Category Archives: Games

Gamepads, Joysticks! How do you play with those?

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I integrated Joystick support into the game engine a long time ago but I never actually played the Doofus game using a Joystick or a gamepad up until now. One of the testers logged an issue last week saying that the game’s camera movement was a bit slow for game controllers in general. So I decided to play the game out myself with a joystick. For the record I never play any game with any accessory other than the keyboard and mouse and after my recent experience with the gamepad, I must say I missed the mouse quite a bit. Maybe it’s just me or I have taken a strong disdain towards any kind of game controllers ever since my days with God Of War, and though I am a total fan of the GOW series, the experience with game controllers while playing that game has been more than a little unpleasant. I think I have been playing games with the mouse for too long. Maybe so much so that I have grown too accustomed to the Keyboard and Mouse. I truly don’t know. However, and this could very well just be me, I find controlling the camera using the mouse far simpler and more intuitive than a Gamepad or a Joystick axis.

I tried a lot of different games this week with a gamepad, which  for the better part of this year, has sat inside the cupboard. I told myself, “It’s just a matter of time before I get the hang of this thing.” No chance! With every game I try it’s the same story. I just give up after struggling with the controller for about 10 mins. It’s been like 3 days and I still can’t control the Doofus game’s third person camera, which by the way is not at fault 🙂 . For me, controlling Doofus’ third person camera just seems a lot more natural with the mouse than with the Keyboard. Not that I can’t do it, it just feels a lot more comfortable with the mouse. Fortunately for people that dislike the mouse, Doofus does run perfectly well on any game controller.

Some people say game controllers are great for flight simulators and maneuvering vehicles. Sorry, I haven’t had time to play those. I can tell you, FPS games are almost impossible to play. You can’t aim with these things and get fragged pretty easily. Maybe combat games fare better, but again I haven’t had time to play those either. I ran Tomb Raider demo I have on my system and even there I found my gamepad to be more than a challenge.

So, after this bout of testing, the gamepad goes right back in the desk from where it came. Ok maybe I have ranted enough for one post!

In-game advertising.

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I was recently asked as to what I thought about in-game advertisements. Given the fact that I am a game developer, the whole concept of in-game advertisements does seem like an intriguing subject. There are two ways to really look at the whole idea of in-game advertisements.The first and the most obvious one is of course as a potential money spinning tool for developers/publishers and is quite an interesting idea to explore. But there is a also a view that such ads inside games will end up polluting and degrading the overall game experience and could attract an ire from the players or the community as a whole, and in the worst case have an adverse effect on games sales. The last thing you want is a commercial break or a cutscene marketing something inside a fast paced game. Such a thing will be a disaster and I am sure players will frown on games that take this road.

My feeling is, game designs don’t need to this drastic to have the whole in-game advertising thing working for them. It would be a horrendous mistake to have advertisements inside the game that degrade gameplay. However having interactive ads that are properly integrated into the game may not necessarily be a bad prospect. That is exactly why ads in games need to be more than just inert props and simple banners. To a player such things make little impact and might or might not get noticed. The impact from any 2D inert items will be limited, especially if the game features a 3D world (2D games could still make use of banners more effectively than 3D ones, but even they could do better if the ads were interactive). Games typically differ from other traditional forms of digital entertainment in the fact that they are an interactive medium and therefore like every other gameplay element, ads within games will also be most effective when the player interacts with them.

Gamers (, especially hard-core gamers) might frown on the idea of having in-game ads but it may not be all bad. Not all games are ideal for in-game ads, I will touch on that point a little later. I personally haven’t seen any ads in most of the games that I have played. But I have seen it in some games, the example I can sight is Second Life. Second Life is a great example of how ads can make into games without being immediately frowned upon. The player is given a choice of whether he/she wants to interact and view the content (of the ad) instead of something being forced on him/her. A player will appreciate this, and the ad campaign will thus be successful. In the brief time I played Second Life (here), I visited a couple of interesting places where the in-game advertisements looked really great. Music seems to be the best appreciated followed by fashion when it came to ads there, but I am sure people must be advertising all sorts of stuff over there. As I said, my stint with Second Life was pretty brief.

As a game developer I look at the whole scenario of in-game advertisements positively. I am sure using proper game design advertisements can be made sufficiently interactive so that they could “fit into” a game without actually nagging the player. I would even go further and say that if used effectively a game could actually be enhanced (case in point Second Life) so that marketing inside games could be something that player can look forward to and actually find an interest in the whole idea of having an online try-before-you-buy opportunity. Can all games be effective as in-game advertising mediums? No, some might do a better job at it while others might not be as effective. MMOGs like Second Life will probably be far better at it than say a FPS with it’s setting on an alien planet. Some games like shoot-them-up tournaments might not be effective at all. Having said that, we can never be too sure about marketing ideas and how “genius minds” work. So, someone might just find some way to insert a “Matrimony Online” banner inside the Strogg Nexus on Stroggos, you never can tell.

OpenGL 3.0 is finally released, and it disappoints.

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ARB has released the much anticipated OpenGL 3.0 spec and if you were the one following developments of OpenGL for sometime, you would know that hopes were riding high on the fact that OpenGL 3.0 would be a revolutionary redesign of an ailing and a rather old API. Apparently it’s none of that and even worse it’s actually nothing at all. OpenGL was drugging along for the past 15 years, adding on layer upon layer of muckish extensions to the point that many had expected ARB to really go ahead and make radical changes in the 3.0 specification. None of that has happened. Most of the radical changes promised have not been delivered. All that seems to have happened is the standardization of already existing extensions by making them a part of the the standard. Sad, really sad.

As a game developer and more as someone who has been using OpenGL for the past 8 years I am pretty disappointed. I was hoping to see a refreshing change to OpenGL. I am at a loss of words here; no really I am. There is really nothing more to say. The changes have been so shallow, that I wonder why it called for a major version number change in the first place. 2.1 to 3.0, phooey, it should have been 2.1.1 instead. Let me put it in another way; my current OpenGL renderer which is based on OpenGL 2.x could be promoted to 3.0 probably with 4 or 5 minuscule changes or maybe none at all! Where is the Direct3D 10+ level functionality what was hyped about? Where is the “radically forward looking” API?

What does this say for the future of OpenGL? Sadly not very much at least in the gaming arena. It was already loosing ground and there was a lot of anticipation that ARB would deliver a newer OpenGL to “take on” Direct3D. I must say that a powerful Direct3D (thanks to DirectX 11) looks all set to become the unequivocal champion when it comes to gaming graphics. OpenGL will clearly take a back seat to DirectX here. While some may argue that OpenGL will continue to flourish in the CAD arena, I am not so sure that Direct3D wont find favor over there as well. OpenGL drivers from most vendors already fall short of their Direct3D counterparts. That’s to be expected. It’s not their fault either. What else can they do when you have a 15 year old API to support whose legacy functionality is out of touch with modern day reality.

EDIT: The major thing missing as far as OpenGL 3.0 was a clean API rewrite. When you compare OpenGL 3.0 with Direct3D 11 it’s how things look from here on forward is what bothers me. Direct3D is more streamlined to address developments in hardware and while vendors could also expose similar functionality via OpenGL using vendor specific extensions, the whole situation doesn’t look too good. Making a driver that is fully OpenGL compatible will cost more in terms of manpower. That is because the specification is so large. Yes there is opportunity to deprecate things but I am not too sure how things will pan out there as well. Supporting older features on newer hardware means compromises and sacrifices in quality and performance. Driver writers cannot optimize for everything and that is why in the end performance suffers; or in worst case, ships out broken.

DirectX 9 to DirectX 11, where did 10 go?

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This week there was a lot of buzz about DirectX 11. Yes, the newest version of the graphics API was unveiled by Microsoft at the XNA game fest and it has an interesting feature set that, I think, were long overdue. Most of DirectX 11 doesn’t diverge from version 10 (and the almost not eventful, version 10.1), but I think DirectX 11 should see a renewed interest from game developers since it provides features that were desperately needed in light of recent hardware developments. 11 (of course with the features of 10 and 10.1) now seems to be a more complete API to addresses issues related to game and graphics development and seems to be a more complete solution for the future.

What is really interesting to see is the emergence of what Microsoft terms as the “Compute Shader”, no doubt a marketing speak for GPGPU which they claim will allow the GPU, with it’s awesome power to be used for “more than just graphics”; which smells like CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) to me. I wouldn’t be surprised if both turned out to be very similar (remember Cg/HLSL). In any case, what is important is the fact that such technology will be available to game developers under version 11. Technologies like CUDA (GPGPU) are the requirement of the hour and this could be the fact that 11 might see a lot more interest than the earlier (10.x) versions.

There is a lot of talk about hardware based tessellation, but frankly I haven’t seen too many details on that. At least not enough to make a detailed comment on it. From what little is being said, DirectX 11 hardware based tessellation could be used to make models appear “more smooth”. How this ultimately translates to actual implementation will be clear when more details come out. I am hazarding a guess here, but there should be something along the lines of some technology that allows sub-surf LODs to be calculated in real-time and/or displacement/bump/normal mapping to be done on the fly. I am not too sure as yet, but could be something along those lines, or maybe something in-between, or a combination of those techniques. Whatever it is, this would mean really good looking games in the future.

Issues like multi-threaded rendering/resource handling are things that were long time coming and yes, it’s a good thing we will finally see them in the newer version. It just makes my job as a game developer a whole lot easier. Most details on Shader Model 5.0 are pretty sketchy, so I won’t go into things like shader length and function recursion. However, I hope such issues are addressed satisfactorily in the newer shader model.

So will DirectX 11 succeeded where DirectX 10 failed? Will it get mass adoption like DirectX 9? Difficult to say. While most cutting edge games have adopted DirectX 10, it’s usage remains low because of several factors. For one many people still use XP which doesn’t support version 10 (or greater) of the API (for whatever reason) which means most developers have to adopt the lowest common denominator of the alternatives available, and that generally is DirectX 9.0. Also many people still don’t have DirectX 10 class hardware and that is also another reason not to go for 10.x. The issue with DirectX 10.1 is a total mess. It’s interesting, but there is even talk that NVIDIA might skip over 10.1, giving the version a total miss and aim directly for version 11 class hardware. There is logic to that decision; given that most games (except of the really high end ones) don’t even bother to use DirectX 10 let alone 10.1. All this makes adoption of 10.x a non lucrative issue for game developers.

Version 11 does bring in some really good features to gaming in general but that is not necessarily the reason the API will succeed. As a game developer, 11 holds some serious promise and could be a success if Microsoft plays it’s cards right. However there are some issues (mentioned above) that still bother me. Microsoft is still fixated on releasing version 11 only for Vista, so don’t expect your XP machines to ever run DirectX 11 even if you buy brand new hardware. That said, like most previous versions, DirectX 11 is backward compatible with version 10 and 10.1 and even 9.0. It would be impossible for Microsoft to ignore 1000s of games that already use DirectX 9 so it’s almost a written fact that newer versions of the API will continue to be backward compatible until and unless we see a complete divergence of a sizable amount of games to newer versions, and that could be a long way away since many games even today are still being produced on the 9.0 version.

New screens of the Doofus 3D Game.

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Update: Doofus Longears – Get ’em Gems has been released and can be found on www.doofuslongears.com

Whew, finally found some time to update the blog. I have been frantically working on putting final polish to the game, business related activities, tweaking graphics, ironing out small glitches in gameplay, play-testing levels, and the list goes on!

My major headache was the background. There were a lot of people who had complained about the background not being up to the mark. So I decided to paint a brand new background from scratch. It was a hell of a lot difficult though. Doofus 3D being a cartoon game, I wanted to have a flamboyant background (, rich and colorful with a distinct cartoon touch). However it’s not quite that simple, it’s not as easy as firing up good ol’ GIMP and just having a go at painting any ordinary scene. Since you are painting for a sky-box you really have to be a lot more careful and lot more sensitive about how to handle depth in your scene, plus you have to paint for a full panoramic view. A lot of experimentation went into this one, believe me! Lot’s of hits and misses later, and after studing some other skyboxes this is what I ended up with.

As you can see the background is a whole lot better than the muddy dingy background from the screenshots of the previous beta. Plus there is something more. Yes, the first pictures of new characters. More later 😉 .

Fable, Oblivion and the sandbox gameplay.

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Fable is a game developed by Lion head studios and to be honest I missed out on it a couple of years back when it first came out. Interestingly it was my bout with Oblivion that actually first piqued my interest in this game; since the game seems very similar to Oblivion, and yes Oblivion is pretty high on my list of all time favorite games. Fable is interesting because it just seems so much like what I have in my head as to something I might be working on. A very cartoonish backdrop, a very serious and in-depth gameplay with, what can be called as, dark humor. I have only very briefly played the game and it seems like a well designed game overall. I like it, and like it a lot. While not exactly same as Oblivion, some similarities do exist between the two and, well, it’s hard not to compared the two.

For one, although Fable is open-ended, Oblivion allows you more freedom, definitely more than Fable does. (Those of you who don’t know what an open-ended or sandbox style game is read this.) You can play Oblivion at your own pace and the game can play differently depending on the choices you make quests you complete and how you interact with world (and NPCs). Fable does allow you something similar and does have a sandbox style play, but unlike Oblivion it has a more linear gameplay, or should I say, more linear than Oblivion. Fable is actually an older game as compared to Oblivion, so it wouldn’t be fair to compare them outright, since of course the game predates Oblivion by almost 2 years. Then again 2 years isn’t such a long time after all.

The one thing I didn’t like about Fable, or should I say, didn’t appreciate too much, is that fact that you can’t deviate from your play area, meaning you can’t go anywhere and everywhere in the game world. Exploration is kept to a confined area and the player is not allowed to go beyond that. In Oblivion you are free to explore every corner of Cyrodiil which, I must say, can take quite a while. I played the game for 8 months now and I still haven’t had time to go to every place on the map. The world along with every cave and dungeon is just simply huge. I can understand the technical limitations for such an approach, but Oblivion addresses this very subtly and elegantly. Coming back to my point about exploration; I think exploration is a critical component of any sandbox style game. It gives you so much freedom or should I say gives you an illusion of total freedom and that is something I have come to appreciate a lot after playing the Elder Scrolls series (Morrowind and Oblivion).

In support of Fable, it has a fantastic combat system. I would place it better than Oblivion and I can safely say Fable allows you to have a more balanced combat game. I can give you an example; both Oblivion and Fable allow the use of Mêlée and Ranged weapons, but for some reason I didn’t find the use of ranged weapons in Oblivion all that intuitive. I can’t really explain why, can’t really put a finger on one particular reason, but while playing the game I used to get clobbered if I used a bow & arrow. In Fable I use both to an equal degree. Both games are sandbox games and both games build the player character by the choices the player makes. In Oblivion I ended up being a beefy guy with little resistance to ranged attacks from other NPCs. In Fable my character seems to be a great balance of both. Now I can take down NPCs with proper planning and lure them into traps by using a combination of mêlée, ranged and magic. On the whole Fable does allow you to build a more all-round character.

Fable’s graphics are top notch. Spells and magic, combat system, weapon augmentations and teleportations are all done wonderfully. Even the cartoonish world is built beautifully and so are all the NPCs, of course considering the triangle budget and the fact that the game runs flawlessly on a Geforce 6200 with an impressive frame-rate I must add. The camera navigation and the cut-scenes are also pretty good. Graphics complement the gameplay very nicely and that’s what is important. Graphics are not over done and that’s good. You will find games that are galore with graphics that do nothing more than slowdown the game for no apparent reason and have no particular function other than to please graphics “fanbois”. Fable does none of that. The only thing I really hate about Fable is it’s game-save system. You can’t save your game in the middle of a quest. All you can do is save the skills you have learned. I can’t understand the reason for this, just defies logic. I generally play games only for 20 to 30 mins and quests take significantly longer to complete. So this “feature” is a real PITA. This is probably the only real complaint I have with the game.

I am a fan of sandbox style gameplay but my interest in Fable was 2 fold; it’s true I like playing games, however this time around my interest in the game was more of an academic nature; as a student of game design. I wanted to see how the game was designed overall. Yeah! I have this crazy idea of actually making a sandbox style game some day (long time in the future… or maybe not so long) and Fable seemed too hard to resist. Mind you I haven’t fully played the game yet but I am already pretty impressed; and the same goes of Oblivion too. Baring little quirks, I think both games are equally good in presenting the player with a out-of-the-box experience. Both games allow you to build the player character in unique ways (, sometimes not so unique) but non-monotonous none the less. Both game are “different” and it would be unfair to say that one is better than the other. True they each have their good and bad points, but both games are equally enjoyable.

Are integrated graphics chips the new battlezone?

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In what could be an “one up” and almost a sucker punch to Intel, AMD announced an amazing new chipset, the 780G which is sure to create some flutter in the industry. The 780G puts a full fledged GPU on to the main-board and while I was reading the specs, it does seem to be substantially better than any of the other on-board or, ( in correct terminology,) integrated graphics chips out there. While Intel claims to have “more half of the graphics” market, the graphics or should I say “craphics” cards supported by Intel (, and to some extent AMD earlier) are nothing more than a big joke. The only reason they have such a huge portion of the market is because the average joe/jane is stuck with it and because it came pre-installed. I was recently quizzed by an acquaintance as to why his system could not run Bioshock and the only answer I could give him really was, “Well your system isn’t designed for that sort of gaming”. To that his reply was “Oh I just got a brand new system. How is it that it can’t run a latest game?”

It’s really disturbing for people who buy a brand new PC only to see it fail, utterly miserably I might add, to even push a last generation game at a shallow 24 FPS. Most are clueless, and while their PCs may be brand new with a “fast” multi-core processor with gazillions of RAM at it’s disposal, it can only but run their Office applications. Yes they run faster and better! No such luck with games though. People have to realized, having a faster CPU or for that matter having more cores doesn’t really help too much with games. It does to some extent, but as it stands right now, I would rather have a top-line graphics card like the 8800 GTX than a quad core CPU. It’s a very deceptive concept, I know, but thats how it is.

Anyone who has worked on graphics knows how utterly lousy and how much of a pathetic abomination integrated graphics chips can be. I have battled with all sorts of problems, everything from broken drivers to faulty implementations to near absent feature support. I hope things are finally changing for the better. The question is where does that leave Intel? Intel has been desperately trying to get a better graphics solution on to it’s boards without too much luck. The chipset that AMD has thrown up beats anything that Intel can conjure up hands down! At least in the near future that is. While Intel may add on more cores, they aren’t going to be too useful for people who want to run the latest games. With quality of integrated graphics on offer by Intel, users will have to install, at the very least, a low end graphics card. Sorry Intel, that’s how bad things are!

Then what has the Green Brigade (NVIDIA) have to say to all this? AMD’s acquisition of ATI is finally showing it’s advantages. While the graphics chips may not be the fastest out there, they are indeed very attractive considering the price point. Chipzilla and Graphzilla better get their acts together because if 2007 was the year both ruled in their respective departments, there is a new kid in town. He’s got better and faster guns, and looking more attractive than any of the old boyz!

An Unreal Crysis.

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If you are graphics geek and love to see those so called next-gen effects, then recently released games like Crysis, UT3 and to some extent Bioshock will give you lot to cheer about. Crysis for one has shown that modern top line cards can push extraordinary amounts of detail. However, raw figures show that Crysis and UT3 sales have been anything but extraordinary. They have in fact fallen flat! Interesting figures there, and to some extent I am a bit surprised by what the figures show. As the articles point out both games were pretty hyped out before the release and they should have made flat out more sales than what the did. True Crysis has some crazy hardware requirements, but still the game can be played with older and less powerful graphics cards, so can UT3. Maybe not with all the graphics effects and resolution maxed out, but they can be played nevertheless. Besides both games have *huge* fan bases so the figures are very surprising indeed.

Well I can’t speak for everyone but, my personal take on the whole thing is the fact that vanilla FPS genre is kinda getting old. After so many games that churn out the same mundane gameplay, it has pretty much lost it’s charm. True the graphics have improved but not the gameplay in general. Games like Bioshock stand apart from the crowd because they give that little bit more to the overall game and it is exactly why they sell more. I can tell you from my experience over that years of playing games is the fact that (, and I have pretty much repeated this a lot of times on this blog,) FPS games are getting kinda boring. As a gamer I want more interesting stuff in there. That is exactly the reason I spent nearly 6 months playing Oblivion. The game gave me so much more to do than just run kill, run kill, collect ammo, run kill, collect health, run kill …..

I myself haven’t played UT3 and for that matter only watch someone else play Crysis, but from what I have heard people say about the games makes me wonder if they are nothing more than tech demos. Maybe we should look at it from a different perspective; it’s a fact Epic markets it’s engines via the UTx games, and I think to some extent Crytek does that too. So maybe that is exactly why those game are here for, to show off what their respective engines can achieve. The graphic brilliance achieved by both games/engines is amazing, there is little doubt to that, and the hardware requirements for the games is equally demanding. But that is for now. The same hardware will become mainstream in another 6 to 8 months and the same engines can be used/licensed to make other games. I therefore wouldn’t count them as outright failures.

Different people have different tastes and different points of view, so naturally have different tastes for game genres. However the feeling I get is, in general, game genres are beginning to overlap. This I think that is because of necessity. Game designers that strive to make their games “immersive” have started incorporating ideas and methods from other game genres to make gameplay more interesting and challenging. However having an equally good engine is a must. Case and point to Oblivion. The game looks great because it uses Gamebryo, which is another good engine. I am pretty sure we will see more and better games using both the engines in the future.

New year wishes and a look at the year gone by.

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First of all, a “Very Happy New Year” to all.

Just to highlight some interesting news and events that happened the year gone by, plus my own experiences.

  • Games:
    1. It was probably the game of the year (, at least as far as I am concerned), I am talking about Bioshock. Enjoyed playing it even though not on my PC and I still haven’t completed it. Truly amazing graphics and a new twist to FPS style of play.
    2. The Elder Scrolls VI: Oblivion, this game didn’t come in first place because it was not launched this year, but the last. It is here since I could only manage to play and complete the game this year. Played this game along with the Shivering Isles and Knights of the nine expansions for like more than 5 months 😛 starting July, and I must say I have come to thoroughly enjoy the sandbox style gameplay the game offers. Don’t be surprised if I start getting crazy ideas of creating games like this in 2008 😉 .
    3. Just when we thought nothing could tax the 8800, Crysis hit! The game takes away the best visual graphics award of 2007. Amazing eye candy and surely the sign of things to come, though I am not sure about the overall gameplay.
    4. A couple of other interesting games as well like GOW 2 and Gears of War, but didn’t get my hands on them as yet.
  • Programming and Development:
    1. Biggest disappointment was the postponement of OpenGL 3.0 specs. I was hoping to see at least something concrete on this, but to no avail. I hope 2008 will give us more to look forward to.
    2. 2007 saw the release of Visual Studio 2008 and it’s Express editions. Not too much to complain or praise there. .NET 3.5 was released along with the studio versions.
    3. While major releases were few and far between, minor releases like Cg 2.0 and Silverlight dominated most of the programming and development news.
  • Personal projects:
    1. Biggest miss was not being able to launch Doofus 3D. Period! The game was stated to release October/November but inevitable delays and project pressures resulted in the game not being shipped. This has been the biggest disappointment from my side.
    2. The project is however still on track and baring time delays the product and the engine has become stable and looks more and more like a very solid platform for future projects. Most (almost all) of my ideas (some reallly crazy ones too) have thankfully worked!
    3. My RnD on scripting engine integrations has yielded good results. I remember my promise, will update the blog with some statistical data on this, just tied up with project pressures for now. On the whole RnD this year from my side was lower then what it was last year.
    4. Got a new website this year, migrated the blog and also have one lined up for the game release.
  • Hardware:
    1. The year belonged to NVIDIA and the 8800 has pretty much dominated the graphics scene unchallenged for most of 2007. There was a feeble attempt by AMD(/ATI) at the end of the year but the HD 3870 and 3850 have been plagued with shipping problems, though they have shown impressive figure and amazing value for money considering the price point. However, I expect the green brigade to counter that since they are already well ahead in the race to do so.
    2. The next was Intel which has successfully managed to run the competition (AMD) to the ground with it’s chips, the Core 2s, pretty much dominating the market. The Phenoms are here but still have to prove themselves. It’s safe to say Intel ruled 2007.
  • Operating Systems:
    1. I have done enough Vista bashing on this blog already, so no more! My sentiments however remain unchanged regarding the OS. 2007 has been particularly bad for Vista, the OS was given flak on a lot of articles on the web. My recommendation; give the OS a skip for the time and use XP and/or…
    2. Ubuntu 7.10 code named Gutsy Gibbon (released 2007) has been a revelation for me. I have been using this OS for a month now on my internet PC and I am more than happy with it. True there are some quirks that remain but Ubuntu is great OS for, well, everyone and anyone. I recommend this OS hands down!
  • Misc News:
    1. India wins the 20-20 world cup 2007.

New year resolution:

Release Doofus 3D.

A lot of plans in mind, but more on that later.

Apricot: The open game.

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The Apricot game was officially announced, though the talk about the game has been going on for a long time now. I had almost forgotten about it entirely till I read the story on Gamedev today. A great initiative by the Open-Source and Blender communities on the whole I must say. I am really curious on how the team integrates CS with Blender and it’s definitely something I will be watching closely, though I don’t understand the rational behind using CS when Ogre was around. I am particularly interested in Blender-CS integration since Blender is also the modeler we are using for assets in the Doofus Game (,more here,) as well. I have particularly grown fond of it especially since the new compositing and multiple UV mapping tools were introduced. Just make it look pretty nifty, something like UnrealEd 😉 .

Blender is no doubt a good 3D modeler. Baring its unconventional interface, it has all the necessary bells and whistles needed for full-fledged game development. What the Apricot team is trying to achieve is commendable and I sincerely wish the Apricot team, “The very best of Luck” and hope we get to see a great game soon. Three cheers for Apricot! Hip hip hooray…!!!