| In Xenobium298 you will play the part of an intrepid explorer, boldly going where no man has gone before! You will face many dangers, meet new foes and make new friends. With a rich mixture of gameplay ranging from interstellar trading, arcade warfare and real-time strategy you will be immersed in a full 3D world of infinite size and complexity. |
|
| The game will feature: | |
|
|
To follow the progress of Xenobium298 check back to this page often where status updates will be posted when possible. If you are a Games Publisher and are interested in finding out more about Xenobium298 please email me at the address below. |
 
|
 |
A squadron of 4 Viper assault vessels orbiting a planet. |
| A squadron of Viper assault vessels attacking a Carrier class mothership. |  |
 |
Main menu. |
| Progress | |
| 12/07/1999 | Ouch! No update for 4 months. I bet you all thought I was dead! Seriously though, it's not that nothing's been happening - believe me! I've been knocked off course slightly as I've got involved with another project called Mayhem!. Getting together with a few other people, especially with a design goal, has caused quite a few changes in my thinking. The big change was how the Xenobium engine would handle animation. Let's face it, in a Space Sim, there's not really going to be that much sophisticated animation going on. Vessels don't really 'bend' that much unless they've been taken out by a proton torpedo that is Here's a synopsis of the latest developments: Revision of model hierarchies, attachments and bounding boxes for rudimentary collision detection. Animation playback is controllable using schemes like Nearest Keyframe, Linear Interpolation and 3DS MAX's B-Splined Interpolation. Collision boxes are interpolated from pre-calculated keyframes for optimum efficiency and speed. Attachments are now represented as true frames within the hierarchy. |
| 25/03/1999 | Wow! Seriously long time since the last update! Anyway, the following is now in and working well: Ported to VisualC++ v6 (Grrrrr...) Separate Physics thread Basic demo Complete entity support with object persistence Hierarchical model structure Frustum clipping plus loads of minor bits... |
| 15/01/1999 | What can I say. It's been too long since the last update but there you go. Done loads and loads. Got the basic engine going and have created classes for the Camera, Light and Input. The camera class allows the view to be changed from first to third person and has various modes of operation. The light class essentially caters for the generic D3D light interfaces but of course hides all of the manky structure settings. The input class has support for keyboard, mouse and joystick. I'll need to extend this interface once I've got a Force Feedback device to trial some of the effects. XenEd now has some validity checking which circumvents alot of error checks required within the running of the engine. I've established DLL support for entity 'plugins' so most of the core functionality of the entities, their characteristics, etc, is outside of the main engine. Configured the engine to currently run a separate thread for collecting mouse input, another thread for keyboard and joystick and the main thread doing the rendering. I'll add at least another thread for the physics once that gets online and maybe one for the network. |
| 26/11/1998 | Woahhh! Long time no update! Been very busy though. Started to use FrntScrn to build the dialogs and stuff. Got some feedback from lead artist and essentially added AVI playback support as an option to animated bitmap buttons. The AVIs will be much smaller in size which is good... Have fully implemented relative paths so game will run from any base directory as long as the directory tree structure is maintained. Enhanced the level editor XenEd a little and set up a facility whereby the size of game objects can be changed (i.e. XenEd can change) and any existing data can be loaded and then saved without problems. This should help with the testing!! Created some class wrappers to deal with DirectDraw surfaces, Sprites, etc. These are all self-policing and will restore themselves if they are lost. Now just need to re-visit the texture class... Added a 16-bit screen fade class. This fades really smooth - too smooth infact! ;-) |
| 02/11/1998 | Right. Been quite busy which explains why nothing has been added to the site for a month. Started looking at interface screens i.e. the main menu, etc. I've written a utility called FrntScrn (Front Screen) which allows bitmaps, buttons and animations to be placed interactively on screen. This makes the creation of screens like the one above very easy. I assembled it in about 5 minutes using some pre-supplied artwork. Furthermore, the interaction with the program is easy too - just like Windows messaging... In order to handle the animations and bitmap buttons I've also written another utility called BMPJoin. This allows several bitmaps to be 'joined' into a single file. It even works with Paste too so you can create those jazzy graphics in Paint Shop Pro or something and then paste 'em straight in there. Way cool! Been revising a few things within the engine too. I realized I was on to a bit of a bum steer with absolute (full) path names being used for the game files. I've started changing things to use relative paths now. Formalizing the interfaces for the abstract machine which handles the level scripting. Should have this finished soon... |
| 08/10/1998 | Woahhh! Finished the port to DirectX6. Those MS guys have changed a few interfaces alright! Got into a bit of a pickle with textures but things are okay now. The good news is that I can now use those wonderful managed textures and other cool stuff. Back to work on the engine I suppose... I've uploaded the DX6 version of the viewer too. You can find it on the Download page. |
| 17/09/1998 | Added scripting to XenEd for level designers to define and control mission scenarios. This will need to be extended as time goes on but the flexibility is now there. Just about ready to bite the bullet on DirectX6... |
| 03/09/1998 | Added XenEd to my download page. All constructive criticism gratefully received... |
| 30/08/1998 | Wow! Big break through! Have finished XenEd the level (well, at least for now!). I'm putting together some docs and will probably put it onto my site soon. Got the DirectX6 SDK. It looks pretty good but can't read any of the HTML help only the MSWord DOC stuff. I'll need to install IE 4.x (Bugger!). Ah what the heck, I'll keep Netscape anyway Will start to port to DX6 within the next week or so. |
| 17/08/1998 | Still busy in level editor. Ordered DirectX 6 SDK. From what's been said it's going to make a big difference! |
| 01/08/1998 | Created quaternion class to enable a smooth camera system to be written. Quaternion rotation for objects added to level editor. |
| 16/07/1998 | Fixed minor bug in 3DS model importer that inverted vertex normals on some faces. |
| 11/07/1998 | Enhanced 3DS model importer to smooth out 'crease' in texture mapping on models. Level editor now has 'automatic' dialog construction from a C header file for specifying and validating entity creation parameters. |
 |
Last Modified: 12/07/1999 02:21pm Author: CyberFrog |
|
Always under construction!