Birth of Legends

As anyone keeping up with the site should know, I was making all sorts of progress with BOL and then all of a sudden haven't posted any updates. Well, there are some good reasons for this. First of all, I very recently acquired the code of a game that is very interesting and is helping me to get the physics working as it should. And yes, amazingly enough this means that jumping off cliffs might become possible soon. Also, because I have a new player model, and because everyone has been wanting one, I'm doing a makeover of the character code so that it isn't so hard to update all the time. For npcs, as many of you have already seen some of them work great, and some of them don't. I still need to finish the code for a server-side npc handler, since as of now they've always been client-sided creations. This is close to completion, so, if I don't keep getting distracted, I should have many new updates by the end of today. I'll be updating the developer's page so that those of you who care can see what's being worked on right now.

-Mark

Some of you might recognize the title of this post from another game. Well, because my sister is using the testing computer right now I can't check to make sure what I just wrote works or not. So, in the boredom that comes from waiting, I decided that it would be a cool thing to have random loading messages. Of course, half of them go by too fast to read anyway, but it still gave me something to do for a short time and I'm pleased to say that the next release which will come out in a couple of hours will indeed have random loading messages. Also, because I forgot to mention it before, if you take a screenshot now it will come out right side up, instead of flipped. Also, in the last two updates some of the animations were really off, so I'm happy to say that at least for the player character that has been fixed. Another addition to the list of what you'll probably see tonight, most of the npcs move now. So, whether or not I want them to, as I'm not entirely sure I want all of them to, I think that they do. Though, I can't confirm this until I'm able to test it out again.
...
Let's see...Oh right, also now there is a new player character. I'll probably just have the new character as the default for players until the character selection screen is up, though tell me if you want otherwise. Hopefully I'm able to test it out soon, and if not I'll add some other feature that no one cares about :) .

-Mark

I uploaded it yesterday but I forgot to post about it :) . Minor changes from yesterday's plan include that it is still possible to mess up the animations of the main character, you don't start off as the new character, and that was it. So yeah, read the last post for the updates of this release as I'm in a rush. Download it here.

-Mark

Well, it's been a few days since I last posted anything, and you might all have wondered what's up, so I'll tell you: My computer works again!!! I got a new motherboard from Newegg yesterday, though sadly I wasn't able to try it out because I was already helping other people with their computers and doing some modifications, plus I had to figure out where I was going to take the parts from, but that's besides the point. So, today, and still going on now, is a big transition back to 1 gig of ram. But, unlike I had originally planned, I decided to practically build another computer instead of just switching out the old motherboard again so that I'd have two computers to work with which will hopefully increase productivity. So, lets count... I currently have 8.5 computers in my room. 8.5 instead of 9 because I don't have enough power supplies to run them all, as if I had enough outlets :P . But now I have an additional 80 gigs to add to the 120 gigs that I've been using recently. That will hopefully last me till the end of the month, but I can't be sure.
So now for BOL news; I haven't looked at the code since the last time I posted. The current download is still the latest build. Tomorrow if I have time I'll add some more fun and try to finish up some of the old promises, but I might be sidetracked for a while now that I have a decent amount of ram again. I'll post again tomorrow. Lol, tomorrow is in 1.5 hours.

-Mark

Someone at school a couple days ago told me that they weren't able to log into BOL recently, and then today when I actually tried to test something new, I wasn't able to connect either. So, I reset the server and, lo and behold, it works again! It was a minor problem with the log files getting too big after server neglect for a few months, so I'll have to recode that soon. But, back to the server, a side-effect of resetting the server is that the npcs have all gone into hiding (they don't exist anymore). So, when I upgrade the server I'll have to create a better way to save and load npcs. So, enough of that. The moral of the post is that the server works again, snowballs can be thrown, and npcs are still waiting to be recreated (which by the way is something you can do).

Now as for actual updates: I'm still working on one but I haven't been able to put much time into it for a few reasons. One, and this is a big one, is that I lost the installer for Visual Studio so I have yet to get it working on the good computer. Two, and this equally as big, I'm currently playing a free trial of WoW, which I know is a sin but I thought would be good to do eventually to have a better sense of what BOL needs to accomplish. Three, there are a lot of other games that I haven't been able to play forever, and it's taken me about a week to settle down. Though, I still haven't looked at Oblivion.... Maybe I'll hold off on that for another week. If your all very lucky I'll have finished an update for tomorrow, which involves graphics, animations, and fireworks. That's all I can say for now, hopefully everything works out.

-Mark

Yes, I didn't forget to update today. And, yes, I did actually manage to fix something. And yes, there is even new content. So here's what I did:
-I fixed the character animation once and for all.
-I put some of the npcs back in there places (you can place npcs yourself, type "/help addBot" ingame for more information)
-I added fireworks. I was too lazy to put in more then two because it took a while to get them to refresh correctly. I'll add more next update because they look cool.
-I changed the sky. I did this mostly because the old sky looked terrible compared to everything else and also because this sky looks better :P . One big change with this sky is that there is no sun, meaning there is no flare. I'll try to make another good sky that even has a sun, hopefully in the next week or so.
-I increased the snowball speed. More then one person complained that the snowballs weren't moving fast enough and both that it wasn't realistic, nor hard to dodge. Both of these statements were true and therefore I changed the speed of the snowballs.
-Aiming of snowballs has been improved; you can still throw a ridiculous distance as some of you claim, but the aiming hemisphere doesn't jump around as much as it had before.
-And finally, there are some visible penguins in the game (check out the pingoo village while online).

Screenshots from today:

-Mark

p.s. Download the full version here, or get just the update here.

I really hope that I don't find enough bugs to have to declare a bug of the week every week, but there is a pretty big bug right now. When I was trying to fix how names are displayed over players (I want the actual play name displayed, not that dumb entity######) I found that when I changed how people are created I messed up how players get connected to the server, meaning that two different players couldn't be online at the same time without errors being created. The good thing about this is that it was also at the root of the problem where names don't get displayed correctly. So, moral of the story is that I'm close to having a solution and should have another update tomorrow. And that is the bug of the week.

-Mark

p.s. Also today, I found that I hadn't updated all the files in the release yesterday, meaning that the sky had still been the old one. So, I reuploaded both the full and upgrade downloads and you can now get the latest version using those links.

Good News! I was successfully able to squish the bug of the week. Not only can multiple people play online again, but your actual name is displayed now instead of "Entity####" or "Self". I figured out how to properly use the registry, which is cool, and also means that you can even play multiple characters at the same time if you want to (this will be taken out once BOL gets into an official beta). I know I still need to create the whole login and character screens update but I seem to do a lot better with gameplay and graphics updates.
Current bugs left in this release: Penguins sink a little in the snow as well as are sideways. The fireworks don't always update properly. And finally, the camera still has issues every once in a while. If you find other bugs please tell me.
Upcoming: Login/Character Selection screens, fixed penguins along with other actual character models, real physics, and items/weapons.

Hope you enjoy! Latest patch here. Latest full client here. To open rar files head over to rarlabs.com.

-Mark

I made a breakthrough today in the art department. I haven't worked on getting this into the game yet, but it's becoming more and more possible. Textures work even. So, here is a short movie (14 seconds) showing a character model that may or may not find itself in the client soon. Word of warning though, while this quality of character will be in the final version of BOL, this particular model will not. The reason for this is that it's from another game and is copyrighted. But models like this one will be much nicer looking placeholders until I'm able to acquire actual models for BOL.

-Mark

I didn't have time for another update today, though if you want to see an overview of what's being worked on take a look at the developer page. What I've been working on today has mostly been 3d graphics/content.

I also need to do some major improvement of this site so that everything is easier for people to understand. I'm not entirely sure how to do this, so any input you readers might have would be helpful. If everything goes as planned I should have another update tomorrow. Until then, this has been the 100th post.

-Mark

I wasn't able to finish the next update today, and I won't be home much the next two days so I think the next major update will be this sunday. Anyway, I thought I might as well tell you what I've worked on so far today. First I made about 6 new animations for the gnu so that he can hold a sword or axe, which I think will be the first weapons to be seen in BOL. Also, I perfected some new particle effects so that in addition to snowballs we can have some spells, fireballs and the like, to cast around at folks. Also (and this is partly theoretical still) I was thinking of putting in some targets so that even when no one else is online you can have something to find and shoot at. For targets I was thinking of putting little igloos with a bullseye painted on them randomly on the map. When you hit them they'd explode and respawn somewhere else. So, as I said that part is still mostly theoretical but I think I can do it without too much problems. Also, since I now in a way have more time before this next release I'll try to at least have proper physics for snowballs. Any other ideas or requests would as always be appreciated.

-Mark

As you might have noticed, I didn't update yesterday like I had planned. The reason is that I was sick, and I still am. I feel so good that I didn't even go to school today. So I don't know if I'll be able to concentrate on creating an update or not. Probably not but who knows? I'll post again tomorrow with an update on the situation. In the meantime, having a custom character may be possible soon (graphics wise).

Enjoy!

-Mark

I'm not going to be able to finish an update for today. The reason for this is that I'm still a little sick and haven't been able to concentrate on code. However, I have managed to work some more on animations, and particles, and graphics in general. Here's what I've done today:

Along with that cool sword I also have a battle ax. I'll try to have this by tomorrow, but we'll see how I'm feeling then.

-Mark

I'm very close to finishing everything, but some small problem is coming up with the sword and the compiler isn't liking me right now. So, I'm just going to give it a break and finish up this release tomorrow. So, until then.

-Mark