Monthly Archives: September 2010

Missions of the Reliant: Thanks for the support!

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I don’t have any real progress to report, with one exception: The “Report” command for all crew members, the one which tells you that systems are damaged and that crew members are hurt and that messages are incoming and all that sort of thing, is now complete and working. It’s not tested past the most basic stuff yet, though, so give me time :-).

The real thought behind this post is to thank you all for the unremitting support you’ve all shown these past months as I’ve worked on the game. Every few posts I get a whole list of comments from everyone who says they’ll wait for me to finish it, telling me how much they look forward to the results of the work I’ve put in. I just wanted to say, I truly appreciate it, and I’m certain I wouldn’t have gotten even this far without that to encourage me. Thanks, everyone :-).

And, as always, a special thanks to Michael Rubin; without the enthusiasm he showed when I first approached him with this idea, it couldn’t have happened.

As a gesture of my appreciation, here’s a short QuickTime clip of the Reliant entering warp drive. I’ve been promising you a real look at this thing for a long time. Enjoy! And please blame CoreText and QuickTime for the text layout and sound synch problems! ;-)

QuickTime Player plugin required. Tested on Firefox 3.6 and Safari 5.0. No guarantees about other browsers.

As always, stay tuned!

Missions of the Reliant: Take the weapons station

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Well, I cleaned up the command console code quite a huge bit, it now works quite nicely, and also the gunner’s commands are all fully implemented (with the exception of, as with the helmsman, “Report”). I wish I had more progress to report, but I’m still here and I’m still working on the game, so hopefully you won’t lose hope yet.

This project has taken quite a bit longer than I ever expected, I have to admit. I started back in February with the impression that it would be a simple port, but I forgot at the time that I hadn’t yet learned much about OpenGL, OpenAL, and other such things. It’s turned into a tremendous learning experience for me, in everything from subsystems and frameworks to code design and testing procedures. Then real life came and intervened, kicking my progress down to an even slower crawl. That all being said, I’ve been enjoying it all the way through, even when OpenGL and CoreGraphics have been violently frustrating me with the problems of text rendering on a CGL surface :-).

I hope to have a more substantial update this weekend. Wish me luck! As always, my thanks to Michael Rubin for giving me the chance to work at this, even if I have taken just this side of forever ;-)