Minousoft Software » Software

Screenshots of minousoft_postnuclear

oakwhiz — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 03:14:13 +0000

As you may have heard, I’ve been working on a Garry’s Mod map called minousoft_postnuclear. As the name implies, the map is designed around a barren radioactive wasteland. My goals for this map are to include interesting features and scenery, and to make the map suitable for both building (sandbox) and roleplay (i.e. DarkRP.)

The main areas of the map will be:

The vast wasteland.
A small fenced-off area with a metal bunker and radio tower.
An underground nuclear fallout shelter, complete with enough food, resources, and equipment to last for hundreds of years.
A small shack in the middle of nowhere.
Possibly a small settlement.
A few subterranean tunnels will be provided for shelter and travel.

Planned features:

Periodic radiation damage when walking in contaminated areas of the wasteland.
Physical wind that moves small objects dropped on the ground.
Good optimization – the whole map currently compiles in around 30 seconds, and I’d like to keep it within5 minutes when I’m done.
A huge door that seals off the entrance to the underground base.
A gigantic elevator that transports players to the underground base. The elevator shaft protrudes approximately 0.5km below the Earth’s surface. It takes quite a long time to get from the top to the bottom, even if you jump down in free fall.

Enough with the details – here are some awesome screenshots! Please keep in mind that these are from an early test and will not reflect the quality of the finished map. Several chunks of the map have been cordoned off to reduce load times, so the world ‘cuts off’ suddenly at the edge.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to post them here – your input on this map is appreciated!

Polaris: Current development progress

oakwhiz — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 20:13:49 +0000

A lot of people have been asking about Polaris lately, so I’m going to clarify what is happening and what needs to be done.

Current status:

Design:
Physics:
Gameplay/mechanics:
Optimization:
Testing:
Overall:

Notes:

Design: I still have to clarify a couple of game design issues, and I have yet to even design the artificial intelligence. Many of the other game elements have already been designed, however.
Physics: I spent a very large amount of time on the custom-made physics engine, and it seems to have paid off. Occasionally I will find a little glitch in the engine, but I don’t expect too many modifications in this area in the future.
Gameplay/mechanics: I need to work on the gameplay because at the moment, Polaris is just an engine. I also have to fix the bugged resource system, and create a better management interface for everything.
Optimization: Polaris hogs a huge amount of resources right now. It’s mostly in the CPU department, but occasional load occurs on the GPU. My own aging PC struggles to keep the framerate up when many ships are created. I’m probably going to add more checking for objects that are too far away, and replace their calculations with faster, more granular approximations. Another idea is to actually freeze processing on objects that can be ignored. However, some progress has already been made with optimization; for example, objects in the game that are far away are not drawn, or things like small graphical effects which require extra CPU time are not drawn. Additionally, I found several ways to ‘recycle’ some expensive physics calculations that were being called multiple times, which increased speed quite a bit.
Testing: Most of the features have been tested extensively, and debug interfaces have been added, so future additions to the code won’t take long to test thoroughly.
Overall: I’m halfway there, and it’s pretty much downhill from here.

On a side note, I’d like to thank Chris Walden for his generous donation of $10!

New Garry’s Mod Gamemode in Development

oakwhiz — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 19:16:11 +0000

I’ve started working on a new Garry’s Mod gamemode. (For those of you who don’t understand what I’m talking about, see this link.) Since the Lua documentation for Garry’s Mod is a bit tough to understand, I’m going to simplify things a bit and use Fretta as a base for the gamemode. Right now, I’m producing an interesting map and getting the hang of displacements in Hammer.

If you happen to have any GMod Lua or Hammer skills, I would like your help with this little project.

On a side note, if I get this project completed, then I will look into purchasing a public GMod server. The problem is, game servers are expensive, there isn’t a return on my investment, and I won’t be playing on the server a lot, so I will have to get donations and ingame sponsorship for it to work.

If anyone is interested, comment below or use the contact form.

Rating system broken, new game screenshot, and three new songs

oakwhiz — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 01:18:54 +0000

After trying to upgrade the rating system, I noticed that it broke the layout of the site and does not record some ratings correctly. The rating system has been taken offline until further notice. Sorry folks, but it looks like you have to comment on the articles if you want to tell us what you think of them.

I have been developing a new game, mostly to test some interesting game design ideas. The game revolves around the player being as stealthy as possible – one of the key elements is to leave no evidence that you were sneaking around corridors. (Screenshot after the jump!) Another element is the fact that you are unable to see what lies ahead if it is too far away to hear or see. If you do not have line-of-sight to an object, it becomes much less visible on the screen. This has the interesting side effect of enabling the game to completely ignore unneeded objects that are far away from the player. I’m currently trying to add a dynamic artificial intelligence system to the game – because of the complex network of rooms, doors, and hallways, it is difficult to get an AI to properly navigate the game. I’ve decided to go with a node-based approach rather than an A* algorithm approach, as nodes allow the AI to act more intelligent. Nodes are placed at every possible place the AI can walk, and the AI can only move to a node that it has direct line-of-sight to. This allows diagonal movement. The AI decides what its long-term movement goal is based on what it is doing, i.e. if the AI is supposed to be patrolling an area, it will select the nodes of the rooms it wants to go to, and use the nodes in between to go there. If the AI encounters evidence that the player is nearby, it will deviate from its instructions and try to go to the node closest to where it thinks the player is.

Lastly, three new remixes have been added to the Media Player by request:

Geisha Dreams (Ringtone)
Moonlight Sonata
Fullmetal Alchemist – Melissa

Enjoy, and make sure to follow us on Twitter!

Minousoft on Twitter! (plus minor updates)

oakwhiz — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 05:40:13 +0000

You can now follow Minousoft on Twitter. You’ll get the added benefit of receiving tweets when new posts are made!

Also, some minor updates…

A couple of bugfixes have been made in Polaris. Not much progress has been happening with Polaris lately, and it looks like it’ll take a while before it’s ready for release.
I’ve been working on several ‘experimental’ apps lately. I might post one up sometime soon.
Some previously unknown 404 and 403 errors on the site have been fixed.
The server software and hardware is being improved. No downtime is expected at all.

Quick Polaris Update

oakwhiz — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 06:01:51 +0000

Just some quick Polaris updates to keep you posted:

The user interface is being enhanced, and most of the selection system has been worked out.
Modules and ships now have ‘properties’ panels which give information about selected objects.
New module types have been added and old ones have been tweaked; notably the Mass Driver, Science Module, Armored Module, and Cargo Capsule.
Improvements have been made to the Ship Builder, but it isn’t finished yet.
Some previously unknown bugs from 0.23a have been squashed, finally.
Parts of the game have been redesigned to improve efficiency.

New content has finally been added to the Media Player:

Caramelldansen (Remix)
Sonic – Flying Battery Zone (Remix)
Final Fantasy X – To Zanarkand (Remix)
Final Fantasy 8 – Force Your Way (Remix)
Azumanga Daioh – Soramimi no Cake (Remix)

A couple of small bugs in the site itself have been corrected, but an accident while editing the shoutbox has erased all of the shoutbox comments and the CSS template for the shoutbox itself.

Polaris v0.33a Progress Update

oakwhiz — Sun, 31 May 2009 23:01:42 +0000

Polaris is progressing, however, because of new time constraints, a public release is not expected for at least another month. Those of you which want to pre-order Polaris will have to wait for now, as we are dealing with licensing issues at the moment.

Below (after the jump) is an animated GIF of how modules react right now. The ship firing the lasers has a primitive auto-targeting system, which causes the lasers to point in many different directions. At the end, the ship has its lasers’ power levels bumped up to a very high number, which causes the ship to explode.

What’s new with Polaris:

Basic module selection system
Complete saving and loading of entire ships – you can create a ship, save it, and an exact copy of it can be loaded later
Started work on the in-game user-interface and ship builder
‘Aimable’ modules – lasers and thrusters can be vectored to point in different directions
New module types: Armored and Science
Module types are more balanced
Container system – modules can now hold objects
Many bugfixes

Polaris v0.25a Progress Update – Planets

oakwhiz — Wed, 06 May 2009 05:13:23 +0000

The last Polaris update I made was at v0.16a. hxhl95 has been alpha-testing some of the releases along the way, and progress is looking great. At the moment, I am working on turning Polaris development towards modifying the code into more of a game. Right now, it’s just a ‘sandbox.’ In order to get to the finished product, the main things that I need to add are the user interface, the ship builder, and the scenario engine.

In order for everything to ‘fall into place,’ as it were, the game needs to be shaped into a sort of framework at this point. I’m adding in the planets, asteroids, and other objects which will be used during missions later.

Any suggestions or comments about Polaris are appreciated. However, I would like all future commenters to note that insane feature requests probably won’t be honored.

Wondering what Polaris is? Read previous entries tagged with ‘Polaris.’

Polaris v0.16a Progress Update – Includes Lasers

oakwhiz — Sat, 02 May 2009 06:30:22 +0000

There have been so many changes with Polaris since I last posted that video. The main thing that everyone’s been talking about are the “lasers.” *does Dr. Evil air quotes*

[Screenshots after the jump!]

I’ve just about worked out all of the bugs in the laser module. The laser uses a crude binary-search sort of algorithm to detect how far it should go. This reduces the lag, allowing whole groups of lasers to be constructed.

You may be wondering what the laser modules are for, and how they work. Every laser module has properties relating to output wattage and frequency. Statistics about the range, shape, size, and result of the laser are calculated based on these properties. For example, a low-power rangefinding laser in the range of milliwatts will be very dim and have a short range, while a laser yielding several kilowatts will actually be able to heat up and destroy other modules. I’m trying to add some more effects to the lasers to make them look cooler, but right now they look pretty awesome in motion.

Stay tuned for more updates! If you haven’t already, use the subscribe box on the right to sign up for email notifications.

Polaris Demo Video

oakwhiz — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 02:23:32 +0000

I’ve uploaded a demo video of Polaris. Progress so far is good. Check out the nice physics!

Polaris article link: http://www.minousoft.com/2009/04/polaris-new-game-in-development/
Video link: http://www.minousoft.com/media-player/

Feel free to comment on what you think.