perils of neglected backups, but what do you do when your backups fail? I recently had a glitch while installing FreeBSD 8.0 in a multi OS configuration. It seems that with a SATA drive array one can cause all manner of problems with a simple alteration of the drive configuration.

As I mentioned, I was installing FreeBSD to boot from the same drive as another OS, Ubuntu, when I encountered a glitch.

Since my blogging efforts have lagged a little behind actual "weeks", this blog will cover the weeks from Nov 30th to December 10th, and I'll start blogging on Thurs or Fridays to cover the previous week.

For Fractured Universe proper, the only thing I completed in this past week or two has been to get the game client functioning on both Windows and Linux... I can't seem to find enough time on a Mac to get the Zen build docs completed, so I don't have a fully functioning Mac development environment yet.  Oh well, I'll work on that when I get some time.

I'm pleased with how I have the Subversion repo set up so far.  I used the "external" property so I could link to the IndieZen Lua scripts directory, and I placed that in FracU/core and FracU/mudbot.

For those that don't know, mudbot is my Lua IRC bot that I wrote as the beginnings of a MUD (multi-user dungeon).

It's not a fully functioning MUD at the moment, but it is useful enough to test different NPC and AI subsystems without having to use a full 3d GUI.  I prototyped my current NPC dialog and quest system using mudbot and I'll probably continue extending the functionality for additional tests and prototypes.