Clockwork Age

Clockwork Age is a project I am doing with a friend of mine, as preparation for the study we want to do at the NHTV in the Netherlands. I am aiming for the Game Programming-direction and Luc is aiming for the 3D visual art. We both stopped our study at the Utrecht School of Arts & Technology, because we both disliked the way the school treats its students, we both wanted to specialize something. We chose to do this after completing two full years at the USAT.

Clockwork Age

Clockwork Age is going to be a third person RPG-like game in an era called the Clockwork Age. This era is  a Steampunk-inspired environment in a post-medieval setting. The world will include at least one small village, a big city, lots of terrain and the room to add more. 

We do not aim to complete this project, we only aim to get as far as we can and learning as much as possible during this project.

I will work on the tools we will use to do so, including a level editor (with a terrain editor), an asset-builder, for combining assets like models, textures and effects into a usable asset in the editor and the game.

I will also focus on building the game itself. The character movement, the physics, the particles, the shaders and everything necessary to make something awesome. I am currently using XNA to achieve this.

This is what I have so far:

It is a Windows Forms-application running an XNA View. Clicking the assets on the left will currently import  it to position 0,0,0.

You can save the scene and you can load other scenes. The scene-files are simple text-files with a reference to an asset in the asset list, a position, rotation and scale. The rotation and scale are currently not implemented, but will be in the near future. 

Upon starting the Editor, the Asset List will build. It will gather all resources from a .assets-file and add them to the content pipeline. This is quite inefficient, due to rebuilding every asset at every run and I am going to fix that. The problem is that I do not have access to the Content Pipeline as easily as in an XNA Game-application. It will not save references and all .xnb files are saved in a temporary location until the application closes.

I will try to fix this, right after I fix the camera-controls. 

I am having problems with them, because I can't decide whether I want to use a direction  relative to the -position as a camera-target or an actual target.

Using an actual target makes it easy to orbit around, but makes movement a bit harder. Using a direction makes it hard to orbit around, because the direction should be normalized and orbiting around a Vector that is 1 unit away from you isn't really useful.

More will follow soon!