Friday, November 23, 2007

Friday already!

Apologies, dear regular readers (both of you) for these past days of blogging indolence. I can however report that I've been absorbing myself in relevant activities, discussion of which will reach these very pages, very soon (read: I've been playing Mario and compiling a list of complaints).

Work on my current side-project, Hohokum, is gathering pace. I've now switched physics engines, from Ape, to an Actionscript3 port of Box2D. B2 seems much more fully featured, being a port of an existing c++ engine, and it's also really nippy, partly because it implements a broad phase - a pre-process to calculations which works out which objects have no chance of interacting, and so massively reduces the overhead of calculations.

I'll be sad to leave Ape behind, partly because the userbase is very active and enthusiastic, but it simply doesn't support some of the features I'm looking for in a physics engine at this stage.

Anyhow, I now have my Extractors vibrating as they pump out lumps of rock, whose physics are handled by Box2D beautifully. I'll post something in the next month so you can see what the hell I'm talking about.

In work news, this week we had a big meeting with our publisher, where we unveiling the various games we've been prototyping, and then we all decide which one we should make next. It's kind of a strange bitter-sweet experience - you'll only be able to take one of your children home and raise them, which is fantastic, but the others will have to stay in the orphanage for the time being, until their features have grown more beautiful.

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