Y I no been posting

Well i'm going to make this short and sweet, I haven't posted for the past week because i've been on holiday.

Ill post some stuff soon

Bye

3D game dev has begun!

Full blown 3D game development has finally begun (it's about time).

For about 2-3 years now I have been working on 2D games. At the start of this year my new year resolution was to plan and start development on my 3D game. There are only a few details which I want to reveal, so here they come:

  - The game is a zombie game
  - It will be Action/RPG style
  - It will take place in a city
  - There is no main character, you are in a crew of about 5/6 people (haven't decided yet).

I have a few (by a few I mean alot) of pages on MSWord containing truckloads of information on my game. But I don't have a name for it yet... The past few months have been more focused on the creative side of the game, Storyline and some very bad concept art. The rest of the year is pretty much focused on the development side of it, and polising the storyline and other things like that. All that said, i'll probably still be working on this game in 2 years time.

Progress on all the game stuff below:

  - Storyline | 80% done
  - Game Engine | 100% done (using Unity so I did not make the engine)
  - Sound | 5% done 
  - Textures | 0% done
  - Game models | 1% done
  - Scripting | 0% done

  - Overall | 31% done

Update videos will be posted on my channel, and updates on the more geeky side of the game will be posted right here, on this blog.

Saving and Loading games

Saving and loading, seems simple, right. Well it's not.

For the past 5 hours or so I have been implementing a saving and (somewhat) loading system into my new game. About 2 hours of that was testing, the other 3 were figuring out how I would go about achieve saving and loading. The system now works fantastically, it saves the map into 100 different chunks, each holding data for approximately 187,500 blocks.

One chunk takes about 0.2 seconds to create and save and only takes up ~0.153MB (153KB). Here's some math on how fast it really does save and how much space a FULL world takes up:

  3000 * 1000 / 16 = 187500 blocks in 1 chunk
  187500 / 2 = 93750 blocks created & saved in 0.1 seconds
  187500 blocks = 0.153MBs of data
  0.153 * 100 (amount of chunks) = 153MB MAX in any given world
  Finally 187500 * 100 = 18,750,000 blocks stored in the save files

That's the math over and done with, basically what I'm trying to say is the method I have created for saving worlds is VERY efficient. (after 5 hours of work that's what you would expect). And this is all done in Game Maker 8.0. :)

Now it's time to move onto random world generation, this should be fun.

P.S: If anyone wants to make me a texture pack for the game feel free, here's the reference one (right click save file to your computer to save it):