News

Version 1.2.5 of Stick Adventures Online has been released. In this update, the in-game chat has been replaced by the web-based chat, a help button has been added, and the ban list has been cleared.

Development has finally started again for Stick Adventures Online. The game is being recoded from the ground up. This update is being called "SAO: Redux".


From the Programmer
Written by Invisible

If you are writing a physics engine, I highly recommend reading Nonconvex Rigid Bodies with Stacking. It's easy to read for the most part, and really helped tie up some loose ends for me. I implemented the described method, except without using a contact graph and shock propagation (friction was also omitted). The resulting physics engine was far from perfect, but gave me that final bit of

News

There is no news to report in this issue.


From the Programmer
Written by Invisible

It turns out that my previous trouble with non-penetrating rigid body simulation was actually caused by an incorrectly calculated collision normal. On vertex-vertex collisions, the normal was chosen to be pointing in the direction of the center of the body to the point of collision. Handling vertex-vertex collisions as vertex-edge collisions solved the problem and the simulation no longer stalls as frequently when two bodies collide.

You might have noticed I said "as frequently". That is the problem I have been trying to tackle since Monday. The simulation will sometimes stall when two bodies collide, and it will definitely stall if I try to stack two or more bodies on top of each other (or push

News

Development on Stick Adventures Online will be starting very soon. Check the game's website to see our progress till then.


From the Programmer
Written by Invisible

I've spent the last 4-5 months studying physics. I'll need that knowledge for Merki, the SAO updates, and probably every other project we work on.

For anyone interested, these are some good resources for learning physics:
http://www.brightstorm.com/math - Introduction to calculus
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/ - Calculus, differential equations
http://www.physicsclassroom.com/Class/ - Beginner level physics
http://electron9.phys.utk.edu/phys135d/Modules.asp - College level physics. There are some typos though, so watch out for that.
http://chrishecker.com/Rigid_Body_Dynamics - Rigid body dynamics, specific to game prog

News

New concept art for Merki has been released, along with a look at the artwork pipeline.







From the Programmer
Written by Invisible

Last week I created a model viewer for our artist, GreyKnight. I was unable to find a 3D modeling program which allowed enough fine-tuning of the camera and projection. The artwork needs to be drawn at an orthographic custom-isometric angle so that the texture looks correct after being applied to a mesh. The closest I was able to get was Wings3D, but it wasn't quite close enough. While powerful, their custom camera coordinate editor wasn't designed with this kind of thing in mind. I finally settled on setting up a special copy of the isometric workbench which loads a model called test.ms3d and displays it. It would have been nice to keep model editing and ca

News

The codename for our main project has been revealed as "Merki" and a forum for it has been created. http://www.ifthensoftware.net/forums/index.php?showforum=41


From the Programmer
Written by Invisible

I've been learning how to create and use projection and view matrices. Tiles are created as 3D meshes and rendered at an isometric angle with orthographic projection. We still need to get the content creation pipeline working for this new setup, but that shouldn't be too difficult. I am currently looking into using Milkshape3D and Wings3D for the mesh creation and uv mapping.



Artist's Easel
Written by GreyKnight

iScribble Sketches #25

(Click to enlarge)


(Click to enlarge)



Community Spotlight

I have compiled a list of known information about the project codenamed "Merki", w

News

We have officially announced that we are starting a new project. You can view the first released piece of concept art on the forums by clicking on the following image:



From the Programmer
Written by Invisible

The week started off well. It was fairly easy to get a single layer of isometric tiles to tile without seams.


However, when I progressed to walls, I ran into some depth problems which I wasn't expecting to have to deal with that soon. I still don't have the problem solved completely, as I will need to decide on a maximum view distance, but the basic occlusion seems to be working correctly.



Artist's Easel
Written by GreyKnight

iScribble Sketches #24

(Click to enlarge)


(Click to enlarge)



Community Spotlight

The community, though not as active as in the previous months, has had some thin

News

Volund Preview 1 will be released on Saturday, April 10th, 2010. Be sure to checkout the Volund website at http://www.volundgame.com for a countdown to the release and information about the game.

The Volund Facebook page has been given an easier to remember address. http://www.facebook.com/Volundgame


From the Testers
Written by Jay

The beta has gone through many game versions in order to make sure that all the bugs are found. When one version is created, most of the previous bugs were fixed; however, we had to test to make sure more bugs weren't created. There's the rub: there have always been some new glitches and bugs with every version. This is not necessarily bad, because the newer bugs have usually not been as serious as the older ones.

With the announcement of a release date for the first Volund preview, a rush of orders came in that, when summarized, told us to do absolutely everything anyone can do and make sure it works properly. This is when testing the balance of classes

News

A new forum titled "Community Spotlight" has been added to the IfThen Softwareforums. Its purpose is to collect everyone's and anyone's contributions to the weekly community spotlight newsletter article. If you have anything you wish to contribute, please post it! Instructions are in the thread titled "What Is This For?". You will be credited for your contributions in the by-line for the article.

Loradon Online is officially closed. It has been a dead project without updates or support for roughly 4 years, and with Volund being in closed beta it is time to finally close the doors on Loradon. The Loradon Online forum has been turned into a read-only archive, so Loradon fans will still be able to look back on the history of our longest standing game.

Volund now has its own forum. The game has not yet been released to the public, but feel free to post in the forum with your thoughts, opinions, and theories. Some players are even starting up Volund guilds already.

News

There is no news to report in this issue.

From the Testers
Written by Jay

(Click to enlarge)

A suspicious new banker in town... When did he show up?!

Using an item cloning bug found by Acaceol (and described in Newsletter #60 - "Loradon 3.0" Closed Beta), I started to clone rare items to amass a large sum of cash. Of course, doing this after the preview is released would get you banned (however, it will be fixed by then), but for now it's okay as long as we are testing it. Anyway, after buying and duping more expensive items as I went along, I ended up with 55 Talcite (the equivalent of 5,500 Gold, which is the equivalent of 550,000 Silver). That is... a huge amount of money.

From the Programmer
Written by Invisible

The update system for Volund has been in place for a while. Your client is notified if it needs to install any updates, and which exact patch to download. It then accesses the HTTP server and downloads the patch, which is an executable. Volund then runs the patch and

News

There is no news to report this week.

From the Programmer
Written by Invisible

I spent most of the passed week setting up the servers to run as services, the idea being that I wouldn't need to worry about manually starting and stopping them. I managed to get them to run as services, but ran into a snag; I can't guarantee that the MySQL server will still be online when the game server is being shut down. To fix this problem, I will need to restructure the way the database is kept in sync with the server, which I don't have time for right now.

While learning how to run the servers as services, I discovered something which I have been curious about for a while; how to read HRESULTs (error codes from Windows). The 32-bit HRESULT is split into parts. Bits 0-15 store the result code. Bits 16-27 store the facility code, which tells where this result came from. Bit 28 is reserved. Bit 29 is set if this is a customer defined result (set for all non-Microsoft defined results). Bits 30-31 stor