Monday 2 July 2007

Misteries of Astronomy

Yeah, the World's on its who-knows-which day of creation got Night and Day with orbiters around. :-) A number of arbitrary orbiters can be added to the World's WorldOrbiterHandler and the 3D core will take care to display it. The code needs some cleanup and more robustness, yet it has visible signs of its workings already! Here are the shots... ( look at the changing shadows, yeah, but don't look into the sun for too long! :-) )

5 comments:

Charlie said...

As much as I admire your development pace and as much faith as I have in your dedication, there is an increasing worry of featuritis creaping into JCRPG.

Beware focusing on too many features and forgetting the actual game / gameplay. The more featuers you have, implicitly the more complex your codebase becomes and the harder it is to eliminate bugs. Now, I'm not saying JCRPG is buggy but if you are not careful it could become seriously so.

They also say a jack of all trades is a master of none. Translated, I am saying that a few features done well is more impressive than a lot of features done not-so-well.

At some point, sooner rather than later, draw a line under your existing feature set and set your stall at creating a playable demo game and making it as bug free and polished an experience as possible.

I hope that sounds alright, it's meant to be advise rather than criticism. Keep up the good work.

Charlie said...

Just to follow that up briefly - the hardest part of any development process is not when you are having fun and working on things with quick reward-to-hacking ratio. It's when you hit a wall, when a problem appears unsurmountable no matter how much grey matter you throw at it.

It's always best to try and stay close to playable code as possible. I know it's early in development of JCRPG but try and stagger development rather than trying to include everything at once because it means that aforementioned wall will be even higher when you hit it - and it will come. No project gets away without a code blackhole or two.

pzi said...

Thank you for writing down your thoughts on the problematics of (game)-development! It shows that you really care about helping jcrp. :-) And that's good!

Things I have to add to that is that I mostly agree with your comment, and that yet it will mostly seem to your taste that we will be jack of all trades! And that's a point here, jcrpg is firstly a Framework, that tries to capture as many aspects of a planet and living place as possible. Yet it aims to be developed in iterations, so you will get the worst of it - by your taste - it won't be a master of one thing, but a master of everything - on a basic level. The dream is that maybe it will be hard to love it at first, but if you get into it you MUST be fascinated by the level of possibilities, details. There is no compromise in the fullness of this framework! :-D
.
.
.
And now back to reality... the black hole you mentioned is here already, but it is a black hole of invention, of how to create a living fullness in simple iterations. It must be done. I wouldn't love anything less than that released in the first version. :-)

And the astronomy presented here was/is not as complex as it may seem... so don't be afraid if you were, I am keeping things simple in the first iteration.

Ah, and one more thing. If the framework will be simple in its first version yet the scripting must give place to a complex story and gameplay...okay, that's all. Hope you are discomforted now! :-D

Kocka said...

Charlie, dont worry about Paul, he knows stuff :)
I really like the progress I have seen so far with JCRPG, and while I cant wait to get a really nice game, I also like the new features that come up day by day.

Go Pali! :)

pzi said...

Hi, Kocka! Thanks for supporting me! :D Check out the new lens flare effect! :-)

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