Hello,

So as some of you must know by now, the original thematic shift I had in mind didn’t pan out. Anyway, so I made some other designs and this is one that people seem to have liked a fair bit.

So I finished the model over the last couple of days. Here is how it looks in game:

Comments? I think it’s good. We’ve also decided that the ships are allowed to be radically different from each other. That’s probably for the best anyway, makes them easier to tell apart.

Cheers.

Hello there folks, I come bearing yet more interesting screenshots today. Right to business then.

First of all, Risujin put in a slight glowing effect with the logo and resized some things. Here is how it looks now:

Another big thing that he’s done is make the tile that your mouse is currently over highlight, and the model on it glow. Here are some images about that:

And when you click on a tile, the game now opens a “ring menu” that lets you choose what you would like to construct there. This work is still incomplete in terms of what will be on the ring and possibly ring size, but I think the idea is clear:

And then when you click one of the icons in the ring, it will place a model on the tile. Obviously in the finished version, things will be constructed more slowly and the models will be textured, but you get the idea:

Also, I spent a while and made a finished-ish Sloop model (textured). Here is the process of selecting and building again, but this time I can select a ship for demo purposes:

And here are some better angles of the ship model:

Well, thanks for reading. Hopefully you found that to as cool as I did. It’s obviously even more fun when you have it live in front of you and can actually rotate and spin the globe. I think we’re all generally pleased about how it’s coming together. I really need to make more models, though, and quick!!

Cheers.

Risujin and I have been working hard as usual and have more progress to show off. Mostly, I’ll just be showing off some pictures as they’ll say more of what people are interested in than explanations of what’s going on would.

So, first of all, Risujin has committed several fixes and now a lot of issues have vanished. He discovered a couple bugs related to the PLUM model exporter (related to normals), the fixing of which has given us correct lighting on the models.

I’ve redone the tree model and made it overall better. That model is in SVN, by the way. Anyway, long story short:

Risujin has also worked his magic some more and improved our performance quite significantly. The face count limit for the models looks like it has stabilized at 300 faces, which is a lot of detail if you know what to do. I hear the game renders over a million faces at 25 fps on Risujin’s computer.

So yeah, we have models loading nicely, and some models done! Stay tuned for more exciting stuff coming up.

Hello again. I’m getting back into the habit of working on Plutocracy and making blog posts (woo). Here are the updates from the last couple of days.

So, I’ve been doing some art. Here is to showing off.

First of all, I’ve made a (thus far) naked tree. The tree actually has a really detailed texture with bark and stuff, but it actually turns out that when you view it at the size you’d be viewing it in game, it’s pretty much just brown. Anyway, as what you’d be seeing in game sounds like it is more interesting than details that you’ll only ever see on my blog, most of these images will be posted with a bit of distance on them. However, Risujin says that placing models onto the globe is in the pipeline, so I should soon be able to take screenshots with the models in action. Anyway, Here is the tree:

Second of all, another unfinished model is this strange rock I’ve been working on. I haven’t textured it properly yet, so I just made the entire texture grey. Here it is anyway:

Third of all, you may remember recently Risujin added the cool new limbo mode for when you first start up the game. I saw the potential of this and decided to make a new logo, partially inspired by a heraldic wallpaper I have. Naturally, I’m not in the habit of stealing art — so here is how it turned out:

This is actually not how I made it originally, it’s been changed due to some suggestions and complaints I received.

Also, I should mention that the above image was brought to you by Plutocracy’s new screenshot feature. Notice how there is no window around it like normal? Plutocracy can now do the screenshotting for me. For those of you that have this version of the game running, press F12 to take a screenshot. For the moment, there is no kind of confirmation that a screenshot has been taken, so don’t worry. The screenshot should appear in you .plutocracy/screenshots folder. Thanks Risujin, it feels like you made this feature specifically for me.

So that’s it for the art updates (this kind of thing takes a while, you know!). I thought some of you might be interested what the texture for the tree actually looks like from a development point of view. The way textures (for Plutocracy and a lot of games) are done is with something called UV mapping. Basically, the model is unfolded as if it were made of paper and laid out flat. Then you paint onto the flattened model and save the file you used. Later, the game can use the unwrapping layout it used and the image file to texture the model. Makes sense, I think.

Anyway, I’m new to UV and pretty sloppy, but here is the tree’s texture:

You can imagine that the flattened model would roughly fill the non-black space.

Anyway, have yourselves great days and I’ll have more updates for you later (probably).

Hello, a quick update…

• Mill (generic building) completed. More specifically a windmill.

• The UI stuff that Risujin’s been working on is coming together. We have a button now. Soon, the console will work.
• It also is really easy to re-theme, so I expect to see a bunch of fun designs in the future.
• Yes, the button does click and change highlight. Very buttony.

Too lazy to write any more. Cheers.

Hello, I know it’s been a while. Sorry. We haven’t been that lazy, actually, just kind of quiet. Here is what’s going on:

• Risujin and I argued heartily for a week or two now, but the end result is a pretty good game design wiki. We’re pretty sure that most of the details are there now and there won’t me too many radical new design things coming in. The gameplay/features is mostly laid out, so it’s worth a read. Check out the Plutocracy Wiki.
• Risujin’s been working away on the User Interface / Input stuff. I hear he has a buttons done, but they need fixing. You’ll probably hear more on this before the weekend is over.
• Developer Attraction: Recently, as we have been getting more popular, we’ve actually been seeing more people interested in working with us. Hopefully some of these people actually follow through. There was a guy on IRC who seemed rather keen, but then suddenly vanished, not to be seen again. Similarly, a musician I randomly stumbled into said he’d maybe help. We’ll see if he’s interested in a few days, I guess. My website is doing somewhat well at getting attention to the project due to increased hits from Stumbleupon (which is evil, by the way… But I’ll talk about that later if I get around to it).
• Lambdanaut’s been slowly working on making the random island generator less random since we decided that the max size for an island should be 150 tiles. The current generator sometimes makes huge islands that really get in the way and break some game mechanics.
• I’ve just made a model of a guildhouse. See the buildings page for what else I’ll have to make in the future. Here is a render, as usual:

Hello, hello. Big update, but as usual, kind of rushed

1) Workshop.

2) Warehouse.

3) Windows. Risujin has written Windows for the user interface. Expect to see a lot of windows that look like this. They will be partially transparent, nice looking, and have a variety of contents in them. Risujin is continuing work on widgets and other UI components. Of course, I’ll keep you updated.

As an aside: the globe you see may look a bit different. Lambdanaut has put in a new randomization function and then promptly buggered off . We’ll probably hear more about from him in the future.

4) Wiki. Risujin and I have taken Khent’s advice and did some more planning work on the wiki. 4.a) Resources. We have a list of resources now, and how they are interconnected. Check out http://code.google.com/p/plutocracy/wiki/Resources.

4.b) Buildings. We have a list of buildings now, and how they are interconnected. Check out http://code.google.com/p/plutocracy/wiki/Buildings.

4.c) Ships. We have most of a page that describes all you need to know about ships, from design to creation. Check out http://code.google.com/p/plutocracy/wiki/Ships.

For the observant… Hurrah for copy and paste!

Well, that’s all folks. Cheers.

Hey there. Lets get to it.

1) Text. Risujin has text rendering working, as well as word wrapping.

2) We’ve been working on much planning. There are some nice mockups and things. Check it out. You may get a better idea of what the game is about. The pages that are most valuable are Buildings, Resources, and the Design page. Wiki Link.

3) House. I’ve been working away on modeling. Slow progress. I know it’s not much to look at, and that saddens me. However, I only have so many faces to work with, and the building will be very tiny. I know it’s not really pretty at large and without textures, but that’s the way these things go. My plan is to not texture anything until the end. Then I can get into the “texturing mindset” and do it all at once. Makes sense to me at least.

I’d like to talk about the “night” shot as well… in our current plan, the models will actually be able to support having their own lights. When night rolls around to some side of the globe, the lights on the buildings turn on and look pretty. Its a nifty idea, and we think we can pull it off without crazy lag.

Also from the world of developerland — our plan for fog of war is actually to render the fogged parts as if they were a drawing on an old map. Stay tuned for that.

Hello,

I’ve started working on models that are actually usable in game today. We have the exporter and loader working very well now, so I have no excuse not to.

So, model one is mostly done. I’d like to cut down on the complexity a bit and it still needs textures. Obviously, it doesn’t come with water included in game This is actually a model that we can more or less use, considering we decided that the amount of faces we have per building is 500. That high of an upper limit makes me happy.

Meanwhile, Risujin has drastically improved the exporter. It’s about 150x faster than it used to be. Good progress around the board.

SURPRISE EDIT:

Oh my goodness! We have islands! Lambda came back from visiting his parents part way through Sunday, and whipped up an awesome random island generator. Words cannot explain how brilliant this is… we have islands. Observe!

Also, Lambda set up a clever way of making it so that it generates a number that represents the noise that generates the islands. Long story short, sending the map to everyone from the server will be about as much effort as sending a small number. Maps would download just about instantly. Amazing.

Hello,

Nothing too much to report. Today, I stayed late at work. Not for work, though. Thanks to my awesome boss, Avery, I am allowed to come in in my spare time to use their computers. This is nice, because they are a lot better for rendering than my laptop is. Also the monitors are bigger, so I have more working space for Blender. Anyway, while testing out how much the computer could decently handle, I created this image. It took only a couple minutes to render, which is amazing beacause those circles have some 30,000 faces each. Anyway, what I quickly threw together looked somewhat interesting, so I decided to post it. It really requires no effort to make something like this in Blender if you know where the buttons are

Have a good time.