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, hello!

Big updates recently. It’s almost like we have a real game! The ships move and we have some more UI. I’ll also talk about some other changes here and there.

So when you start up, you’ll notice now that there is a new button on the bottom left. It’s grayed out though.

Well, anyway, so if you click the flag and join a nation, a ship spawns. When you click on it and select it, the little ship button that was grayed out before lights up.

Clicking on the button will show you a listing of everything that’s being carried on the ship.

Probably the most interesting part — after a ship is selected, clicking on some other water tile will lay down a path for your ship to travel. (Note that it’s a bit wavy because of our triangular tiles. For the moment, we decided we weren’t going to fix the zig-zagging.) Right away, the ship turns the way it’s supposed to go and heads off!

Also, I’ve gotten into the code a bit and tried to improve the screenshot feature (F12) which I use so often. I managed to write a patch that lets you set r_screenshots_dir, a variable that will change where screenshots are saved. I also made a call to display a popup to tell you when a screenshot has been taken. And guess what? I did it all wrong and I bet Risjin’s reprogrammed all of it before applying. Hahaha. Oh well, the features are in at least.

Also, we have a google newsgroup now! If you’re interested in following development, you might want to sign up.

Another unrelated note — my last thematic change design was boo’d down mostly, so I made some new designs. They were much more liked, but I’ll post about them later. I’m hoping to make one of the models today.

Finally, we also decided that our resources system was bloated, so Risujin and I made some changes, which are now reflected on the wiki pages about Buildings, Resources, and the model list.

Yep, big updates. Sadly, however, there probably won’t be another one for a while, since Risujin is being called away to improve his old project, CellWriter, for a few days. Anyway, have a good one folks.

My university Internet just has crazy speeds. I mean just nuts. By far the best part about living in residence here (which I won’t probably be doing any more after this term) is the insane download rates I can get. I know I’m repeating myself, so have some screenshots instead.

The first two images are thanks to speedtest.net (nice website) and the last image is me downloading a large high quality speed run from speeddemosarchive.com. (Not over the LAN!)

Speaking of which, the latter is a very fun site that has a large collection of speed runs for varies games. My hobby is watching speed runs for games that I’ve either beaten (to see how much people can exploit it!) or watching runs of games that sound interesting but I know I’m never going to get around to playing.

Cheers.

Hello, I’ll make this relatively short. Basically, Risujin and I have been thinking about switching up the theme of the game a bit. Caribbean is boring. “Lets go for something space-y and imaginative. We’ve so lost our rocker,” we said. Oh boy. Anyway, so as a first order of business, I’ve been redesigning how a ship should look.

The textures will be roughly:

• Wood for the decks. I’m thinking about a nice dark stain for this one.
• The wing structure, head, engines will be some sort of metallic, not sure which colour yet. My original thought was a golden-brown, with variation of course.
• The wing fabric will be very white.

Some ship features:

• Strong head if we for some reason decide that ships can ram into things, ha!
• Engines. Yeah. Engines. Frickin’ ion jet engines. Because I say so.
• Wings that can use wind to help the engines. Not like there is wind, shh.
• Pretty classic hull design. It fits well into the era we originally drew from.
• OPERATIONAL NOTE: SHIP DOES NOT FLY! DO NOT ATTEMPT, YOU’LL HURT YOURSELF!

I think I put too much thought into textures. I need to remember that this ship will be tiny. Anyway, this design solves some issues:

• Looks nice from above (see sloop from above, can’t even tell what it is).
• Roughly triangular in shape, so it fits better to our tiling system.
• Cooler style which I’m personally more excited about.

I’ll still have to figure out how buildings fit into this kind of style, but I think I have some pretty good ideas there too.

Construction of the Aurora ship shown above has begun. She’ll be game-worthy as soon as possible.

Hello, hello!

Exciting updates a plenty, friends. To business.

First thing I want to point out — as in this screenshot — is the new status display. When something of note happens, a notification in a pretty bubble comes up on screen.

Next thing that you should rapidly notice is that there is now more main UI! Yes! User Interface goodness. (Bottom left corner for the observation impaired.) This new bit of UI shows us the nations options, and for the moment lets us switch between them freely, which should be restricted later on as per the spec.

So when you click the Nations button, you get a window with the different nations possible. When you first click a nation to join with, a notification comes up. However, this is a special kind of notification — this one has a little magnifying glass icon. When you click the magnifying glass, the globe smoothly rotates to the area of interest — in this case, the newly spawned ship you own.

You’ll notice in this more zoomed shot that the ship has a pretty little ring around it. This ring shows the unit’s health and armour (for the moment). I’m very impressed that Risujin thought to put the health info in a ring like that. The ring already shows ownership of the unit in a lot of games, but this integrates the health in as well and looks very stylish.

Also note: clicking on the ship will highlight the circle for when you want to move the ship. This is not shown in these screenshots.

Also note that the nations have different colours. These colours are based on the Tango colour scheme — Risujin and I both love Tango, thanks Tango people.

Also there have been some changes to the globe rotation / movement system. I don’t think I ever explained the system too well in general, so here it is:

• Right clicking on the globe and dragging will move it, as you’d expect.
• Right clicking-dragging quickly on the globe and releasing will “toss” it. Momentum will then let the globe drift. Think Google Earth.
• Right click-dragging on space will rotate the globe around an axis that would be coming out through the middle of the globe and the center of the screen. (Ie. x-axis, kinda.)
• Double right-clicking on a tile will rotate the globe so that it is centered on the tile you clicked.

We think this system is very good. It’s simple because it only requires one button, but lets you have a lot of control over the globe. You can do quite a few tricks and get some nice benefits:

• You can double right click -> toss (make that you will be able to soon)
• You can toss the globe, select a unit as it’s “drifting”, and tell the ship to go wherever the globe has rotated to.
• You can toss the globe and then single right-click to make it stop spinning.
• You can move over large areas very quickly using throws and small mouse motions.
• You can position your view very carefully by rotating around the protruding axis described and “manually” moving the globe without tossing it.
• You can move entirely by double right clicks, and easily focus your view on your little city clusters and ships.

Anyway, thank you for reading. I’m happy to provide these updates to you all. Big thanks to Risujin for all his hard work. This of course, is the normal state of affairs, but we should continue to be grateful regardless of how common-place his magnificent work becomes.

I’ll leave you with some interesting statistics brought to you by git and other console trickery. Note that insertions/deletions is in diff format and tracks “lines changed” really. Some lines are deleted, some are added, some are deleted then added (ie. modified).

• Diff-format average stats over the last 5 commits: 15.2 files changed, 330.9 insertions(+), 243.6 deletions(-)
• Diff-format change amounts over the last 100 commits: 231 files changed, 135741 insertions(+), 16466 deletions(-)
• Diff-format change amounts over the lifespan of the project: 233 files changed, 143994 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
• In all the C files in the source folder (ie. not counting our home-made documentation generator and source parser script), there are 13261 lines of code relevant to the game as a total.
• In all the C header files in the source folder, there are 1844 lines of code.

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.

Hello there, I would like to publish my concept for how an extrude tool / system could fit into the Inkscape workflow.

Preface

First of all, I think it would be extremely useful to have an extrude system for Inkscape. It would speed up a lot of the issues related to adding nodes to an existing curve. In Blender, I spend a lot of time making low-poly models where I have to pretty much build them vertex by vertex (or node by node if you will). In Inkscape, to do the same kind of thing to extrude just one node, I have to:

1. Make a line
2. Use the node tool
3. Double click on the line near a node to make a new node at that place
4. Move the original node as desired

I would much prefer to just select a node and hit e to make a new node near it and put select that node.

Similarly, the process I described above gets much more lengthy if I need to extured a line or a more complex shape where I have several nodes. As such, I’ve created some mockups for how this could be done better. It all hindges on the idea of select a node and hit e to duplicate the node near it and put the node into selected mode.

Concept Art

So, here, first of all, is how this would work with a line:

Secondly, here is how it would work with a line or a more complex shape:

I think this system I’ve divised here both fits well into the existing Inkscape code and makes a lot of sense. Thank you to those Inkscape developers and that take the time to read this and consider it.

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 there, my it has been a while.

First of all, I would like to tell those followers of our project that aren’t very close with the development team that all is well. We haven’t given up on the project, and things are progressing nicely. What has happened is that my computer had broken (so no new art from me). I had it repaired, but also bought a nice new desktop also. Making models should be easier now, and I have two computers so it shouldn’t happen again. I also went to England and moved. As such, I’ve been mostly offline for about 3-4 weeks. I’d like to mention that I’m also back in school now at The University of Waterloo, but I think I still have time to work on projects in my spare time. Besides, what is life without working in the community

Risujin had been mostly very busy during the time that I’ve been gone. He’s added a lot to the game, which I’ll cover below. However, he too went on vacation for some 10-14 days or something like that. He too is back just recently and is rapidly getting back into the swing of things. He’s really awesomely self-motivated, and we’re all jealous of his speedy output.

Amanieu, our programming apprentice has been swamped with school work, also went on vacation, and is just finishing up his exams now. I think he’ll be back in action soon-ish, but I don’t really know. Anyway, things are great.

Yeah, I know, blah blah blah, heh. Here is the part that you people care about, the changelog with images! Prepare to be amazed, my friends. I will now write a tour of the game so far.

Limbo Mode (or Title Screen)

The first thing you see when you start up the latest Plutocracy client is this screen, what Risujin refers to as “Limbo Mode.” This is somewhat equivalent to what you’d see when you first start up most games, but with as slight twist. The plan is that the UI of the game won’t change modes — ie. you’ll always have the menus that are displayed, you just won’t be able to use them in some cases. As a continuation of this, the server browser will be available at all times, which Risujin has convinced me is a good idea. For example, you’d be able to check if there are people online on another server that you like, or see where your friends are. In related news, we’re contemplating a “buddy list” for the UI as well, so you can keep track of your mates. Anyway, here is the Limbo screen:

So then after you look at the Limbo screen, you’d probably want to get into the game. To do this, you will have to use the Game Menu. It looks like this:

After you click “Host” (or eventually “Join”), the darkness in the middle of the globe and the Plutocracy logo will fade out. And you will meet with the actual game. Theoretically, the game at this point would quickly connect to the server (or start the server) and display the game in progress. This will look roughly like this (but, with, you know, models and players and a completed UI):

New Globe

I’ll show you some pictures of what the globe looks like at this point. Some things I’d like to point out. We have a moon and sun, both of which emit light (of different colours). As you look at the globe, the stars, moon, and sun seem to rotate around you. The game is slated to have dynamic night and day, with different visibility conditions. In fact, at this point, if you watch one point long enough, you will see the night become day and then night again. It’s all very pretty.

Also, please appreciate the fact that since Lambdanaut left the team, Risujin has rewritten the globe and island generation algorithms. They both work really well now and are very fast. Also, the islands are now well controlled in their creation, meaning that you’ll never have an island that is super massive and annoying to get around. In fact, islands now have size limits. All of this is very impressive to programmers who recognize what a huge task that must have been.

Finally, I’d like to mention that Risujin put a considerable amount of effort into the atmosphere and tile texturing system. You’ll see that there is a aura-like atmosphere around the globe, which not only looks nice, but also simulates the diffusion of light, softening it and spreading it out. Another challenge was the fact that the entire globe is made of triangular tiles. Risujin came up with a cool blending system which makes triangles look like a coherent land mass. Kudos for that, it took some time. Check out the globe and comment what you think. I expect something along the lines of “OMG NICE!”.

User Interface

I’ll also show you the UI that is currently available. It should be pretty self-explanatory, but I’d like to mention that the console has tab completion which is pretty handy. As in the screen shot, if you hit r_TAB, it’ll show you the possibilities. Our system also actually tells you what the variables do, which makes the console way more user-friendly. Can you tell I’m proud?

Internationalization

Also, we (I think Risujin, Kasuko, Amanieu, and I all had a hand programming this feature) have excellent multi-language/internationalization support now. It’s like seriously very nice. I’ll not bore you with the internals of how it works, but something I’d like to mention is that we have a source parser that finds all the strings that need translating and generates the file for you, so that all you have to do is type in your translated strings into the blanks. The script is slated to have some improvements that will handle merging changes and deleting old entries eventually. Kasuko will probably do it eventually. To change languages, for the moment what you do is type “c_lang ‘LANGUAGE CODE’” into the console, where the LANGUAGE CODE is something like ‘fr’ or ‘ru’. Anyway, here is a screenshot of Plutocracy with the partial French translation:

As for me, I’ve been doing some sketching and plotting for how to change the art style of the game somewhat. I have quite a few ideas laid out and have made some early models. More about this later when I actually have some more things to show. Should be pretty exciting.

Anyway, we’re not dead. In fact, we’re doing really well, and morale is still pretty good as far as I can tell. As the game starts to take shape, it just becomes more and more exciting to work on it. There is a starting time when everything is just a vague mental image, something that is a bit foggy. You reach for it and grab it, mould it until you can see it clearly enough to design. As you design it, more fine-grained ideas start to come to your mind and momentum builds. Eventually, you get something for all your hard work and it’s exciting to finally see clearly that which seemed so surreal a while ago. We have the framework. The globe works. The internationalization works. The model loader works. The user interface works. The game is ready to be born. Hold onto your stomachs, friends. You’re about to witness a baby come into this world.