Defining Awesome

A speech I gave at TEDxWulkan about why it is absolutely necessary to use our emotions to propel our work.

It was a spontaneous event made by the team behind TEDxWarsaw, which is a local license of TED Talks. The theme of the event was “It’s impossible. But doable.” 2 weeks after the Iceland volcano eruption TEDxWulkan was an opportunity to look at Explosive Ideas, Impossible Dreams and Crazy Propositions and how those might actually be accomplished.

The video was made thanks to streamonline.pl and the rest of the speakers can be viewed here http://www.streamonline.pl/tedxwulkan/.

Thanks for watching, for me it was certainly fun to do this.

This is how I’m working nowadays on creating maps and the map editor code. I take a real picture and try to recreate it by using procedural generating, texture blending techniques and scripts.

Example: This is the source picture.

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I feel like a sculpter slowly bringing out the core gameplay from Link-Dead. Working on sprites gives me something concrete to play with. It is changing all the time but I see a general movement into a Starcraft type of team-game were each team is totally different than the other.

I’ve come to a conclusion that there is no point in fixing bugs at early development stages. It is a waste of time because either the whole code will be rewritten or the bug will get fixed when working on other things. So I’ll now fix bugs only after major releases.

I seem to fail at making realistic looking rubble in maps. I can make concrete but something easier like a pile of garbage is hard. This is the first reason I decided to change the initial map scenery from destroyed skyscrapers to an industrial/factory setting. The second reason is that no matter how realistic an urban tower looks like it is ultimately boring and repetitive (although the concept of fighting in demolished cities is cool for me). I hope to have some new screenshots soon.

Rope will be used for hook, grappling hook and climbing ropes. It uses verlet integrated springs.

One of the weapons we are working on:

I got the map pixel renderer working through a script file. I used Angelscript cause its the fastest and easiest to use. It has a C syntax and I hope most modders will be familiar with it. This basically works like a pixel shader, so we pass texture information and details about how the tile should be rendered and we get a nice image from it

This is the simplest possible code just taking the color of the tiles texture.

Code:

Screen:

Lets do an effect with a second texture. How about a simple rust effect that appears on light areas of the texture.

Code:

Screen:

For some more interesting effects we use math functions. Here is a gradient effect using sine.

Code:

Screen:

I decided to move the tile rendering code into a script file. It will work like a pixel shader so you code how each map pixel is rendered.

Not updating lately cause I’m having too much fun. Victor is doing an amazing job and its so cool to see LD finally becoming my dream.