Today I was pondering about the (minimum) requirements for Nordenfelt. It is a pure 2D game without heavy physics calculations or complex artificial intelligence. Therefore it should run smoothly on older hardware as well as on modern PCs. Hardware statistics from Steam and Unity are cool for investigating these details. The problem with these statistics is that they don’t show how old the inspected systems are.

Now I want to know if you have older machines which you still use for gaming. By older I mean systems built before 2005. It would be nice if you could drop me a line including:

• age of the machine
• operating system (only Windows please)
• RAM
• number and speed of CPU cores
• free hard-disk space
• video card type

I’m looking forward to your replies. Thanks in advance!

Cheers,
Thomas

Quite some time went by since the last post. Time flies when you’re busy!

I just wanted to show what I’ve done during the last days. The following image shows a screenshot of Nordenfelt 0.1 on the left hand side and a screenshot of the upcoming version 0.2 on the right hand side:

I’m experimenting with background tiles at the moment. The old tiles were “hand-drawn” in GIMP. Crafting tiles this way needs too much skill and time for my project. Therefore I’ve switched over to rendering whole 3D scenes to images and tiling them afterwards. IMO that makes the visuals more consistent and lowers the artistic effort.

Thoughts?

Cheers,
Thomas

After six days of fiddling around with the player ship I’m sick of it. It’s time for something new to work on.

This is the ship as it will be used in the arcade mode of Nordenfelt:

The small wings were mounted recently. This was done for one simple purpose: the birds-view shape did not look like a flying object. The wings are rather useless but provide a decorative hint at the vehicle’s flying nature.

Upcoming tasks on my todo list are making the playable level easier, adding some increments to the available weapon (upgrading) and many small tweaks like faster scroll speed or additional animations. I’m wondering when version 0.2 will be out. Hm…

Cheers,
Thomas

After some feedback I’ve changed the shape of the player ship. The engines became reduced in size and semi-covered by the ship hull, the outward-pointing guns are parallel know. Finalizing details like construction seams and rivets were attached:

I’m not really satisfied with the hull’s birds-view shape. The old hull was rougher:

I’m pondering if the engine covers should be reduced a little bit for restoring the “small hip” of the old hull shape.

What is your opinion?

Cheers,
Thomas

Upgrade Triggered Refactoring Avalanche

After collecting all feedback from version 0.1 the first point on the todo list became including upgrades in the arcade mode. That sounded simple. I added a new upgrade object type and integrated it into the collision detection system. Here the first problem popped up: Physical shapes were still represented as polygons, upgrade icons were going to be circular. There was a big “TODO: replace polygons with circles” in the code. OK, let’s replace the polygons with circles. I will have to do it anyway. The avalanche started sliding.

While refactoring the collision code and adapting file formats the latter became painful work. The data formats were simple sequences of numeric values. E.g. a 2D vector was just a pair of numbers and a circle was a 2D vector followed by the circle its radius. The lack of meta data within the files, declaring the meanings of the values, forced me to always reference the corresponding loading source code. That was cumbersome so it was time for the next refactoring step: replacing the old file formats with XML. Next job in the refactoring queue.

The newly integrated upgrades had to load their data from files. They needed sprites, animations and body shapes. The third refactoring job accelerated the avalanche. Hey, I just wanted to upgrade my guns! Oh, wait a minute… equipment needs new upgrade definitions, weapons will have different shoot layouts. Dammit! Next job enqueued!

After two weeks refactoring the hell out of the game all viral tasks were finished. It’s a good feeling that the Nordenfelt engine now has proper data formats, a faster collision detection and upgradable equipment. Now I can go on with the funnier things.

For example modelling the player ship.

The Arcade Player Ship

The poll for your favourite player ship design sketches elected concept G as winner:

Today I’ve made this 3D model from the sketch above. It is not finished yet. Details like plates, frames or rivets are still missing:

IMO concept G is a good choice. It meets the shmup guidelines (AFAIK them), looks steampunky enough and has two Gatling guns! What would our world be without Gatling guns?

Thanks four your votes!

Cheers,
Thomas

There where quite many answers to my call for your player ship favourites. I’m going to start modelling the finalist tomorrow.

If you haven’t chosen your favourites yet: Please drop me a comment here. The current top 3 are:

1. Concept B
2. Concept G
3. Concept F

Click to Enlarge

Cheers,
Thomas

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