Late resolutions
Posted by Ben Hymers | Filed under cities-in-the-sky, banditos
It's still January, so there's still time for me to make new year's resolutions, right? Good.
My new year's resolution is to release both Cities in the Sky and Banditos by the end of the year. They probably won't be final releases, but for each of them there will be something you can download and play and enjoy, at the very least!
I've just realised I've not really written anything about Banditos yet; I'll make a note to do that soon too!
Gone with the windmill
Posted by Ben Hymers | Filed under cities-in-the-sky
Really Ben, you couldn't think of a better windmill pun?
So I fancied doing a bit of 3D modelling recently, and got cracking on a new type of building for CITS - a windmill. In the process I've learned about all sorts of arty things - modelling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging, and animation (the blades rotate, you see). Ignoring the pretty naff texturing (which is basically an AO bake with some tints applied in Photoshop), I don't think it's that bad!
Oh yeah, and I got myself a new skybox too, as the old one is stupidly bright and has massive black gaps in it. And I fiddled with the grass material a bit. I'll get onto some more gameplay soon, I promise!
Real live footage of Cities in the Sky!
Posted by Ben Hymers | Filed under cities-in-the-sky
I've been busy getting Cities in the Sky back up to where it was before I decided to replace the physics engine, and it's now at a point where it's actually better than it was before. Movement of the island is more fluid, the game performs better with more buildings and people in the world, and it's much more predictable than it was before - previously it loved to explode in interesting but stupid ways.
So to celebrate this, and to make the 'videos' section of the new CITS website look a bit less sorry for itself, I've uploaded to YouTube a tasty tasty video of CITS gameplay!
It looks like Google Videos is being decommissioned in favour of YouTube, so I thought I'd best get with the times. Unfortunately someone has already taken (and subsequently either abandoned or deleted) the names "hymerman", "BenHymers", "BHymers", and just about every other nickname I've gone by, ever. So I've had to go with one of their suggestions; the terribly self-important-sounding "TheBenHymers". Brilliant.
New website for me!
Posted by Ben Hymers | Filed under website
Continuing on my web presence rampage, I've made a proper website for myself: www.benhymers.com. Hopefully now it'll rank higher than 6th in a google search for "Ben Hymers".
My next task is to get CITS working again, as the switch to Bullet physics has left it slightly crippled. I'd like to capture another video of it since the current one is very out of date and gives the wrong impression!
New website for Cities in the Sky
Posted by Ben Hymers | Filed under website
I've made a proper website for Cities in the Sky, www.citiesinthesky.co.uk! Well done me. That URL used to be for this blog, but it never quite sat right with me, having the game name as my personal blog, which is why I bought benhymers.com. Now citiesinthesky.co.uk will be used for things relating specifically to the game.
I've implemented it as another Google App Engine app, since whilst the page you see is just some static HTML, it's also making use of a heavily modified gredirector script to redirect all the old traffic from the blog and pages, to either this blog, my main website, or to the main Cities in the Sky website.
Time to get working on my main website, I'm a bit ashamed to put my name to it at the moment!
An update! Progress! Hooray!
Posted by Ben Hymers | Filed under cities-in-the-sky
It's been a very long time since I wrote about anything in particular, and believe me when I say I think about it every minute of every day, roughly. Maybe slightly less than that.
Since the last post, I've done all sorts; gone through crunch and release of Kinect Sports, cruised around California a bit, had my eyes lasered, and started a top secret new project.
I've also been making progress on Cities in the Sky, believe it or not! The unfortunate thing is that everything I change I think is too unimportant to write about, so I don't. And the more time passes since the last update, the more interesting the change has to be for me to consider it website-worthy. So I end up never writing about anything :(
From now on, I think I'll just write about what I've done recently, regardless of if it's interesting or not. Well, I'll have some kind of standard - you probably won't care about my latest whitespacing strategy.
To get the ball rolling, here's a quick run-down of everything I've done since the last time I wrote about CITS:
Gameplay
- Lots ...
Kinect Sports
Posted by Ben Hymers | Filed under kinect-sports
Awwww yeah! The "top secret" game I've been working on at Rare was announced at E3 on Monday, and there are now some videos available online. The game is Kinect Sports, for the new Microsoft Kinect 3D camera. I'm working on the table tennis, one of the 6 sports included. It's basically only me working full time on it, and another guy (hi Pete!) working on it when he's not busy with volleyball, so I like to think it's my sport really :)
Here are two videos that have been released. The first is a stereotypical and very very cheesy American family playing the game. Look for the table tennis. I did that!
The second is the on-stage demo we gave at E3 (the big games show thing in America) on Monday. It's a bit painful to watch since the camera doesn't work to start off with, and the stupid cameraman is only looking at the guy playing (Shin) and not the big screen for the first bit, and our girly that was meant to be on stage (Simona) got food poisoning so they had to replace her with an irritating American girl, but ...
Feed me spam
Posted by Ben Hymers | Filed under website
For those of you that have subscribed to the site's feed; I'm very sorry about the spam! I've just been fixing up old posts, but it looks like Bloggart's feed generation is being a bit silly and is generating a new entry for every edit I make! I only discovered after I'd edited a load and noticed there are suddenly 40-something unread entries!
Still, it's mostly there now; I've sorted out issues with some posts being inaccessible due to odd characters in their URLs, added formatting where the import from Wordpress had none, and fixed links to images that were on the old host or on Picasa Web Albums, so they all point to Flickr now.
Unfortunately all my travel posts will need some more updating as I can't be bothered to put all the photos on Flickr but the styles the images used to use aren't in the new stylesheet, so there may be some more feed spam yet...
Another fresh start
Posted by Ben Hymers | Filed under website
Let's just gloss over the massive irony of the last post and skip on to pointing out the obvious; I've moved my blog again! I'm now using Google AppEngine to host it, using a piece of software called Bloggart. I've done this for a few reasons: mostly it's the scalability and reliability that comes with Google's clever virtualisation technology, but also it's that I won't have to pay for hosting until this site becomes very popular! To you, all this means is that the site should have less downtime and be faster to load, even when it's getting absolutely hammered (which is roughly never). I wanted to get the blog moved over to the new software and new snappy domain (blog.benhymers.com) before I wrote any more content, as the more readers I have the more of a pain it will be to move in future.
Obviously there are some kinks to work out. First is that most of the old post's formatting was lost in the transition - paragraphs and styles are mostly missing, code snippets and anything that looked like HTML is all wonky, and images appear inline ...
Egad, two updates in as many days?!
Posted by Ben Hymers | Filed under cities-in-the-sky
Yep, that's right, I'm writing blog posts on consecutive days now. Whatever next; Twitter?
Anyway, I've tapped on my keyboard a bit more and have now gotten rid of those pesky Piece and Debris classes once and for all, and fixed up some bugs that have crept in during my purging. Pieces are now defined by their behaviour components, which take their parameters from good old objects.xml. To show off how fantabulous this is, I went and added raise pieces in the shapes of crosses, lines and blocks, and had them hooked into the game in probably under a minute.
Eye candy is always nice, so here's a screenshot of the CITS after a couple of minutes of play:
