Warning
I have never written a blog before so this first one may seem disorganized. Still I wanted to post my thoughts somewhere and I like to read and criticize my own line of thinking when I reread them later.
If everyone isn't on the same page, forget it.
I love the idea of creating games, if not more than I love playing them. I like the idea of limitless possibilities and finding obscure ways to make the most absurd thing possible. While I have my own game ideas and concepts I feel everyone involved in the project needs to have the same strive toward the end project or else the game will feel lacking. I sometimes feel like this can be why game sequels can be less fun than the originals. So while I have some great ideas I feel like I need to bend them to what the community wants. Otherwise I need to have like minded individuals to work with, which is where I have been lucky so far.
Problem Solving!
One thing that I enjoy no matter what project I'm working on is problem solving. Why did that object just fling through the air? What triggered it at that moment to decide to do this? How can I fix it? Asking the right questions can make all the difference. Sometimes you need to decide if it is truly something that needs fixing though. Does this problem actually affect the ability to continue playing the game, or does it create an imbalance? Sometimes fixing a small bug may not be worth the time or in fixing it it could create larger problems.
Problem Solving! Fixing Bugs
Then there is the problem solving behind fixing a bug or problem. Sometimes it could be a limitation of the engine, so you have to come up with a workaround solution to the problem. Open GL for instance can only have 8 light sources at any given time. A common workaround would be to paint shadows onto the object itself or generating a shadow map. My personal favorite was RBXs hover car. Battlefield 2s physics where not up to the task of using flight (jet engines) to cause the car to hover so I tried to make it levitate using a constant stream of explosives all launching from the bottom of the car. This actually worked but it was too hard for the player to control the cars movements and anything near the hover car would be flung to the side from the explosion forces (which was fun). So I came up with an alternative while experimenting with moving visual objects of the vehicle but keeping the wheel collision in a different location. So the car still has wheels with soft suspension but they are not visually there. BF2 luckily enough uses the collision mesh to collide with terrain but uses the visual model to collide with other objects. This allows them to cut back on collision poly as much as possible while ramping up the visual poly. It allowed me to male the car seemingly float over other objects and have the wheel collisions pass right through. I noticed later though that when you bump up poly count on all in game objects they tend to repel more violently when they collide even if the collision mesh is reduced. Oddly enough that would mean data regarding the objects collision is still being transmitted from the clients bundled mesh.
A Pause For Now
I'll leave my post there for now, my phone is running out of battery and I am sure you noticed my typos due to me typing on my cellphone XD. I hope to keep adding to this in the future as well as correct mistakes and try and make my points more clear.
