Fancy Compass

At one time, I was working on a 4D graphics engine for a 4D FPS based on 50's horror movies. I developed the math for 4D to 3D perspective projections, but got distracted and didn't go much farther. I've put a little more thought into the game and started making a 4D compass to help with navigation. The game allows left/right and up/down rotation in 3 dimensions like in a normal FPS as well as side/side and back/forward rotation in the fourth dimension. The hypercube inside the sphere to reflect the player's movements. The current version works in 3 dimensions. The next step is to make an object to hold information about the cube, rotate it, project it to 3 dimensions, rotate it again, and display it.

Wow, already?

The war for the fate of the galaxy has begun! Use your Galactic Interceptor 2600 to fly around the sun and push it toward your enemy. Use the left and right arrow keys to turn and accelerate with the up arrow key. Press Right Ctrl to activate your Heat and Kinetic Energy Reflector Shield (H.A.C.K.E.R.S.) and dive toward the sun. Press the down arrow key to deploy your Space Skids and slow down. Your ship can pass through the sun four times before its Advanced Thermal and Radioactive Protection Shield (A.T.A.R.P.S.) fails completely.

This is a game of two players, one keyboard. Player one (red) uses the arrow keys and right ctrl while player two uses wasd and left shift. F actives Spirograph Mode.

If the void offers any feedback, I may very well take the time to work on improving (finishing up) the game. In fact, I may do so even if the void doesn't offer feedback and I instead have to rely on feedback from the real world.



Download: Windows (Required SDL.dll and fmod.dll)

Sound effects made with pxtone, graphics done with openGL.

SWype or Expensive Spirograph

SWype stands for Spacewar!-Type. In it's current form, the game is not much more than an expensive Spirograph (it's free, actually). You fly around the sun in a space ship. If you hit the sun, it continues in the direction you were going and you go in the other direction. The game still needs some physics and other engine refinements (accurate sun-bouncing, determining whether the sun kills you or bounces off) before I add the second player. At that time, the game will become a combination of Pong and Spacewar! Except that the ball will kill you if it hits you at the wrong time.
This is probably a good time to point out that I'm not one of those idiots who has never played Pong, but still raves about how great it is because it's "retro." I am sick and tired of most of the music in Mario. I love the retro aesthetic, but I am not a huge fan of the actual retro because most of it was garbage with a few clever ideas mixed in. Of course, the only difference today (in commercial games) is that the programmers don't also make the art and the music.
At the same time that I preach about good vs bad retro, I know that I am also preaching to an empty void. I want the empty void to be perfectly clear on where I stand here. Or at least less unclear.

Here are your screenshots:


Normal Mode

Expensive Spirograph Mode (I don't know why the background is gray in that one)

Hard Drive Update

Well, I've run a few diagnostic programs and I now know what data can be saved (the important stuff, it turns out), and what sector to stop at. I've got a new 250GB drive on the way, so when that arrives I'll see if I can't use some ghosting utility to copy the first 60% of the failed drive over to the new one, copy the data from the new one over to my backup, and then backup to the new drive.
I'm holding off on Contrecoup for the moment because I don't have 3d glasses yet and I'm still working out how I want to do the collision reaction (kill the player, randomly spin the player, push the player away, etc).
Meanwhile, I still haven't done any work on Purity, but I might do a little of that in the next couple of weeks.
Right now I'm getting ready to prototype a boss fight for another game and maybe work some on the code for the O.D.d.S.A.C.k.S. More data on that game when I release in ten years or so.
The other thing I'm doing is honing my programming skillz on Project Euler. I've finished 5 of the problems and right now my computer is around prime number 1.5 million for another. Maybe I'll go back later and figure out how to solve that one in 1 minutes instead of a few hours.

What you should take away from this, dear internet void, is that I'm still working on making video games and I might even finish one some day.

Gamma 3d; Game: Countrecoup

No progress on the hard drive, but I am working on a game. A few days after the announcement of Gamma 3d, I cam up with an idea for a game and then refined it a little after someone came up with idea of using stereoscopy for multiplayer.
The game is a racing game about getting to the hospital in the one second or so between the coup and the contrecoup from getting hit on the head. The coup damages the bits of the brain that deal with processing signals from the eyes so that at any given time only one eye functions correctly. Each time you run into something, the correct eye fails and the other becomes correct. In order to see properly, the player must close one eye or the other.
Screenshots of the game so far follow.







The controls are currently purely keyboard based, but hopefully it won't be too hard to find information on adapting them for the 360 controller.

Purity Development on Hold

My primary computer is rather ill right now, so Purity development is on hold until the issue is resolved.

The Future

It has just occurred to me today that the brilliant idea from that dream, the one I scribbled onto a piece of paper just after waking up, has similarities to an idea that another person conceived in a dream. The difference is that when he awoke and wrote it down, he was left only with a paper containing a few numbers and the phrase "all the mechanical complexity of a teapot."
The device of my dream, a simple plastic shape, literally has "all the mechanical complexity of a teapot." Could it be that this is the very same device? Could it be that this vision of the future is more than just a nocturnal hallucination?
Probably not, but I must still be prepared in whatever way I can. The things I saw in my dream must never be allowed to occur. We must always be capable of feeling pain. It is critical to our humanity.