Update April 2011 - Just an update to say that Legends is still alive and after a year of general project burn out and huge changes at work (that left no time for anything else for a long time) I am back coding and creating. Highlights include finally making some real progress with the combat system ... it still needs to be game balanced correctly, but the NPCs are really starting to act more realistically (for instance running away when they are loosing). They also die now rather than just standing there looking a bit confused!

In terms of the game itself (rather than the engine) I have been sharpening up the content here and there and bringing a darker theme into the story. There has also been attempts to remove any black and white distinctions and create a morally grey world for the player to explore. And despite the combat system working much better now the objective is to avoid Legends becoming a 'kill 10 rats' hack and slash with dialogue and investigation being at least as, if not more important.

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Update June 2009 - As a bit of an update I have been busy polishing the player and NPC movement algorithms and adding sliding code (so when trying to move through a building the player or NPC slides around its edge). After a bit of fun with the maths this seems to be working nicely in most cases - the only remaining thing to sort out is when two objects overlap (such as with town walls) as the code only applies sliding for one building - I just need to do some double checking to avoid sliding into another building and even to give up if it is not actually possible to slide at all (if the player is stuck in a corner for example).

Other than that polishing of the prologue chapter continues at a steady pace with amongst other things locks and lock picking implemented - for the moment I have taken the easy approach for lock picking and automatically unlock doors if the right key or lock pick is in the players inventory. Longer term I will look at some kind of mini game, but this will wait until the more critical elements of the game are complete and I can be 100% confident about the overall feel of the game that the mini game elements will need to compliment.


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Update April 2009 - After all the excitment with introducing carrots into the game, I quickly followed up with some apples, a chicken and some fish ... oh and some curbs for the sides of the streets. All terribly gripping I'm sure.

More concretely I have been working on some rather tricky components in the game engine over the last week or so. First off I have been introducing a sound and music manager basing this on OpenAL and Ogg technology. Given that streaming music needs a separate thread I have been busy remembering all about semaphores and communication between concurrent asysnchronous processes. And watching the game crash at regular intervals while I sort this out. At least now I have some music playing when the menus are visible. As far as sound is concerned the ambient sound is gradually dropping into place so the player can hear (at last!) the rain fall and the waves washing up the beach. Next stop point sound effects.

Then in addition I have been (re)introducing some texture splatting to add some more detail to the ground texturing. Objective sandy beaches, rocky mountains and the odd bit of snow on higher ground. After fighting with OpenGL for several hours things are getting there. Hopefully I will have a few before and after screenshots to show off soon.

Finally, I have been adding proper multilingual support to the game. Most of this involves looking for a language specific version of a dialogue or book data file for example, but there are odd bits of text that have previously been hard coded into the game engine. This has now been replaced by a series of canned messages, currently available in English and French.

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Update March 2009 - Still busy working on the first two chapters of the game. The last month has been spent adding as many interior locations as possible with there being a real sense that the exterior is changing from an artifical 'film set' to a more realistic ... virtual ... world where the player can enter buildings and continue the adventure in a series of dungeons, crypts ... and front rooms of town houses. As this has continued I've been tweaking the code here and there to remove bugs or increase performance, while I have also been busy adding boring, but in the end fairly important objects such as buckets, beds, wood piles and carrots. Next up cheese and some apples!

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Update January 2009 - Again I've been pretty quiet recently, but work is continuing at a steady pace. Through December I was busy polishing up the exterior gameworld including the addition of animated waterfalls (click on the image below for a video).



Following on from this I have had the 'exciting' taks of creating a series of tables, chairs, beds, chests, plates, pots, candles and so on so that I can finally add some complete interior locations. Currently I am working my way through the town below creating the interiors for each building ...



I could lie and say that it's good fun ... the Inn and a couple of other buildings are interesting to do, but when it comes to positioning yet another book in a bookcase (and creating the text for the book) in yet another villager's house things get a bit boring. Should be a few interesting places to visit though especially when I finish introducing the storyline scripting (which will quite dramatically change the overall atmosphere of the town over time)



In working on these game elements I discovered a few bugs with the object handling code ... picking up a pile of coins, leaving a building and coming back in resulted in a nice 'feature' where the money was recreated. In the interests of the (fantasy) world economy this has now been fixed.

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Update 7th November 2008 - Well that was a long break! Too much (real) work getting in the way. Recent development includes more work on the character models (again!), tidying up on the rendering code and particle systems. Game wise the prologue and the first chapter continue to take shape with a lot of the elements in these chapters being polished and finalised. Finally, I'm having fun adding windmills and waterfalls to the game - no real need for them, but they look good!


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Update 22nd April 2008 - At the moment I'm working on the models in the game. To start off with this involved adding or tidying up a few of the building models to add a bit of variety to towns. Then efforts concentrated on removing place holder models borrowed from external sources and replacing them with home made (and free to use) models that can be released with a demo. Finally, in the last week or so I've been busy working on some new character models (to again replace those borrowed from elsewhere). A new screenshot has been added to give an idea of progress in this area.


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Update 7th March 2008 - I've been a bit distracted recently trying to tidy up the Legends website a bit. The changes aren't really visible just yet, but it will be easier to keep the development diary up to date and add new screenshots (or even the odd demo video).

As far as the game itself is concenred I've been dividing my time between working on the first two episodes in the story (the prelude and the first real chapeter) and enhancing the NPC AI. At this stage the NPCs are becoming more aware of others around them (and not just the player) which means that fights now kick off between them. Next step is to stop them being suicidal lemmings ... in other words if an NPC is going to be badly beaten then he/she should run away...


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Update 2nd January 2008 - Work continues at high speed - hopefully I can keep the momentum going! Development of the game engine has continued with recent work concentrating on improving the look and feel of interior locations (an example screenshot having been added to the project page). More importantly I've been working on the game content with the storyline taking stronger shape. New map cells are being added, with additional objects being added to the world editor to add extra variety. Two new sets of NPC models have also been added.

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Update 21st December 2007 - Just a quick update before I'm off for my winter break. The inventory system is complete with all the standard features including movement slow down, grouping of items in the inventory and, as of last night scripting triggers and events based on the inventory (so for instance it finally costs money to travel by ship). This combined with a fully debugged world object system and save/load code means that the player can finally have a real and long lasting impact on the game world. Next up a whole host of things including merchants, magic and NPCs that will take full advantage of stupid players dropping money in the middle of busy streets (and even NPCs that won't wait for the player to be stupid before helping to lighten their inventory).

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Update 10th December 2007 - With the player able to pick objects up and put them down, it was about time to get started on the inventory system. As one of the screenshots indicates this is going pretty well - the underlying code is in place along with the basic user interface. To add are the scrolling and filtering controls (pretty easy to add ... I hope) along with equiping - the hardest bit here will be ensuring the character model (in the inventory and in game) is updated neatly.

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Update 26th November 2007 - After a long break (thanks to moving house and not having access to the internet for a while) I'm busy working on Legends again. Apart from adding more content (including a couple of simple quests) I've been spitting my time between different sections of the code. The climate code has been tidied up (including the removal of a couple of lingering bugs), I've been working on the magic system (as recent posts to the forum have indicated). However the biggest task has been introducing persistent objects ... which means that the player can pick up an object, carry it around, drop it somewhere else, go to the other end of the world, save the game several times and come back to find the object where he left it. Or have an object changed by a script and have it stay changed after saving (the burnt farm from below stays burnt!). Most of the code is working nicely already and I just have a few more sections to up date - all being well this should be finished by the weekend.

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Update 6th August 2007 - Work continues at a fairly rapid pace with my time split equally between adding more content to the game world and continuing to enhance the game engine. On the content side of things there are now 20+ NPCs in game and a few more settlements appearing. I've also been working on adding a few more models to the game to vary the architecture a bit more and also add some story specific objects.

With the coding I've been enhancing the scripting engine a bit and it is now possible to trigger the creation and removal of game objects, buildings and characters based on simple scripts. At the most basic level this allows the player to drop and pick up objects, while at a more advanced level it is possible to script attacks on the player, or make story driven changes to the game world (I had a quick test where I burnt down a farm for example).

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Update 17th July 2007 - I've been busy again with lots of different things. Most work has been concentrated on getting more animated character models into the game. As creating these models has always been a major problem for me I've cheated by borrowing some models from Morrowind that will be used as place holders for the time being at least.

I've also been working hard on adding more NPCs to the game, all with different dialogues and schedules all built around the home-grown scripting system. The world is looking a lot less like a ghost town already.

Most recently I've started working on the combat system - the player attack and defend controls and animations (at least the basic ones) are in place and now it's a case of building up the role playing engine (as opposed to the game engine) to take advantage of this.

Finally on a more technical side I've been working on the lighting and the distance culling of objects to get the maximum frame rate out of the engine, even on less powerful machines.

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Update 4th July 2007 - Work continues on introducing some more NPC models into the game and taking full advantage of the new skeletal animation code. At the same time I've finished off the movement AI so that NPCs are able to use node maps for scheduled movement and then move freely across the landscape when chasing or fleeing from the player. Here the hardest thing was finding a good mix of collision avoidance and collision handling - after two or three different tries this is now properly in place and working nicely.

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Update 6th June 2007 - The skeletal animation code is now fully in place and integrated with the AI with the NPC brain able to select an action (attack hand-to-hand for example) close in on the player and select an appropriate animation (swing sword, stab, whatever) which then is used by the animation code. It's even possible to vary the speed on the animation - I'll be using this to differentiate between old/injured/tired NPCs and those in full health - it's even possible to have slow motion (although I'm not sure how I would want to fit this into the fantasy setting).

As an aside thanks for the latest review - for the WASD controls, I've already had some feedback on the sidestepping (or lack there of) and have recently 'fixed' this ... probably time to get a new demo organised ;)

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Update 28th May 2007 - Its been a while since the last update as I haven't had much time to work on Legends recently. Now things are busier again and on a purely technical side of things a code clean up resulted in a very significant improvement in performance (a typical scene that was running at 20 FPS is now back up to 40+).

Aside from this I've been working hard on the NPC code with skeletal animation replacing keyframes. Combined with the ability to load Milkshape MS3D files means that getting decently animated NPCs in to the game is a lot less painful.

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Update 3rd January 2007 - The new Legends demo is now available from the website. This includes the ability to walk around the world as it exists so far and to interact with certain (but not all) NPCs and other game content. The demo also includes the integrated world creator in its latest form giving the possibility to edit existing game content or create new content. All feedback would be very much appreciated.

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Update 21st December 2006 - The idea was to get a new demo out around this time, but unfortunately other commitments slowed things down more than expected. Having said that there is definitely something to demo and with a bit more time over the new year it should be possible to get a solid demo out early in January. New additions include the addition of yet more content in the world (with minor enhancements to the world editor as I go) and strong development of interior objects (I never imagined it would take three or four days to get a spiral stair looking right!). The big change recently has been the improvements to the NPC AI. Previously everything was handled at one level which was a bit of a mess, but having cut out the old code I now have a system where one process works on the high level AI (checking schedules, making choices and deciding what to do next) while a lower level AI handles carrying out the action selected (such as working out the pathfinding to get to a desination location). The real test for this was setting up guard duty rosters - now the guards change and head off home when not on duty, even adjusting their dialogues depending on what they are doing at the time. Only down side - this isn't in the world editor yet and still needs to be 'coded' directly in text data files - and to be honest this will be tricky to get into the world editor for the moment at least. Otherwise 2007 is looking good for Legends

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Update 11th December 2006: Have had a busy few days bug hunting and finally found the source of a nasty bug that popped up when switching from editor to game play. Improved the handling of interior locations and the transitions to these locaitons. Also spent some time polishing up the scripting a bit (which means improved NPC reactions, dialogues, object actions, books, etc).

On a more game orientated side have really started adding plenty of NPCs to the game world. Still need to tidy up their movement and animations, but now possible to talk to them and walked through quests they offer to the player.

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Update 27th November 2006: The world editor, apart from a few minor bugs, is complete and all game content so far created is now available for use (with just over 50+ different buildings, plants, props and other game objects available). Efforts have now switched to getting the NPC AI a bit more realistic ... first step creating schedules for the NPCs and improved path following AI.

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Update November 2006: After a longish pause due to work commitments I'm back developing Legends. In the past month I've been busy polishing up the world editor which is now fully integrated with the rest of the game engine and a bit more user friendly. Still a few more bits and pieces to polish up and then I plan to release a new demo that would let people see Lengends in action and use the editor. At the same time I've been very busy creating or updating game content with for example the number of buildings available in the editor having easily doubled. Next step - back to the NPC code to tidy this up and get NPC behaviour a bit more realistic.

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Update 28th April 2006: Still working on the character models, now sorting out the animation which is time consuming, but not particularly difficult. At the same time I've been working on getting the NPCs interacting amongst themselves - when they met they see if they have any common conversation topics and if one is found then they start talking to each other. Most of the time this is just chatter, but I'm trying to ensure that there is plenty of background info (history of the world, current world events, etc) and the odd bit of useful info for one or more of the quests the player is currently completing. For the moment at least all conversations are presented via subtitles only (recording speech not really realistic for the moment at least) and it took a long time to work out how to handle the subtitles and link them at least to a limited degree with the NPCs. After a lot of trial and error I've opted for a 'info and chatter' window with each line of text preceded by the NPC's name. This approach seems to fit into the general 'feel' of the game better than subtitles floating above the NPCs' heads or other similar systems.

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Update 29th March: To better show off the new character models I've added a few close ups of the character's head. For the moment he's bald, but still not too bad.

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Recently I've been busy working on the character models mainly to get them up to at least the standard of the buildings. In additional I also wanted to make them more flexible in terms of adding variety to the models in terms of the texturing and the ability to mix different items of clothing for example. This has taken an incredible amount of time and effort, but after three months of trial and error the first model is complete with by far the hardest bit being to get a head model looking like a head.

Next steps are to finish off creating the first part of the game world, get the NPCs behaving in a more interesting way and get a playable demo out that includes a couple of small, if hopefully interesting quests.