blender

The game is out for review, link coming soon. Above is the screenshot I chose for the App Store.

Below is a script I wrote to export models from blender into a *.h file that contains two static GLfloat arrays. It requires that the model be already triangulated in Blender (maybe later I’ll add code to go ahead and triangulate the mesh if it needs it… oh yeah, and to manually triangulate a mesh in Blender’s edit mode hit ‘Ctrl+T’) and that the mesh already have UV texture coordinates. Also, it only uses GL_TRIANGLES mode right now. Later I am going to update it to use GL_TRIANGLE_STRIPS instead of GL_TRIANGLES. Finally it doesn’t apply Object rotations and scale. You should apply them in Object Mode Transform->Clear/Apply->Apply Scale/Rotation (or Ctrl+A).

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Alright! Those of us who were still waiting for acceptance into the iPhone developer inner sanctum have at long last been allowed in! StarSmasher is now running on my development device but its running between 15 to 20 frames per second and it takes a solid 15 seconds to load. Now its time to optimize.

UPDATE: after rewriting a major portion of the game controller and the object models the game is now running at a smooth 28 fps. Looks and feels great.

Enemy ships attacking from the space station.

New Laser Model

One More for an Even 3.

I’ve finally added enemy ships! Also I added a nice shockwave to the player’s ship explosion (pictured below). One of the enemy ships (not pictured) is a light weight fighter with two top mounted cannons. The other ship is a mine layer that lays proximity mines (pictured below).

The minelayer up close and personal.

The minelayer laying mines.

Explosion shockwave.

Okay, I have two screenshots for today. Last night I finished the first part of the HUD. I have to write a routine to allow me to pass an NSString to the hud to type on screen for the score and lives part still.

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Added animated sprites (in this case an explosion) to the game engine!

I’m tentatively calling the game “Starsmasher.” What do you think? I wanted to call it “Asteroid Runner” but that is too many characters. It becomes something like “Aster…nner.”

Anyway, here is the wallpaper (click for larger size):

Image removed for now.

Not a lot to show for today visually. I put some work into restructuring the code to help minimize memory footprint. Now loading the same model multiple times (as long as the texture hasn’t changed) will only load the model into memory once and share the models memory space among all references.

Also, I got started on the collision detection but doing it right is going to take some work.

Image down for now.

Here is the latest screenshot of the game. Got some nice alpha transparency in additive mode on the engines (which flickr slightly–cheap but nice). I created a skybox for the starfield background with a 512×512 texture image but I think a 1024×1024 might be better. For now it will do however. Also, I added an asteroid (as is aparent).

That’s it for now.