In a sense I do want Drivey to be realistic, though not so much in how it looks as how it feels. Visually, it’d be nice to capture just the parts that your mind pays most attention to, though of course it’s tricky deciding exactly which parts those are… Headlights at least seem like a no-brainer. Must have headlights.

BTW I know I said no more mockups, but the JujuScript version is constrained to flat monochrome shading only right now, so I manually added a linear gradient and blue tint to the sky.

I understand that some people are wondering why I’ve been bothering playing with color and shadows in DriveyC++ instead of just sticking with the distinctive CameoVision [silhouetted] look of the current demo. After all, existing driving games are loaded with color… not to mention texture and bumpmapping and lens-flaring etc etc… so why don’t I just stick with the thing that makes Drivey unique [as well as fast and easier to code]?

The short answer: I’m a compulsive tinkerer.

The long [rationalized] answer: My programming style is very experimental, and not particularly goal-oriented. This means I will generally pursue ideas that interest me at the expense of ideas that might help pay the rent. I think the CameoVision look is cool, and am by no means abandoning it, but it’s important to realize that it emerged as a direct result of me messing about with what was originally to be a simple Night Driver clone written in JujuScript.*

Tinkering leads to new ideas… occasionally even good ideas.

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* First I made ugly white oblong posts on a black screen a la Night Driver… then I added nice bezier-curve road markings… then I thought up a better way to make posts by extruding curves instead… then I made some posts taller [into poles] but found that a bizarre limitation in my extrusion algorithm prevented me from allowing them to cross the horizon line… then I tried making the posts the same color as the ground and only drawing the parts above the horizon, and coloring the sky differently… and that’s the story of CameoVision.

Sometimes having to come up with a title for every entry can be a pain, but I guess it’s a bit late in the blogging game for me to start wondering if title-less posts are a good idea. Before I moved over to WordPress [and renamed to intepid] I actually didn’t need titles for posts but generally provided them anyway, with only a few exceptions.

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I’ve been working mostly on today, which will probably come as a bit of a shock to those who may have given up on any hope of seeing another version. If you’re not currently a user and are interested in trying it, I recommend waiting a week or two [ok maybe three… let’s be realistic] until I announce that a new version is available [for beta testing of course — because these days all software is kept perpetually in beta, a perfectly natural state of affairs AFAIC].

So maybe I should split off a dev-blog, or just shut up about Drivey for a while. It’s kind of taken over to the point that I find myself casting about for something else to talk about.

And it’d be nice to keep a little bit of mystery about the project ;)

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I saw Million Dollar Baby yesterday. If you like your movies served with a big dollop of pathos then you’ll probably like it a lot [I did]. I’ve seen it described as Rocky meets Terms of Endearment, and might be inclined to agree if I didn’t have such a low opinion of the x-meets-y school of criticism [for nerdular reasons: if you define everything in terms of where it sits between two other things, you are probably neglecting the axes along which the subject might actually define a new extreme].

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The soundtrack to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is not as good as I would like, dammit! Probably because [as with most soundtracks] the music was selected based on how well particular bits of it worked in particular scenes. There are beautiful little piano pieces that don’t actually go anywhere, along with disconcerting vocals accompanying parts which had been purely instrumental within the film. Plus it includes music from the more jarring sections of the film, which worked well dramatically but really sucks when you just want something nice to listen to.

I’ve been working on DriveyC++ for a while now, and as I kind of predicted I have yet to recreate the exact qualities of the original JujuScript demo [here’s what the "industrial" level currently looks like in the new version — pretty crappy really], so I’m playing with the original again for inspiration, with an eye to releasing a minor update to it sometime soon.

As well as making it easier to steer, I’m experimenting with the appearance of the other cars, and might even try adding some basic collision detection so you can’t just drive through them ;). You can see in the shot above I’ve added a rough sort of reflection [a la Driver], which actually looks not bad when the cars are whizzing past quickly.

Check out Double-Tongued Word Wrester for some fun new and/or rare words [as well as a refreshingly simple page design]. I’ve added it to my blogroll, and not just because they’ve included Google egg in their neologisms section ;)

I’ve been mostly concentrating on aforementioned sound, and it’s proving quite a challenge to get all those sine waves and noise functions to produce anything that doesn’t sound like a loudly farting ray-gun.

May do some fix-ups in the current [JujuScript] demo version of Drivey and release a minor update with manual steering control that doesn’t suck [and road noise— not yucko engine noise though]. Steering control seems like one of a few self-contained algorithms that should be fine for rapid prototyping in JujuScript, although in general I plan to avoid parallel development [ie duplication].

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My hair is getting long and stupid looking, but I have to resist the temptation to shave it all off [short and stupid looking is worse] — I must overcome this morbid fear of hair professionals…

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I lurve the new Battlestar Galactica [saw the miniseries last week], and the series [which starts this week] will have to suck donkey balls for at least the first five episodes before I give up on it. I’m kind of glad I saw it before I read too much about it, because the whole Cylons-look-like-us-now thing sounds too much like an excuse for not coming up with any cool robot costumes. Yet somehow even with an imaginary sexy humanoid Cylon, it still works!

The idea: Hey, I know… I’ll use synthetic sounds for Drivey! That’ll be fun, and it’ll kind of match the synthetic visual style as well!

The reality: Synthesizing sound from scratch is really frikkin complicated, especially FM synthesis, which is like the audio equivalent of alchemy [with only a slightly higher success rate].

I am still keen to use synthesis, but if it all proves too hard the audio system I’m working on will incorporate sample-based sounds as well, so it’s not like I can’t just bung in a few stock sound effects if required.

If I can at least perfect my inside-car road noise sound [using nice Perlin noise functions] I might do a minor update to the current demo just so that you get a bit of soothing audio to go with the hypnotic visuals.

I’m trying out a timeslip feature on intepid, which I would love to see implemented on other blogs. Quite often I will come across a new blog and wish that I had discovered it earlier, but diving into the archives [with hundreds or even thousands of entries] is simply too much information in one go.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ok, so here’s a CameoVision shot with a color gradient rendered in real time — I’ll post no more mock-ups unless they are necessary to illustrate a concept. Using gradients does cause a performance hit right now, but then the whole system could use some optimizing anyway so at this point I’m content to work on features first, and when it comes to releasing some playable demos then I will try to optimize the crap out of it [maybe even writing some MMX/ SIMD type code… yuk!]

I’ll have to start working on a few new environment objects I think, since these power lines are all getting a bit samey.

That’s right folks, there’s a new primitive in town, and it’s called a "cone" ;) Also of technical note here is the three-way junction — it’s Drivey’s first proper intersection! And, er, don’t mind those enormous pine trees growing in the tarmac there…

Daily updates [with screens] will probably cease soon… but for now it’s kind of nice to document the new Drivey’s first couple of weeks of development.

NOTE: I had to force myself NOT to add a color gradient to this image… since the point of this is to document actual progress then it’s a bit silly adding post-effects to screen shots. Also, in spite of all this color I’m still playing around with silhouette effects.

This image has had a radial gradient manually applied to it — an effect that could be done on-the-fly but is just not implemented right now. Gradients seem like a nice way to add atmosphere to a scene without adding clutter.

Here’s what the previous desert style scene looks like with a gradient added:

Note that the gradient is aligned to correspond to the direction of the light [as indicated by the shadows.]

In practice, gradients would probably not be used across the whole screen like this; more likely there would be one for ground and one for the sky. They could also be positioned and scaled to give "roundness" to smaller objects, although this may be [once again] drifting too far in the direction of "realism".

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NOTE: I don’t know if it’s a good idea or not using intepid as a [sort of] development blog for Drivey, but since my traffic is low I really can’t see the point in splitting off a separate dev-blog right now… If you’re not interested in reading about Drivey then you’re probably not gonna like the rest of my blog anyway :P

Not making quite as much progress as I’d really like; too much recompiling and mucking about trying to integrate 2.5D bezier world with pre-existing 3D code. Serves me right for not implementing 3D functions directly into JujuScript in the first place, I guess.

A lot of what I’m working on is the method for building roads/environments… trying to strike a healthy balance between accuracy [specifying vertices and control points] and fun [clicking predefined segments of track together].

Off to bed now — it’s late, as usual.