Recent blog entries for witten

"There's a reason for all of this, and I don't know what it is."

I woke up this morning and hit slashdot. I immediately saw the story about the attacks. I kept looking up to the top of the page for the "It's Funny. Laugh." icon. But all that was there was the U.S. flag. I guess this is really happening.

Today I finally released a new version of Hover Carnage. That's about eight months since the last one. Working at Linuxcare this summer took up quite a bit of time that I could have spent hacking, and rewriting the game's engine several times didn't exactly help speed development. But it was definitely all worth it, because now we have a solid, extensible engine to play with.

For me, the next priority is to get complex tunnel generation working. Branching, rooms, and intersections will be very necessary for any sort of interesting gameplay.

Lately, I've been hacking entirely too much on Hover Carnage, my pet 3D game. I'm toying with the idea of making it more than just a multiplayer action game, but I figure that I had best get the basic engine working first before I start delving into the wonderful world of creeping featurism.

Right now the craft moves over the tunnel surface mesh (with inertia, gravity, and velocity, oh my!). The problem is that because the position and velocity are calculated depending on the rather non-fine-grained tunnel mesh, the craft's movements are unacceptably jerky. I think I should try smoothing it out with hermite curves.

Oh, and something really must be done about that chase cam. It would be nice if it didn't weave in and out of the walls whenever it pleased. I've definitely got my work cut out for me. :)