NEaB Today

3 Sep, 2010

Long time since my last update. Well just to say I'm really a bit overloaded lately, anyhow I'm still working for Nebula Rider (as well as other things).

Nebula Rider can now (in our internal version) show other players on the maps, and you see them moving around. Yet you can't chat nor can't really interact with the others. At least it is a first step in the MMO direction. Other works have been done like a start to making the interface customizable (color wise yet). We will certainly offer customization and I was even thinking to let players decide where to place some stuff like maybe moving the HUD around or such.

You may ask now, when will we see all those? Well, the question is simple, the answer is not. Basically I'm reluctant to put an intermediate version which wouldn't offer that much more to you, anyhow I hope to update the preview version the coming week.

Along this, I'm talking with an artist to let you players have a customizable avatar face, (doable only once!) and that others will be able to see. And as the game may attract yet more people, I'm thinking about changing our old forum software for something new and maybe in house made. Reasons are that the current forums don't deal well with many sub categories, nor offer many features.

3 Aug, 2010

The mission editor is finally working as it should. We can create missions and we can test them. Now how great they are are not anymore dependent on the editor but on us (either we lack some code or we lack the skills to use the code we have).

Next step is the dialog editor to allow to "talk" to some NPC which will unlock either additional missions or be part of the mission. This will allow to introduce more diversity and build a richer universe. As this is not the first dialog editor (due to the one I made for NEaB) I know how it should look like. Or at least I have some ideas. Doesn't mean it's all easy but at least it should be not that much complex... hopefully.

Once this piece is finished, we will certainly need some hand on the content writing... so if you feel interested please contact us!

27 Jul, 2010

While Nasrudin works on the Inventory and try to create new kind of weapon and other ship pieces, I have been (very) busy working on the mission editor, which will allow admins to create missions directly from the game interface without any coding.

Even if this part is a lot of work, it will quiet certainly pay off at the end as any admin will be able to work on the missions / quests. The tool is also fully dynamic which means, as soon as we create a new ship behavior for example, the tool will spot it and allow you to use it.

Soon I will add the ability to save / load those missions and then Retor will be able to work on them to create the actual story.

After which I will work on the NPC which will allow some dialogs and based on the dialogs some new missions.

8 Jul, 2010

Things are going forward, and more and more tools are reaching what we could consider as usable tool. For example, the mission browser now will show past and current missions, allows to switch from one mission to the other and more. Also the target system (green arrow) will try to point you at the next thing you must do. New mission types have been implemented as well, and other small things are slowly improving too. Well overall I start to be really pleased with this project.

Now, as things are reaching some maturity we must choose how we will design the stories, either full coded, or via some admin tools. We didn't choose it yet, but we may end up having some sort of mix. What's clear is that players will not be able to create quests, and this for the simple reason that if we want to offer a good story we can't simply mix 200 or more different story lines. Sad news for those hoping to work like they was doing it in NEaB but as one main complain was the story quality we must do something better for this new game.

BTW just to give an impression of the code size, our code is growing slowly about 300 lines per day... and we have now 17131 lines of code.

Note: our ETA for the beta shifted a bit (due to personal holidays), count still 2 months before you will have some sort of playable game.

2 Jul, 2010

Game state does indeed save! That means this huge show stopper has been bypassed, and we can now basically work on both the story and continue the work on the server side support. I'm really pleased this serialization issue has been fixed, as it would have been a real shame to not be able to save the game state and therefore stop the game due to something like that.

To celebrate this, I worked on more funny things like "system voice" which gives you hints about what happens (shields down, enemy destroyed etc...) however even something that simple in theory took some time as I encountered unexpected issues like lack of support for some MP3 settings. So we MUST use 44kHz sounds and not some less resource demanding one. Too bad.

 

29 Jun, 2010

As we are moving forward, one mandatory feature is the persistence of the game, which means, you can leave the world, and when you come back you should return with all the items and stuff you had last time you played... or at least, without losing all the progression.

To do that, we need to "serialize" the game status, which means, we need to transform all the game objects into something we can send back to the server, and store it, and then when you enter again, load it back, and restore the status of the whole thing.

Sad news for Silverlight programmers, serialization in Silverlight is quite limited... and doesn't actually fit our needs. So which options remain? Well, not many besides coding all the required facilities ourselves. And I can assure you it's not fun.

Hopefully, after this huge work, we will be able to keep your game status (with missions, system ships and more), otherwise the game will be... a failure. But as our prototypes seem to demonstrate, we should be able to code it, it's just matter of time.