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Submitted by , posted on 10 October 2001
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Image Description, by
This screenshot is taken from the TechDemo that can be found on our site:
http://www.torcinteractive.com. This being FlipCode, then I'd better go into
some detail on what it is, and now it came about. I'm probably the worst person
to do this atm, having been dragged away from my current baby (DB Engine) to
tidy the TechDemo up so that we had something for the punters that visited the
site, which only just went live on Fri 5th Oct. But now it's done and up there,
I can hopefully put it behind me and get on with more pressing matters. But I
suppose there's something there to take some pride in - it's a 'relatively'
complete game engine and it's been FINISHED. Completing projects (whatever size)
isn't something to be sniffed at, so I guess I'll take some heart in that.
Anyways, the TechDemo. To cut corners, we decided to use Q3A BSPs and MD3s as
our level and model formats respectively. This brings plus's as well as minus's,
but for a team working entirely in their spare time, we felt it worthwhile to
cut our game development teeth using these well established formats - and it
sure as hell helps when you've no profiler and you KNOW your code should run at
X fps at this section in a level, when you've world-class software to test
against.
As I say, a full-time job, a wife and 3 wanes kinda limits the programming
opportunities, but when you're addicted, the only 'cure' is getting in front of
that keyboard. We've been at this craic now for well over 3 years, and we look
at this TechDemo as a learning exercise. We pretty much went thru the entire
game development cycle to complete it, well I'd the benefit of someone else
writing the level and model compilers, but our content guys had no such help.
Our next project, FATE, has us developing a 4-level freeware game (episode)
using entirely our own tech. We're really just getting into this now, and I hope
to have maybe another IOTD in the not too distant future. Again, this is a
learning exercise - on both tech and content counts. We hope at the end of all
this (6/8 months - who am I kidding!), to be finally in a position to approach a
publisher for backing to do our 'real' game, tHE SeVeN - the reason why we're
putting our lives on the long finger.
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