Friday Status: 12/18/2015

In the real world, I've accepted a full time position as Linux IIS Admin w/ The Bon-Ton Corp.

Things are going to get a lot busier for me, I suspect.

So status, in no particular order:
1) Neo-Monagasque Chronicles Book Two got a shitty review from a friendly reviewer.  That was ugly.   I'm not really sure how to fix the story problems he has with it, or if it's worth fixing at this point.  It kind of gutted my interest in it though.

2) Mechwarrior Dark Age Javascript game.  On hold, as mentioned previously.  No new work will get done on that till next year.

3) My Sci-Fi WIP has a bit more work done.  Working on cleaning up the lighting and finishing up the first zone's layout:

 Revised lighting.  Still having trouble with that primary pillar in the foreground.  The spool on the left is just a placeholder for more stuff later.  I want this entire area to look like a busy docking bay which means people, places, lots of workers and palettes of goods. While I like the lighting, I will say one significant negative is how the overhead lights look off now.  More work is going to need to be done.

More revised lighting.  Spotted some issues here -

• Natural lighting should be seeping in from above, it is not.  Meaning I have to adjust some of the ambient levels or fake it.  
• My coffee sign fell down, because I had to adjust the physics values of the entities.  A simple mistake, easily fixed.
• Light post on right is poorly positioned and looks like it's off.
• Needs more 'reason' to come over here.  I want to turn these machines into functioning entities, shouldn't be too hard. At that point the hard lighting used for illumination/shadows should really help push the player towards these machines.

This was originally an outdoor panoramic scene but because of an engine issue (shadows displaying on empty space) I decided to fool around with making it part of the ship and it came out really well.  So now you still have a window to space but you can see the ship more naturally as part of an extension of the actual player's experience.  The docking bay itself is actually an old free model done by cosmic prophet for dark city (or was it nuke city?).

This area is my first real "crew" area; it's clutter and design is specifically oriented towards giving a more human feel for the ship.  I'll have a few people sitting, eating, cavorting.  etc.  There should be a lot more decoration to give you the feel that this small mess area is a nice through-way for travelers.  There are a few mistakes here though.

• One of the panels (mid center, slightly left) for the roof shows misaligned ceiling textures.  This simply needs rotated.  
• The area needs more lighting in general to put shadows on the interior elements.
• The far pouch actually is the first secret area and I need to hide this better.

So as you can see, this is coming along well but progress is slow because I have little time to work with this regularly.  I want this to give a nice solid feel; this first level (Receiving Bay) will actually be somewhere we visit again later - it should have a trashed feel at that point as things have gone to relative shit.  

More to come!   For now, I'm slowing down as it's end of the year; holidays are winding up, I have a lot going on in my life (Baby, Job, Holidays) and mostly I'm just taking it as it comes.

Forthcoming reviews:  The "Deep Space" package by oldflak
                                      My comprehensive 'must have free stuff' list - part one
                                      Wizard of Id's warehouse pack.
                                       Errant AI's Arcade Pack.

Deal of the week:  https://en.tgcstore.net/pack/10703  - ... 600 dollars worth of resources for 27 dollars.  Holy jeeze!

Project(s) status Friday 12/4/2015

I'm  resolved to try and keep up on my projects for once, instead of letting them languish.  Part of that is being open and honest with my few regular readers about where I'm at:

1. The Mechwarrior: Dark Age JS game has stalled.  This is because of inherent limitations in Javascript.  The most recent thing I did was build a shellscript which parses the DB @ www.warrenborn.com and builds a JSON for the various expansion packs.  That was done about a month ago.  The question then becomes - what engine do I want to move forward with? Easiest would probably be Unity, since it's got javascript as an optional scripting method.  On a plus note the basic combat engine for one on one combat works like a champ, including statuses like pulse lasers, flamers, etc. 
2. My Sci-Fi trilogy (book 2) is being reviewed by my proofreaders.  I'm fifteen thousand words and about 8 segments short of where it needs to be before it's a first draft.  So I'm waiting for their reviews so I can get an idea of how to fill out those missing pieces.
3. My Sci-Fi game (unnamed as of current) is stalled because of life; I am trying to work on it from time to time but it's hard when your job and home life take up 95% of your time.  Current issues are interior shadows in the Game-Guru engine and asset/story choices need firmed up.

In life, I'm a Linux Systems Engineer and Lead Linux Administrator.  I'm currently working on deploying SALTstack to SLES 11 sp4.  I've got most of the elements in place and a functional system running but boy howdy was it ugly to get moving.  You'd think something called (S)use (A)dvanced (L)inux (T)echnologies would be more compatible with (S)use (L)inux (E)nterprise (S)ystem.

I may write up a blog post on it.  Currently I am sticking with puppet for minor tasks despite it's raw incompatibility with Suse's package management system.  It's decent enough at user removal/etc though.  SALTstack however has the benefit of direct 'zypper' package management integration which is pretty sweet considering it's the backbone of how Suse manages packages.  So that's also been taking up my mental CPU cycles. 

One upshot from a gamedev standpoint is I learned how to make functional alpha channel decals work in Game Guru.  This gives me at least one solid tool to work with.  After that I want to work on doing skyboxes, because frankly I find most of the ones on the store are too repetitive or boring for my tastes.