Website Updates

04/26/2006: Updated design of website.

05/18/2006: Restored back-up of site and reinstalled forum.

05/28/2006: Senior projects for school are officially over and my the incomplete prototype of Asgard Legends won me the $1000 technology project scholarship. However my game will still continue to develop. The game is called Asgard Legends, Rebirth of Daevan.

01/07/2007: I am attempting to set up a schedule this semester so that I can set aside times to actually work on this project among other things. Luckily there is time between class that is long enough to get work done on this but too small to find time to go home.

02/08/2007: Set up php index and history files in order to quickly update news.

02/09/2007: Completed web-based news updater.

2/22/2007: Switched hosting services from 1and1.com to dreamhost.com.

06/25/2007: Forum finally updated and cleaned of all bot registrations. The update should also deter all bot registrations.

07/11/2008: Code section updated with latest versions of InputDiag and InfiniteTile. Planning on adding screenshots once I find an easy way to get them.

Asgard Legends Updates

01/14/2007: Prototype project dropped. Final stable version available for download in demo section.

01/15/2007: Asgard Legends Remake's magic system devised. Check the forum for details.

01/20/2007: The design document for the remake of Asgard Legends has been started. The main things done so far is the abilities of in game events based on triggers and NPC interactions. Basically the Triggers are events set in motion by moving on top of them and NPC interations are events triggered by hitting the action button while facing the NPC (can be a person, switch, box, etc.). The other thing completed just recently is the magic system for the in game which I am looking for input on how to implement it. Check the forum for more details.

02/08/2006: Game now has its setting, basic plotline, and both attacking and magic commands for the battle system decided on.

07/11/2008: Coding restarted. The remake of Asgard Legends has been decided to be programmed for the Zune using Microsoft's latest release of XNA Game Studio 3.0 beta. I have uploaded two initial programs that I have designed. InputDiag is a Input Diagnostic tool to see how the XNA deals with the zune's input device. InfiniteTile is the first real demo of some sort. It displays a top down view of randomly placed tiles from an old map set. Check out the code section on better instructions on how to interface it.

07/20/2008: I have finished the templates for the isometric tiles. Hopefully the next update to infinite tile will be to use the isometric tile set and actually have a set map rather than a randomized batch of tiles. Here is the tile set and a sample of the expected outcome. For now I will include the edges but later I will remove them.

10/05/2009: Long time without an update partly because the project was stalled. I have some thoughts about starting another project for the XBOX seeing how my major in college gives me access to MSDN which has the possiblity of XNA Game Creators Membership which is needed to deploy games. If I do I plan to work on an fast-paced action platformer. For now I have reworked the templates for the isometric tiles. I didn't care for the appearance of the shading since it they didn't mesh well in my opinon, so rather than having the planes be set up per 3 vertex triangles in the isometric tile, the height gradiant changes from all vertices simultaneously. I got around to upgrading the framework to XNA 3.1, however the game will still be designed for the Zunepad, and I don't have much interest to switch to something more suited for the touch screen of the Zune HD. Hopefully before I stall on this project again I will add actual tiling using the isometric tiles instead of preconstructed square tiles using the isometric. Below are the new template tilesets. You can compare them on the history page to spot the differences.

10/09/2009: Finally have actual screen shots of the game. I never realized how easy it is to do. So from now on when a respectable update comes along I might post a couple. So I have finished the basis of my isometric tiling engine, the only thing I can think of that is still missing for tiling is just animated tiles, but I will currently don't have any graphics to use for it. So below you will see the isometric map with height. Also another screen shot of another area of the map with the debug mode overlay. You will notice that the FPS shows under 20, but it seems that when not running in debug mode and connected to the PC it tends to get around 24. My goal is to ultimately keep it above 16 FPS.
Up next I will be adding the player, movement of the player, animation of the sprite for the character and lastly walkable pathways/pixel collision with the terrain.

		Isometric tiling with height. Each tile can be one of 15 different sets shown from the sampler from the last update. The height block is used as a repeated tile whenever a base tile is at a height greater than 0. To save CPU it is possible however to draw a tile and not draw the height block when the height blocks would be completely hidden from the terrain in front of it.
Isometric tiling with debug enabled. Debug uses the zunepad to generate password like sequences to do a variety of things. Currently it just allows modification of the lower and upper movement speeds.