I fixed a few bugs in Hack Mars this week. I'm happy that I'm able to work at 200% for the last few days. I've slept 8 hours and worked 16 hours Wed and Thurs. Today, I will go to the 2600 meeting at 5, but only because it's terribly important. In fact, I might as well call it work since hacking is a vital part of my job (the first word in the title of my game is 'hack', don'cha know).
Surprise! Today I will talk a bit about superheros. Perhaps you aren't interested, but allow me to indulge myself. What classifies a superhero? Is any person who does something good a superhero? No. Are superheros just fictional? No. So what characteristics do superheros have that make them superheros instead of salarymen/women? Usually superheros save lives. How do they save lives? By conqueoring evil. Now we're getting somewhere interesting. So imagine a city without evil, could a superhero exist? Could a superhero save lives without evil putting lives in danger? Yes, many people die unnaturally without any evil force working. Or perhaps there is an force that isn't so much evil but misunderstood. Or maybe there's just a ticking timebomb inside of every person which is evil that the superhero must stop to save lives. Does a person who notices instability in a person and comforts them with soothing words become a superhero? Not likely. But if this person did this more than once, it wouldn't be a coincidence, but a planned action. Would that person be a superhero?
Today you are privaledged to hear my simple new melody, bm2c. BM stands for better music. BM will be my base for learning of melody. I lack the ability to create good music, only bad music, so I am working on taking my bad music and creating better music. How do I propose to do this? Simply by experimenting with the tracker and thinking about melody and rhythm together. I can put rhythm together atm. I cannot put together melody. So I start the better music song with a rhythm. I drum to some simple rhythm. Then I add a simple FM oscillator. I play notes until I find a combination that works with the rhythm. It isn't very hard because music just goes together. So then I have this new melody. For this one, I just copied the first pattern and put it on the second and third. Then I modified the second and third and then put links to the third in the fourth through Nth spots. I edited the second and third until they linked with the melody in the previous and next patterns and it was finished. At this point, I don't want to work on BM2 anymore since it's such a simple song. I want to advance, so I will go on to BM3 today.
I actually had a day off today so I was able to work on Hack Mars for most of the day. I got a few important bugs fixed (texture reload disappearance) so I get to show you some beautiful screenshots I did today. All of these are for Demo 2. Demo 2 involves Mission 2 where the player runs from home to school. It may seem simple, but the idea is extremely ambitious. The idea is to use a simple portal rendering system to render N levels deep with a maximum of 10 characters each with 1000 triangles. Of course, it's impossible to render 10k triangles + 5k triangles (colony) + 5k triangles (terrain) at 30 fps on a GeForce2. The solution is Level of Detail (LOD). I wrote a very simple LOD that throws away the shortest N edges of a mesh. So I plan to do LOD depending on distance so I will have more detailed characters closer and less detailed characters further away. That reduces the triangles to ~10k and allows 30 fps on a GeForce2. Think of a scene where you walk through the tunnels shown above with 700 people. Walking from home to school, you will see ~100 of them, 10 at a time. It should be pretty cool.
