Texas

By -

Terrain

Yes we are dealing with terrain again! While we had 8-bit initially, then went to 16-bit but found using texture image editing software support lacking so we decided lets just make 8-bit work.
As we proceeded, I just wasn't happy with the terrain, and as you increase the terrain geometry it would start to "step." The final nail was to see the tracks again also going "jaggey" making things look terrible.

Terrain quality at varying bit depth
See what I mean?!

So whats changed now? Well, we've embraced blender as our terrain editing tool. My bro, the artist on the team has been programming the tools to allow us to use blender in our terrain pipeline. This has freed me, the programmer on the team to do some art!
What have I been doing as the artist you say?
Well, I present to you...

Texas 

Texas posing for a beauty shot

Ain't she a beauty? This is based loosely off of actual GIS elevation data, which we take into blender and smooth out and exaggerate some features to make it playable in a game.

I have found the whole process actually quite relaxing, painting away the grass and sand and rock, while my dear brother is slaving away programming and beating his head against the desk. It really is a nice turn of events.

The hardest part has been trying to balance the map, and this is still much a work in process. I expect going forwards maps will continue to be balanced continously through the development process so I suspect maps will never truly be complete until we just cut it and say - that'lll do!

Video Blog Improvements

As you may well know, we have started doing video blogs/developer diary's or what ever you want to call them. Last time it took a whole day to put together this rather rough video with poor quality. It took so long as it was the first attempt I've done at putting something like that together. The next day I went and ordered a few microphones to replace my crappy mic. The new mic's arrived today, so I've not put together a new blog and video just to test it out (and I'll use the cover story that it is really you the avid fan I wish to please and keep apprised of our progress).

To that end I present our latest developer blog to accompany this blog:

Build and upload pipelines

Next up I have rebuilt the build and upload pipeline. I've better automated the procedure of building the games executables, packaging the data into its releases: Linux demo, Linux full version, Windows demo, Windows full version. I've also been investigating the possibility of doing a Mac build but have been unsuccessful so far.
Then I have also automated the next step as best I can which is to upload these packages to Steam and Itch.

Website changes

As we recently acquired bitshift.io we have been having some teething problems getting our new hosting to go along with it. This means from various locations around the world, some people can get to our website, but others cannot. It is strange, so we continue to look for some new web hosting that will be more stable.
Please keep this in mind over the next few days or weeks if you can't get to our website.


That is all,
Fabian Mathews
On behalf of the bitshift team.



Popular posts from this blog

Trains & Things Official Announcement

By -
Image
Build a logistics company from the ground up using trains, planes and automobiles in this real time multiplayer focused economic strategy game. Featuring Multiplayer via internet and LAN Real time economic strategy Manage a logistics company Build railways, airports and roads Transport numerous goods to meet supply and demand Custom map and mod support Media Head on over to the Trains & Things website to see some full sized screenshots. Connect with the community @bitshift we have been working hard on developing Trains & Things . We are wanting to open up our development to you, the public, so that you can stay in the loop and contribute. We want to form a community around our game, we want you to take what we make and modify it, add to it, have input in to it. So, follow us on Twitter or Facebook where we are currently posting monthly blogs. Or join us on our matrix channel #bitshift:matrix.org. Looking Forward  ...
Read more

Open-sourcing Trains & Things (and our other projects)

By -
Today we have some exciting news! We are open-sourcing Trains & Things, as well as all our other projects. As many of you may have noticed, development of Trains & Things has crawled to a halt. A few things have contributed to this. Firstly, me and my brother (that is the whole bitshift team infact) have both recently got married so our free time to work on hobbies has been reduced significantly. Then we have been stuck waiting for Godot 4.0 (in particular GDScript 2.0) to become stable enough to use. As a result, we have decided to open up all our repositories to the public so that they might be able to finish what we likely cannot. Although we will possibly tinker on our projects from time to time we simply do not have the time we once had. The easiest way to find the repositories is to head to our website: http://bitshift.rf.gd/ Down in the footer you will see a link to GitHub and GitLab which will take you to view all the bitshift repositories. Our bigger repos are stored...
Read more

Post Kickstarter

By -
Image
Well, the Kickstarter is finally over and the results have been abysmal. We only had a hand full of backers, so thank you to those people. The Stats Lets look at some stats: In the last month, we have had about 1,400 people come to our Kickstarter page with only 12 people following through - a conversion rate of 0.857%. Reddit indicates that 43,800 people viewed our adverts, with 507 clicks - a conversion rate of 1.158%. Youtube indicates that 29,000 people viewed our adverts with only 29 clicks - a conversion rate of 0.1%. Twitter failed to even launch the advertising campaign and our attempts to reach out to them fell on deaf ears. Also our attempts to reach out to the gaming press also mostly fell on deaf ears with the exception of gaming on linux .  From my research a conversion rate of about 1-2% is normal. What now? We have taken the last month to reflect and pester the press and twitter (with no luck). We lack the funding to be able to complete Trains ...
Read more