The post Phoenix Game Development.Com: Undergoing Updates first appeared on Phoenix Game Development.

Official Documentation for Spiritus Astrum is here:

Spiritus Astrum Documentation [phoenixgamedevelopment.com]

This is a PDF document of the documentation for Spiritus Astrum.

This is vs 1.0 of the docs, this will be updated in the future.

The post Spiritus Astrum [P0-B8]: p1444: Debugging, Improvements first appeared on Phoenix Game Development.

I have decide to re-enable comments on PGD on a trial basis.

I was getting a lot of spam, which is why I disabled them.

I am using a moderation queue with fairly strict anti-spam settings, so I am confident that I will be able to allow interaction with posts while still keeping spam to a minimum.

The PGD forum (Which will mainly be for technical issues, bug reports, etc), is located here:

FORUM

The Steam store page for Spiritus Astrum is here::

SPIRITUS ASTRUM ON STEAM

I have also created a (currently blank) Reddit sub for Spiritus Astrum, which is here:

REDDIT

The post Regarding Comments, and all my links first appeared on Phoenix Game Development.

I recently discovered that it is actually possible to sponsor certain unicode characters, and also, that the “heart” of my logo is in fact a unicode character. It is U+2727, the Four-Pointed Star:

I have sponsored this character on the official Unicode site HERE.

I also get an official tweet from the Unicode channel:

Phoenix Advanced Concepts: now a Bronze sponsor of WHITE FOUR POINTED STAR! #UnicodeSponsor https://t.co/HR24IjpL85 pic.twitter.com/GnhTpUSoYt

— Unicode Consortium (@unicode) May 3, 2016

The post U+2727: Four Pointed Star: Unicode character Sponsorship first appeared on Phoenix Game Development.

The garagegames community have launched a new forum HERE.

This forums seems to have replaced the previous one, which had been having problems with spam for some time. The new forum is actively moderated and spam free, and seems to have taken over the brunt of the Torque related discussion from the previous forum.

The post New Torque Forum first appeared on Phoenix Game Development.

Although it was harder than I thought, Oculus  claimed that they were experiencing “Massive” load on their servers, and it was overwhelming their payment processors. That’s a good sign for VR!

It did mean that by the time I managed to complete my preorder, my ship date had slipped from March to April.

Eventually, however, I managed to secure a preorder for the rift using Firefox and Paypal, that combination seemed to work better than chrome and a credit card.

The bad news is that the total price (including shipping) for European customers (or as least the countries in Europe that Oculus ship to, it’s not available everywhere) came to €740! A lot more than US customers had to pay, although even they had to pay more than expected, few prospective customers thought the price would be more than $500.

Several twitter users have expressed concern that this price, combined with the very high system requirements, will serve to price the Rift out of the market.

I see it more as the cost of the early adoption of high-end VR tech. In a few years, with mass production, the rift will be less expensive, and Rift capable PC’s will be a lot cheaper. So, for a high introductory price, you are getting early access to what could be a whole new way of living.
There are some Rift competitors out there, but most of them aren’t capable of the same kind of immersive, realistic experience as the rift. Some of them are intended for mobile devices, for example. The rift is intended for not just realistic gaming, but alternative reality experiences, such as virtual work places, virtual teleconferencing, etc.

I also ran the Oculus Compatibility tool, and as expected, my new PC is more than capable:

The post Successfully preordered Oculus Rift! first appeared on Phoenix Game Development.

According to THIS link, Oculus Rift Preorders will begin at 8 AM on January 6th, or 4 PM GMT!

That’s less than 48 hours away!

Countdown to Oculus Preorder:

[tminus t=”06-01-2016 16:00:00″ style=”carbonite” omitweeks = “yes”/]

The post Oculus Rift Preorders start on January 6th, at 8AM PST/4 PM GMT first appeared on Phoenix Game Development.

I generally adopt a simple sequential naming convention for my Projects, P-165, P-166, etc. My current virtual world Project (Which I don’t have a name for yet) is P-152. However, I think that given the sheer complexity of the Spherical Terrain Implementation which I am currently working on, this element should have it’s own project number. This trend will likely continue throughout the virtual world project, with many parts of the main project being assigned unique Project Numbers and/or Names due to their complexity.

That means that I need to adopt a new project number for this project. I intend for this virtual world to be my most important project ever, and I will likely never finish working on it, I intend for it to be a life’s work. As such, I want to choose a unique name that best fits it’s status, I don’t want to just assign the next free number to it like I would with any other project.

I have decided to use an ID of P-0 for my current project, for “Project Zero”. This should allow me to uniquely identify posts and content for the project, and also define project numbers for the sub elements separately.

My first major virtual world, Spiritus Astrum, wasn’t given a project ID because I didn’t use them at the time. Astral Realms was given an ID of P-101. I think that P-0 properly emphasises the important of this project, since it will be an ongoing project. It may go through more iterations (which is what happened with my previous virtual worlds) but P-0 can still be used to define the project as it evolves.

The post Project Naming Conventions: P-0, P-152, Astral Realms (p101), Spiritus Astrum first appeared on Phoenix Game Development.

I am currently constructing a server for the purposes of hosting games and programming projects. This is very much a test of a wider concept, and a learning opportunity for me.

I am aiming the server at mainly T3D or other amateur game developers and software programmers. Having a dedicated server available with which to test a network game or application is a huge advantage, since it is impossible to properly test a server from the same internet connection at it’s clients.

One can use virtual machines, or colleagues with other computers, but these have their own set of problems. Virtual machines don’t always work like real machines, especially when it comes to networking, and properly testing an application requires a whole host of debuggers, compilers, preferences tweaks and router settings, something that is very difficult to do unless you have direct access to a dedicated server.

The specs are going to be quite basic for the time being, AMD Phenom II X2, 4 GB’s RAM, and  2 40GB HDD’s in RAID 0.
The server is being hosted from my home internet connection, so it is likely that bandwidth will be somewhat limited.

I will probably be running KVM or some other kind of hypervisor based operating system, since this provides greater opportunities for the users (such as the ability to install a custom client OS).

I am not certain what kind of system I am going to use to govern usage of the server, or whether it will be free or paid. I am mainly trying to gauge the interest in dedicated servers for game and software development.

The post Upcoming T3D Development/Test Server Rental first appeared on Phoenix Game Development.

The next step in this project is to enable the player to control machines and vehicles that they have made using the world creator. I want this to be as emergent as possible, so I wanted to have the controls themselves by placeable with the world editor, and not just use a predefined gui or preset buttons or controls.

I have decided to add levers to the game, which will be used to control each of the directions of moving platforms (One lever each for forward and backward, up and down, and left and right). These levers are bidirectional, they can be turned in either direction to control two directions at once, and they can be moved by different amounts to set the speed of the move.

This was actually quite complex. I could not simply allow the player to “use” the lever, since that would not give me directional control, or control over the distance that the lever is pushed. I also couldn’t simply animate the lever moving, since I needed to allow the player to move the lever by different amounts to choose different speeds. I have more or less finished a system that does exactly what I want it to do. I don’t have the ability to set different speeds quite done yet, and I have some tweaking to do, but it basically works. It’s actually a reasonably complex solution involving vector maths.

The next step would be to allow the player to connect these levers to objects, and use them to apply physics forces. In this way, complex machines could be relatively easily built and controlled.

The post P-152: Virtual World Concept Update 6 first appeared on Phoenix Game Development.