Apparently, I am still missing books 1, 6, 7 of the x11 series. The lead programmer just finished with his math grad school final, so he should be getting back into programming again. Hopefully books documenting x11 will make the whole coding project go much faster and not make us feel like we are digging with spoons again.
Why have I decided to go with x11, well for starters, it is what the whole thing is based on. I don't want to learn some half finished library only to find out that it doesn't do what I want anyway. At least I know what x11 does, windowing menus. So I should be able to get a better user interface with windows you can close so they don't take up the whole screen.
I asked him if he could find the books in pdf format. He mentioned that it is not free - licensed stuff for the x11 documentation. Apparently, x11 is such a huge thing that it needed a series of 8, no make that 9 books starting with book 0. I didn't realize that till now. No wonder no one else wanted to get into it and wanted to use useless stuff like python and Lua. Since the books are out of date though, they appear to be fairly cheap, although how well the whole thing will work is another matter, but x11 is supposed to be stable, just like the standard C library, one can hope anyway. The C you use today should be able to be compiled on tomarrows C compilers and not make a whole new update c.01 that is incompatable.
Friday, April 24, 2009
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Updates for the last couple weeks
I have been very bad about updateing this blog the past couple weeks. Our lead programmer did order the X11 books, and will begin workinng on a fix for the menu issue that is shown in the screenshots on the website. I have unfortunatly been busy with a lot of real life stuff that I will not bore you with here.
Suffice to say, I did go to take a look at an art school. Not that I think a lot of formal art training is nessesery to make this game look good or anything like that, but when you have degrees in something then you can thrown your weight around. There are a lot of people in this world that only care about prestiege and letters after your name. Not that any of those types would want to look at or work on this project anyway.
I have to say I was really impressed with the student works. They seem to understand, just like the developers behind World of Warcraft, that the concept is more even more important than the execution. You have to make it appealing. The old "lets try to make everything realism" is dead. You don't just make graphics "better and better" by increasing technical skill, machine hardware demands and realism, like some physics major would like to believe. What is ultimately more important, espeacially in games of this sort, is to communicate a certain feel to the player of the game. Artwork is supposed to evoke emotion, not just try to be a blind copy of something that has been done beforehand by someone else elsewhere.
Eventually, I do plan to have other artists on the project, the look and feel of this game is pretty easy to create for so that I think even a newbie could make good looking tiles. I'm not trying to overdo the shading to make it seem like you just stepped into a photograph. If I was going for that, I would just photograph the stuff I wanted in game rather than waste time drawing it out, cut it, resize and paste it. Why go through all the drawing trouble anyway then?
Suffice to say, I did go to take a look at an art school. Not that I think a lot of formal art training is nessesery to make this game look good or anything like that, but when you have degrees in something then you can thrown your weight around. There are a lot of people in this world that only care about prestiege and letters after your name. Not that any of those types would want to look at or work on this project anyway.
I have to say I was really impressed with the student works. They seem to understand, just like the developers behind World of Warcraft, that the concept is more even more important than the execution. You have to make it appealing. The old "lets try to make everything realism" is dead. You don't just make graphics "better and better" by increasing technical skill, machine hardware demands and realism, like some physics major would like to believe. What is ultimately more important, espeacially in games of this sort, is to communicate a certain feel to the player of the game. Artwork is supposed to evoke emotion, not just try to be a blind copy of something that has been done beforehand by someone else elsewhere.
Eventually, I do plan to have other artists on the project, the look and feel of this game is pretty easy to create for so that I think even a newbie could make good looking tiles. I'm not trying to overdo the shading to make it seem like you just stepped into a photograph. If I was going for that, I would just photograph the stuff I wanted in game rather than waste time drawing it out, cut it, resize and paste it. Why go through all the drawing trouble anyway then?
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