We released a new version of Upshot yesterday, our award winning screenshot collaboration program. We implemented our two most requested features- You can now rename a screenshot before it's uploaded, and you can now have Upshot save a copy of every screenshot to a folder on your computer.

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This has been a busy week for us, so I figured it’s better to inform our devoted readership regarding our activities. Plus, it should be interesting.

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It may have seemed quiet for the last week or so, but it’s because we’re working on some great new AI behavior for Solaro.

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Up until now, the AI in Solaro has been pretty simple. It was basically always attacking, and had no concept of avoiding obstacles. Quite often the AI would simply repeatedly slam into asteroids like a fly trying to get out a window. Humorous yes, but it obviously won’t do for the final game. …

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We’ve recently made some big strides in cleaning up some of the backend code for handling how ships are put together and how collisions are handled. We uncovered a few bugs with calculating the center of mass of a ship and its moment of inertia. It’s now much more robust as you edit an …

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Scott and I are leaving for GDC in just two days. If you’re going to be in the area and would like to meet up, please give us an email!

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So part of the plan for Objective-Chipmunk is to add useful utility features that don’t make sense to add at the level of Chipmunk’s C API. To that end, I’ve been cleaning up my old marching squares code so that it can be used with Objective-Chipmunk. Basically marching squares is …

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Here’s a sneak peek of our example quest. You’ll also see our new targeting artwork.

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The last few days have been pretty productive. Scott did some cleanup with the collision detection system, we added and polished missiles (they now have some really cool seeking and turning behavior), and we made some improvements to the flight system. We’ve got a cruise control mode, which …

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Our demo of AI controlled enemy ships is finally ready. We’ve got a basic playable where it’s you and two escorts vs. an endless number of hostile drones, bent on destroying your way of life.

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We’ve been using tracking software for quite a while in different places and different forms. We even worked on a XP Tracker project back in college- it tracked different projects based on the story / task model popular in various agile development methodologies.

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There’s been a lot of little stuff- Scott’s been tweaking and improving the controls. We’re throwing together a simple demo with some more refined controls. The enemy AI is looking really good right now. I’ve also been doing some cleanup with asteroids, their rotations, how …

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We’ve been working on a few neat new essential features.

First, we’ve got ship damage working. Individual components can be critically damaged. This might mean a weapon won’t fire, or an engine will produce less thrust. Once you lose your critical components (all the cockpits) or …

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This is part two of an overview of cool shaders we wrote for Solaro.

We’ve also got a vertical distortion shader that we can apply to things like in game text, title images, and other billboard effects. Used here on the “Solaro” title, this shader creates a bit of a video interference …

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I don’t know how it happened, but Solaro has 37 custom shaders in the project!

We’ve got a lot of variety in our shaders; some are full screen effects, many of them are for special UI effects or weapon effects, and we’ve also got special shaders for weapon and shield effects. So …

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Here I’ll do a visual walkthrough of how I make planetoids for Solaro.

First, paint a heightmap with the fun shape you are looking for.

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Today we’re showing off a few new features. There’s a bunch of new flight controls stuff, and we figured the best way to demonstrate that was to throw together some player-commandable escort ships.

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Since we’ve been pretty busy these last few months, we wanted to share what we’re currently focusing on with Solaro. Solaro: Skirmishes is a space flight simulator action game that focuses on arena based combat. As you win each arena, you are awarded new components, such as weapons, …

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The ship editor now prevents you from placing pieces that intersect with other pieces. This will prevent people from making strange ships that fold in on themselves. I also made a few more improvements to rotations of pieces. You can rotate the initial piece around any of the three primary axes, and …

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