The following test was done with Terrain Composer in the MCM engine.
MCM Early Prototype Player Ship
A walk through the early development and modeling of the player ship, the centerpiece of the MCM user experience.
Dev Update Q1-2013
In the four months since the last post, I have been converting codebases that were XNA based, with engine & application paradigms into the whole new Unity way of doing things. I’ve got to say, Unity is pretty cool. It’s also very different than strait programming, which is what I’ve done for my career.
Nexus Obscura embraces Unity
Over the last week, the game and engine that has been in progress for the last few months has been put aside. I have licensed Unity Pro 4 and am transitioning all codebases to this platform.
Non-meaningful post
Sometimes when you have nothing constructive to say to the public, the best thing is to stay silent. So, I have been working around the clock for the last few months and this droid is all that I have to show for it today LOL! Seriously there’s a lot going on, but not much ready for the public. This one was just for fun to take the night off and relax with a little modo modeling time. Nothing complicated here, but it did take an hour to fricking render!
Making VS2012 Usable – part 1
Since Microsoft has turned 2012 into the year of no usable interfaces for products, we have to get creative to continue development with their tools, let alone their OS’s.
VS2012 is a leap forward technologically, especially for C++, but like Win8 is a crash back to the dark ages of 16 color computing for User Interface (see Dr Dobbs Review).
Here’s one article that shows how to hack it into some shape, though it still has a ways to go, which is apparently up to the end user:
Blog Article/Howto: Visual Studio 2010 icons and theme in VS 2012!
Does anyone know where all the UI people went? Were they all fired, or silenced in some way? Does anyone at MS actually have to use the products?
Funny and creative advert for Seattle Indies Expo
Unfortunately I missed the expo, and only now discovered the seattleindies.org – but the video ad they had was a very funny parody, made me feel like I was about to go to a monster truck rally!
http://www.seattleindies.org/blog/2012/7/23/seattle-indies-expo-sunday-july-29.html
Microsoft Responds to Windows 8 Hate From Game Devs
Several key developers in the gaming community have made it perfectly clear that they’re either not seeing a reason to upgrade to Windows 8 anytime soon, or that they see the new OS as a huge catastrophe waiting to be unleashed.
- I’m going to have to say; some ‘non-key’ local developers also agree with them!
Windows 8 – the Barney edition
From buttons to widgets to menus, all traces of the 3D richness that began with Windows XP, was transformed with Vista and finally perfected in Windows 7, have been erased from the UI. Transparency, too, has been given the heave-ho in favor of a return to the crayons and finger paint look of Windows XP Luna. It’s like someone attached a digital hose to the side of every Windows 8 PC and sucked all of the the visual dynamism and character out of the user experience.
Windows 8 looks like it was designed by a bunch of two year-olds wired from watching too much Barney
Not only does this sadly make me laugh, but the Visual Studio 2012 interface has suffered the same barney-ization. I haven’t gone across the street to ask them, but it would seem that my neighbors at MS have decided anything more than 8 colors is no longer needed, and complexity of GUI beyond a square with no borders, shadows, shading, or highlight is the wave of the future. Seems like we were in this hole in the mid 90′s before color counts on GPU’s were above 3 digits…