Geko_X

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I'm an Aussie highschool student in year 12. I code, I music, I play hockey, I code, I play TF2. Oh, and I do homework. I'm making CODENAME LITHIUM, a 2D platformer with a personal story to tell.

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Geko_X Blog

Yeah... sorry about that. I had a few personal issues come up, including school and my general state of mind. All is good now, and I'm back into CODENAME LITHIUM! I think the break did more good than bad, so even better!

Anyway, progress report.

I had a play with some Minecraft-like voxel terrain generation in Unity. Its a hell of a lot harder than what I thought it would be, which was awesome, because I could spend some time on it. I had to teach myself perlin noise, too. I ended up writing an algorithm, which went something like this:

  1. Make a PNG from the perlin noise function
  2. Read back the PNG, and create a 2D array filled with the red (or blue or green, doesnt matter) value of each pixel
  3. Multiply each value by 1000 (Unity stores colors as floats) and then divide by the height limit
  4. Spawn a cube at position(i, h, j), where i and j are counters in for-loops and h is the height determined before

This worked great, but only for small terains (less than 128*128 voxels, each voxel being a square metre). Anything more, and I started running out of memory. I thought that this was a rendering problem, so I wrote a script to toggle the visibility and colliders of each voxel depending on if you should be able to see it or not, but this just made it run at about 0.1 - 0.5FPS. At this point I called it quits and a semi-successful job. I did learn however, that you should NEVER DO VOXEL TERRAIN IN UNITY. At least, not just for teh lulz.

Screenshot (click for big image):
Voxles

Hmm... what else did I do...?

Oh, yeah, that's right! I made a multiplayerFPS game in a weekend. And by made, I mean "is playable, works, but still is far from done". Again, I used Unity.

Screenshots (click for big images):
Explosion! :D Laser from LasersAndRockets
Aside from that, I spent my time doing school work. Who knew that you'd get a lot of work in your final year? Not me, obviously.

I think that's about it.

Until next time, Geko out. (Hopefully next time will be sooner than last time's next time)

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Geko_X Blog 3 comments

Well, hey there!

Hey! I decided to mirror some of the posts on my blog about CODENAME LITHIUM here on IndieDB. My personal blog is at Codenamelithium.wordpress.com

CODENAME LITHIUM is a 2D sidescroller puzzle/shooter with a personal story I want to tell. No details on the story yet! It's coded using the Unity3D engine for all the boring stuff like 3D audio, lighting, physics and collisions... but I've had to roll my own code to essentially modify the engine into something more friendly for 2D work (limiting physics and movement to only the x and y axis, for example). Obviously, I'm coding the game, and I'm also doing all the other things, like art and music, myself.

Here, have some media

Particles! :D

So now some stuff about me

I'm an Aussie highschool student, going into year 12. I code, I music, I play hockey, I code, I play TF2. Oh, and I do homework. Too much homework. I guess that's what you get when you do all the "hard" subjects in your senior school years.

What I'll post here

I won't mirror any personal posts here, just the posts regarding CODENAME LITHIUM.

And that about sums it all up

If you got all the way down here, thanks for doing so! It probably means that you're interested in CODENAME LIHIUM, which is awesome! :D

Feel free to leave a comment, I'll reply! Oh, and any feedback about the blog is most welcome. I'm still setting it up and making it look nice.

Geko out.