Additional project information and news can be found on my sourceforge project page.
If you have questions, concerns, or comments please use the forums or send an email to one of the developers
If you are interested in helping, please send one of us an email.
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November 14, 2007 Thisis not a death statement for Crucible. But since I began with that sentence, you know it must in some way approximate a death statement. I did not make significant progress this summer, due to work and other time sinks, and I am now at Dartmouth College, where I find the academic and social demands on my time to be considerable. For the time being I will continue to develop Crucible in what free time I have, but that may not be much. February 3, 2007 While I expect actual releases to be as few and far-between as ever, I am going to attempt to provide monthly news on what is being done. In my very limited time last month, I fixed several bugs and worked on a graphical interface for setting video,physics, and control options. I also made a very slight tweak to the physics system, to allow rocket jumping (at least in invincibility mode) as shown in this very short video (divx avi).As usual, more detailed logs can be found in the developement forum. January 10, 2007 I have received report of a crippling bug in which enemies become unshootable. I would appreciate anyone who has experienced this visiting the tracker for bug 1632838 and correlating the report or providing additional information as possible. December 31, 2006 After far too long, a 0.2 release has been made This is still an early alpha. It features an opening video, slightly improved physics, a load-save system, and other more minor improvements. Note that AI is still abominable and NPC animations are not yet present, among other shortcomings. If you experience low frame-rates, adjust the settings in config\video.cfg. As usual, if you have comments, questions, or would like to help, please contact me at electron100@users.sourceforge.net December 23, 2006 I am hoping to be able to make a release before the new year. Regardless of whether or not I will succeed in that, I have added a new Documentation section (in the side menu bar) to this site, feel free to let me know what you think of the docs November 14, 2006 The load/save system was finished about two months ago, but I have had very little time since then and new bugs are constantly being discovered, so I have been unable to make a stable release as of yet. Today, however, I did create a CVS repository for the Crucible code which can be browsed online at http://crucibleofstars.cvs.sourceforge.net/crucibleofstars/ or may be accessed (read-only) by a cvs client configured as follows: Protocol: :pserver authentication Hostname: crucibleofstars.cvs.sourceforge.net Port: 2401 Repository Path: /cvsroot/crucibleofstars Username: anonymous Repository Name/Module: source While I don't expect great interest in the sourcecode, if anyone is interested in contributing, please let me know. August 27, 2006 I am currently working on completely rewriting the level load/save system to pave the way for save games and for binary level files (for faster loading). Once this is complete, I will release the next version July 24, 2006 A 0.1.1 release, which would include the Crucible Toolset, was planned. Due to fresh bugs in the game, however, this release has been delayed. July 11, 2006 Finally! A Crucible of Stars demo video is now available: either 320x24, wmv or 640x480 wmv Even better, a playable demo has also been released, and can be found on the Downloads page It's still a very rough early alpha, but it gives a basic sense of the game. To change keyboard/mouse controls, video options, and other game settings see the files in C:\Program Files\Crucible of Stars\config (modify appropriately if your install path is not C:\Program Files\Crucible of Stars). A release of the Crucible Toolset will be coming soon May 11, 2006 Work has been slow, but not halted. I've put in the following features
-decal effects
-area of effect damage -sliding doors -.phys physical structure support (basics) -crouching -better loading screen -work on AI -elevators -beginning of portal-divided sectors for rendering and AI -beginning of psychic powers -vast improvements in the editor Dec 26, 2005 I hoped to have a demo by now, but I don't. Work is continuing, but slowly. I uploaded source and data, since I haven't done so in a while, but it's still only of (marginal) interest to developers. Sept 5, 2005 I've made some progress, though slowly. I've ported Crucible of Stars (though not yet Crucble Editor) over to the Lightfeather Engine (formerly IrrlichtNX). This took some time, in fact there are still some little bugs I'm ironing out. The fact that I'm working with a brand-new pre-alpha engine does come with a time cost, but I think LF has greater power and potential than Irrlicht. For one thing, my framerate is about double. I'll port over the editor (though not looking forward to it) when LF's gui gets straightened out. At the moment it is more unfinished than hte rest of the engine. I've also been working (slowly) with AI, mostly tearing out the pitiful structure I had been building and replacing it with a goal-oriented one which is much cleaner (I hope). June 30, 205 Dev slow as always. Just released source 0.0.4. Unfortunately I still seem to be a good ways from a demo and development will be halted for the next two weeks. I changed the title font. I prefer Atari Vector, but its not a standard font (at least on windows machines) May 13, 2005 I'm getting close to the point where I might be able to release a playable demo soon, except for the fact that artwork is coming along terribly slowly. If anyone happens to have any interest in joining Crucible of Stars as an artist please contact me. Any help would be much appreciated. April 17, 2005 I'm workign on porting over my portal and pvs culling systems to the new renderer for IrrlichtNX. This is worthwhile work (Crucible of Stars relies very heavily on IrrlichtNX), but it does delay coding on the game. When I do work on the game I'm workign on AI (still and for a long time to come). Right now I'm working on having NPC's choose intelligent positions to attack from. I've started a development log (on my Sourceofrge forums) where I post weekly to daily updates on my progress. You can view it here. It's updated much more often than this page :). March 26, 2005 Uploaded all my source and data into a release. Nothing really spectacular, not really playable as a game. Check out the download page if you're interested in anything. March 16, 2005 I've been updating several of my tools and libraries lately, and some newer versions have bugs or don't play nicely. All this, of course, does wonders to slow down developement. Feb 26, 2005 Progressing slowly. I've been wroking on a PVS system and pretty much got it working, including a pvs calculating tool. I don't have a demo up for that only because it takes so logn to calculate pvs for a reasonably high poly level (somewhere around 40k I think because of extra polys added converting from .bsp to .x). I've also been working on animating the main enemy model. Blender is a great tool, but not totally easy. It's been going very very slowly. Worked a little more on AI. I think I'm going to use the Free Fuzzy Logic Library for some of the higher-level desicion making. Jan 20, 2005 Made Portal Rendering demo(available here) for Irrlicht Engine. You can download the code needed to modify the engine for portal rendering here. Unfortunately I still do not have a good method of dyanmically determining which sector a node is in. Jan 6, 2005 Unfortunately I will likely make little progress over January. What little time I have I'll work on making hte NPC's follow the generated path and make the editor capable of letting the user change connectivity data, add new pathfinding nodes, and that sort of thing. Dec 31, 2004 I've finally got my pathfinding working, though all the logic is not yet in place for enemies to fuind their way around. I made many really stupid errors while trying to get my pathfinding working. Passing by value a linked list with no copy constructor yields a list that will function correctly most of the time unless the original goes out of scope or is altered. And if you try to alter the copy really weird thigns happen. It was a debugging nightmare. You'd think I'd have been sensible enough to realize I had to pass by reference. Oh well. (To any non-programmers I apologize for that technical rant). I also have a tool in CrucibleEditor to generate pathfinding nodes, though it needs a little work. Node positions can be tweaked, but nodes cannot be added and connections cannot be altered. Also, the generator needs to reject ndoes toclose to walls and connect diagonal nodes. My long term plan fo the next couple months is to: 1)Work on the AI so enemies can utilize the pathfindign and move about 2) Implement a console of the sort found in most FPS games. The basics of this shouldn't take long to implement (I hope) and should provide me some aid in debugging (and easier than having to switch back and forth with a dos-style windows console to see the debug info I output. 3) Get my portal rendering up and working with the game. I'm pretty sure I've got all the portal renderign stuff working now (except splitting a mesh by sectors), but I need to integrate it with Crucible of Stars. Dec 25, 2004 Released version 0.0.2 of source.It's still missing very much, but it now includes source for CrucibleEditor, though still lacking my modded irrlichtnx++ source. I just put it up for anyone who wants to take a look. See the download page if you're interested. I used a self-extracting archive this time because 7-zip can make a smaller 7z archive than a .zip archive. Many people may not have 7-zip, so I made a SFX 7z archive. Dec 10, 2004 As I have mentioned several times on my sourceforge page (Where I put more news than here BTW) I have been having massive computer troubles. I have been unable to post any news here because of not having acces s to putty SSH suite, so can't use shell server to upload anything here. I also have done little on Crucible of Stars because I have not had acces to a compiler. I'm downloading Dev-cpp again as I write this. Unfortunately a major playable demo s mostly out of the question as I've lost a whole month I could have been working on the game. I have new versions of a couple of the core engines I'm using that I have to upgrade to. Then my focus will be on pathfinding, basic AI, portal rendering, and Crucible Editor. My brother and I have decided to try using Gmax for the geomtry creation part of level-editing. Oct 20, 2004 I finally updated the download page to show that I actually do have a source release on sourceforge. It's not much at this point, but if you're interested in my code check out the download page. Please contact me with any suggestions. Oct 10, 2004 Sorry progress on the site has been slow. I've got the portal rendering mostly finished, but I've been working on school :(, Crucible of Stars code, Crucible Editor (level editor for Crucible of Stars, requires external geometry editor though), and modelling. I should be able to put up a first source download this weekend if the SF file realease system doesn't take me too long to figure out. I've just got this website set up so there's not much on it right now. At the moment I'm working on implementing portal rendering with the Irrlicht Engine, the 3D engine Crucible of Stars uses. When I get finished with that I'll put up more here and release what I've done on the game so far. |