More cleaning and tidying - I’ve been making sure that I always declare width, then margins, borders and padding in that order. This will make the IE6 stylesheet easier to write.

I looked at my source from the webbrowser, rather than in the wordpress editor, just to check my HTML tags and DIVS. I wanted to make sure I had stripped out almost all the old formatting, and that markup makes sense by using only tags such as H1, UL, LI etc.

The huge text was offputting so I changed the font-size in the body tag to 80% - the default is too large for most people. I never specify sizes in pixels or points anymore, everything is relative thus allowing people to resize all the text on the site via their browser preferences.

The next stage is photoshop - screengrabbing my site and using paintovers to get an updated site design that I am happy with. Again, nothing too radical is planned at this stage, I just want it to me slightly more elegant than before - like when Apple when from brushed metal to that soft satin finish design in iTunes versions 4 to 5.

I mentioned I was tweaking the site design, mainly to clean up my stylesheet.

The first thing I did was to sketch my site on paper, and (re)name all the elements of it - page became sitebox, widecolumn became copyblock etc. By stripping it back so far, I was able to pare down the styling.

I immediately discarded Internet Explorer 6 - it has too many CSS flaws. The older version loaded in a few IE6 rules, the new one will use a lighter stylesheet overall, and make IE6 pull in a heavier sheet - why penalise users with good browsers? So it’s Firefox and Safari all the way for testing.

Previously to satisfy IE6 I had lots of nested divs - right from the start I had already slimmed the site down. I quickly blasted through, ditching the old nested divs and adding some comments to the code - this makes it easier to debug (although the hardest thing about debugging is nested divs anyway….). The divs I kept got condensed - rather a separate entry for each margi as before, I used the formatting “margin: top right bottom left;”.

Next I removed a bunch of my microformatting - font sizes and link colours and container divs, just to make it easier to add them back in again later.

At this stage, the site is fully functional, but ugly. Really ugly, but it’s a good foundation to continue from tomorrow.

There was a mail in my inbox today from CG Society, linking me to their new Wiki.

“Bringing all the facts from the CG world to you, the CGWiki is another resource available to you, covering movies, software, hardware, and more”

Technorati Tags: 3d modelling, Art, cg, cg society

• Amit’s Game Programming Information
  (tags: Amit’s Game Programming Information)
• DevMaster.net - Your source for game development
  (tags: Game developers)

Recently I was approached by a group of hobby gamers who wanted me to make some art for a game they were working on (for the record, I have no interest). They tried to persuade me that they were worth working with with the line “…and we’ve built our own engine.”

A few days later I heard the same on MSN, about a small hobby project - “We’ve built our own engine”.

Which made me ask - “WHY?”

If you are a programmer wanting to learn about engines, then by all means, go ahead (although you’ll learn quite a lot just tinkering with existing engines). But if you are a small group of hobbiests wanting to make a game, you really shouldn’t.

Writing engines is hard. Really hard. And there are already so many out there that there is bound to be one that suits your needs, or almost suits your needs without you having to write it all. Some do costs hundreds of thousands of pounds, but Torque costs $100 for a single license.

You’ll need to write your own tools, and probably exporters. You’ll need to figure out lighting, and memory access, and probably streaming. Oh, and animation systems and directional sound. Input and output routines. I almost forgot about particle systems, and the scripting language to write the actual gameplay with. Oh, did you want network code with that?

You are going to end up writing more engine code than game code.

“But it’s a great way to learn!”

Yes, for one or two people - but what are rest of your team going to do while you hack away for months? Yes, they can make assets, assets that they will not be able to see in game because there is no game yet, because there is no engine to build a game with.

In the end, an engine is a program that maintains the game world, and if you want to make a game, why not concentrate your efforts on making a game? An off the shelf engine will probably suit most of your needs, allowing you to spend more time on the fun stuff.

Thank you to Dino for the phrase I used for the title.

Technorati Tags: Games, programming, engine

Gordons series on building a 3d character is cracking along. Go check out his second part on laying out UV maps.

Oh, Adam Bromell has joined the blogging games artist group - so check out his site.

Technorati Tags: 3d modelling, uv maps

Previously I mentioned how much I loved Xbox Live Arcade - it’s great for gamers. But XBLA is also great for developers.

Games can cost millions of pounds to make, with teams of 100 people taking 2 to 3 years. These games sell for £40-50 a shot. If you screw up, that’s a load of cash you’ve just wasted. Developing a game for Xbox Live Arcade can take under 6 months, and cost a only few hundred thousand dollars. With less financial risk involved, companies will be prepared to take more risks with games, trying out new IP and ideas.

With these massivley reduced costs, selling at a lower cost is realistic, and you can still make a healthy profit. You also have a delivery system that is pushing your content to the gamers, rather than getting a boxed product into a shop and hoping that someone notices it. I couldn’t find any hard numbers for XBLA sales, but someone has done some good estimating:

From: Randomly Generated

• Frogger ($5 US) - 115,998 users = $580,000 in sales.
• Bejeweled 2 ($10 US) - 115,466 users = $1,150,000 in sales.
• Geometry Wars Evolved ($10 US) - 204,640 users = $2,046,000 in sales.
• Uno ($10 US) - 180,703 users = $1,807,000 in sales.
• Galaga ($5 US) - 43,560 users = $218,000 in sales.
• Street Fighter II ($10 US) - 17,914 users = $180,000 in sales.

Geometry Wars has pulled in over $2 million in under a year. That’s a lot of cash for what is a fairly basic (but very good) game. At the time those stats were generated, I think Frogger had been out for about 3-4 weeks, and Street Fighter II has only been out for a week.

XBLA also pushes the move to digital distribution of games - Steam has already proved that this can work for the distribution of PC games, meaning slightly more profit for the developer and a cheaper end product for the consumer. In spite of all the Blu-Ray hype, Sony have already said they expect this to be last generation physical media based machines, and that the PlayStation 4 will likely be download only.

Technorati Tags:xbox, arcade, developers

Gordon is a superb artist who I work with. He didn’t go camping, but was the provider of a great idea…

Go visit his brand spanking new site, where he is beginning a step by step walkthrough of building and Zbrushing a character.

Oh, and I better add Chris too, or he’ll stop me from voting.

Technorati Tags: 3d modelling