After a few years I've decided to reopen my blog. The the main reason is I'm writing my final term paper for my Game Development course and I wanted to keep a register of this endeavor but I also wanted to write a little about my life as well. I've been going through a lot lately and the only constant in my life is that working on such projects gives me a deep sensation of fulfilment. It's a shame I can't write about my work at Dell, a lot of cool tech stuff there, many technologies, languages and different requests.

I'm going to write a game inspired in Carmack's Rage vehicle combat. I actually planned to use idTech 5 if it was ever release but Carmack sold id Software to Bethesda studios and they're probably never going to release id Tech 5's source as Carmack did with all his previous engines. I'm planning to use id Tech 4 which is the engine used for Doom 3/Quake 4/Prey/Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. It's OpenGL-Based, portable, fast and I'm probably never going to use half of the stuff it can do. I was afraid that the engine would not be very good for outdoors (Prey/Quake 4/Doom 3 are mainly indoor games) but I've learned that id Tech 4 was updated with MegaTexture technology for EE: Quake Wars which is an early version of id Tech 5's Virtual Texture technology. This means I'll be able to make large outdoor environments for my vehicles.

People who knew me last decade will probably be dissappointed that I'm going to use an engine and not build my own, but the simple fact is that the man-power/time ratio is just too small for me to build something of my own and it would never nearly as powerful as id Tech 4.

Game:

I'm not very good in game story so the game is probably going to be dull in terms of background, I want to focus on game mechanics. The game, as briefly as I can describe, is going to be a apocalyptic-future hover-tank battle. I want to simulate engine torques and stabilization using PID controllers, have a complex damage model and vehicle customizations. When my father worked at Hoplon I got the chance to exchanged some e-mails with the designers. They sent me a lot of cool design concepts they used in Taikodom's ships, such as building the vehicles "inside-out", taking in account the physical limitations of the ship's components, mass, etc. I was thinking of something similar but having the internal components affecting the vehicle's damage model.

I plan to have "realistic" damage in the internal components and have them failing/disabling. Not only guns and engines but also radars, cameras, rangefinders/directors, fire-controllers, night vision, batteries, fuel tanks, rotor/turbine blades and anything that would go inside a "real hover-tank". MechWarrior series and Microsoft's Combat Flight Simulator 3 ( FirePower 3) do have some of this but in a much simpler scale. I'm looking for something between MechWarrior and SilentHunter 3 but with a broader management of the vehicle while making it faster-paced than both, something like Han jumping out of the cabin to fix the Millenium Falcon in the middle of a space fight.

I'm still cooking a lot of this but I wanna have something shown on screen as soon as possible, I'll leave the design doc for later, probably a compilation of my future posts...

Me: 

I'm currently programming 80% of my time at work and still I find myself at home thinking what I could do to improve my tools/scripts. I often feel the urge to open up my work computer to do something, I need to put that energy somewhere else. I'm finally living alone so I got the peace and the space I need to put time in a project like this.

I've recently been told and learned the weirdest things about people I have relations with which made me ponder the benefits that having such people in my life has. I think I need a little balance, which in my case means double the programming.

I know I can pull this off, I just need patience, dicipline and a little bit of the burning passion I have for making this kind of stuff, the rest will sort itself out. =)

Marcadores: Game Development, Game Programming, OpenGL

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