Well, January is now gone and it’s time for a monthly review. For the past month I was mainly focused on two projects – Asteroids3D and XSnooker.
The former, Asteroids3D, did not go as well as I expected, even thought it looked great at first and I received a positive feedback from people that saw it. The reason was that it’s my first 3D project (not counting XSnooker which is being developed in parallel and is much simpler in terms of 3D) and my main focus was to build solid 3D space in which a player could fly around. Well, I have accomplished this, but by the time I had done with the fancy 3D world, there was not much time left to finish other things necessary for a good game play. For example, lack of score and a very limited game AI made the game not much fun to play. However, it is a solid start, and if I have some free time in the future, I will definitely finish it.
The latter, XSnooker, is going well, but is behind the schedule a bit. I was struggling to find an appropriate 3D physics engine for the game at first, and even thought there are few available for ActionScript, and Away3D in particular, most of them are kind of slow for my game (i.e. they don’t work well with a lot of objects colliding simultaneously). I finally found a solution in Box2D, which is a 2D physics engine that was ported from C++. Despite having a slightly weird API, it works surprisingly well and mostly important – it looks realistic (which is absolutely crucial for a snooker game). Single player mode is almost done, and what left is multiplayer mode before the demonstration in late March. Fingers crossed.
That’s all about January, I guess.
