Pbuffers, impostors, stuff...


I've been in a bit of a coding mood lately so I guess it makes sense if I mostly am working on that. Anyhow, I did rework the organics engine and it's really fantastic now. The processing overhead seems quite low, which is the main thing, actually the bottleneck seems to be texture lookup which is actually good news (I can use smaller textures, and it will be faster on other HW, and there are other tricks like baising I can try)

@p So, I have to rework the impostor system to use pbuffers. Right now, it uses the framebuffer which is dangerous. Basically, if I try reading back from a section of the window that is overlapped, or the window isn't current, then intsead of a lovely impostor of a tree what you get is like, part of an interface button or something. I think I have the actual pbuffer code working, the trick is positioning the object correctly on a surface I can't see. The math isn't that complicated but it's hard to know exactly because of depth buffer issues, etc. Anyhow, I should have that worked out before too long.

@p Then this afternoon, I don't know, maybe pirate bases? I read an article that talked about trying to view yourself as different player archetypes and it gave me some good ideas for vex. For instance, at the pirate base, there will be a pleasure machine that turns $ into XP. Why? Well the idea is, if you are a hardcore trader, then you can beat the game without (potentially) killing any monsters. It's silly but, even without that it actually makes sense because of how XP works in the game. Your easiest way to get XP is killing monsters, but potentially if you got a tonne of money you wouldn't need it.

@p Remember the feedback model in vex is like, you have two main gameplay models. The text-adventure, where you feed in XP and gems and get out (bottom line) ship improvements, which let you collect more XP and gems. XP is used for training, which is kind of neccesary for a lot of things, for instance learning languages, increasing your piloting skill, court cases (not yet but... it will be) and so forth.

2004-12-09


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