May 10, 2012

Progress Report


In my last post I mentioned that February was going to be "Graphics Month". That turned out to be a bit of failure overall. ZBrush really wasn't the right tool for the job, but to cut a long story short, I once again looked at Blender and persevered with it long enough to get somewhere. I also found a few tutorials that really helped get me up to speed. I also found that making a cheat-sheet with all the common keyboard shortcuts was very handy, especially when coming back to it after a few days/weeks.

Most of the time I spent with Blender involved getting my head around UV-unwrapping, which isn't a trivial task, but absolutely necessary to have anything able to be textured. So far I've created only 2 small models, a rock (for terrain dressing purposes) and a campfire, but its a start.

In the past few months I've been tidying up the project quite a bit, disabling functionality that is only half finished, in an attempt to create a solid build so I can start passing it on to friends for feedback. My development schedule thus far has been fast and loose, whereby I'm not really developing towards a set of known goals, I just work on whatever interests me at the time. Unfortunately this has led to a the majority of features being only half finished, which is going to have to stop. So from here on I've started making feature lists for the next few monthly sprints, which has really helped focus my efforts in recent weeks. I've tentatively planned the next few months of development work, which I'd never really managed to do in advance.

One of the advantages of starting to show it around is obviously feedback, but also its forced me to care about the completeness of features. It's fine to leave something unfinished for development purposes, like say not handling some unusual edge case (with the idea of coming back to it and finishing it later), but once you start giving it out to people there's an expectation that everything works. 

Pre-Alpha 1 was a reasonable success, though I had some teething issues getting the deployment correct due to not really understanding SlimDX's installation requirements properly. So far the feedback has largely been related to the camera system which is one of the first things I coded, and suffered from a situation where the controls made perfect sense to me, but didn't necessarily reflect what others might try to do. Fortunately one of my alpha testers works in user interface / graphic design, so he'll hopefully point out all my mistakes before they become too deeply ingrained. :)