Progress Update

Hello Faithful Followers of Dawn

Heres a progress update as to whats been happening in the game.

Procedural Terrain generation has been coming along smoothly, but I'm taking my time to get it all right. All of my old work on the other computer has now been successfully ported into Dawn on the new one, including the Strategy Camera setup I had going. A few problems however have been had with camera rotation where I hold a button down which activates a modified mouselook script and rotates the camera. Results in testing have been coming out a little wierd as it works sometimes but other times it wont start or it wont turn off. Moving around the camera and edge scrolling however are working properly. Camera zooming is also implemented as well for a versatile system of moving a floating camera around a world. The system of clicking on characters and being able to control them is also coming along nicely.

I also know that many people who read this are lacking any visualisations of what the game will most likely look like when its done so here is a visualisation of the kind of human interaction you can have with the people in Dawn

This is Niel, named after Niel Armstrong, playing with a toy rocket in a spaceship carrying him and 29 others to his new home among the stars, strapped in for sleep. An example to the lengths of how human this game will be and how even children will be playable characters  in this game. This visualisation is courtesy of Steve in New Aurora

Hope you enjoy this visualisation and the progress update. If you have any constructive criticism please comment down below. If you have any questions please comment down below.
Thankyou for reading and following the Development of Dawn. Which is now no longer my personal project and is a project of New Aurora Studios.

Returning to Dawn

Hello Everyone, sorry I was away for so long, I've had a few problems with my internet as of late. Anyway, I'm back into making Dawn and my computer is brand new and Beastly. Here is the current state of the game. I'm currently still developing Dawn in Unity purely for convenience sake as Tempus does not yet have a User Interface, however, I have completely ported Dawn and all of the content I have made for it thus far onto my new computer, but because I'm optimising a lot of my code and fixing a lot of long standing bugs not all of the features I had in it before are properly implemented and tested into the game. I just finished working on a piece of code that allows me to switch between two characters, but even this stands to change at some point as this system will eventually become obsolete, however, the mouse look on both characters now disables as well effectively freezing the character to the spot until I switch back. So I don't have to refer to them as avatar one and avatar two I named them Allen and Lucy respectively. It just humanises the whole experience of coding for me which Dawn is all about anyway.

Next on my list is to reimplement the Strategy Camera. But this time I'm fixing a lot of bugs it had in it before such as it only moving in two directions and adding features such as a better method of zooming (moving the camera up and down on the global axis using vector 3) and rotation of the camera (a slower moving mouse look script on the x axis modified so it is only active when a button is held down) Currently I have the camera moving on the W,A,S,D keys properly and the custom mouse look script behaving... mostly. I'm still using the A* algorithm for Path-finding and the like but that has yet to be implemented as well.

Once I have all of this working properly again with improvements I want to move onto a new method of controlling characters in the game using Ray-casts. basically I click on a character, a GUI box appears with a couple buttons, you press one and hey presto your controlling Lucy. I will also use parts of this set-up in a point and click style of movement so that I can also click on a character and order them around in strategy mode. However, since these are early days in Dawns development, I way not end up using this at all.

Anyway that's the status of Dawn right now and I'm looking forward to balancing working on this with playing the occasional game and studying for my final Exams. Wish me luck :D

-Minefriek

A Short Foreseeable Future and Unforeseen Circumstances

I do believe that the foreseeable future might have just been shortened quite a bit. A member of New Aurora Studios known as the Crazy Dutchman, aka Noah, has decided to create a custom engine to suit all of the groups purposes, were calling it the Tempus Engine at this stage with Tempus meaning time in Latin.

When this engine is complete we'll be able to easily port over to Linux due to the use of openGL which is also faster when compared with Direct X. Well also have the ability (hopefully) to add or remove engine parts as we need to due to a modular design. This will allow us to upgrade aspects of the engine without affecting too much of the other parts of the engine.

Currently I plan to port Dawn over to the Tempus Engine as soon as it has enough features to warrant it. This also means I wont be restricted by the Unity License or have to pay a third party money to do what I love.

Currently Dawn is on the verge of AI path-finding. RTS character control is proving somewhat a challenge for me currently. And I'm regretting wanting procedural terrain as we speak in the game, but i will persevere and hopefully well have a better game for transferring to the Tempus Engine.

Features, Known Bugs, Todo List

Features
- Ability to Switch Between First and Third Person
- Ability to Switch between FPS and RTS
- Temporary User Interface
- RTS can zoom in on objects (Really just changes the field of view rather than going up or down)
- Character Controller is disabled when in RTS mode
- Pause Menu
- RTS has Edge Scrolling and can be controlled with the WASD keys

Known Bugs
- Mouselook script doesnt disable itself when in strategy mode
- Mouselook sometimes stay's enabled when the pause menu is active
- Cant change the angle of the RTS camera
- RTS mode remains active in FPS mode

Todo List
- Fix RTS being active during FPS mode
- Fix Mouselook Active During RTS
- Implement Pathfinding using the A* algorithm
- Investigate the Use of infinite terrain generation
- Implement 'Select and Travel' RTS controls for the character
- Investigate Unit generation

Introductions

Well Hello World, let me introduce myself.
My name is Samuel and I am part of a group of people called New Aurora Studio's, but this project is currently completely my own work for now and the foreseeable future.

The purpose of this blog isn't to talk about myself though, this is to talk about a project I am working on Using the free version of Unity 4. I call it, Dawn. Now I know that most people will think that this isn't new, just another guy trying to make a game that will never come out or be released, but I guarantee you that this is not that kind of project.

Dawn is a cross between FPS and RTS where the goal is to rebuild human civilisation after centuries of mass genocide by the civilisations humanity called friends. At the beginning you will have 20 people in your small colony, the last hope of humanity. And through the RTS mode you will be able to select and control any of the 20 people in your colony, and as the colony grows, so too will the amount of people you control. This will give the player a unique insight into the people in the game and participate in any of the tasks the player may set from the strategy mode. Think building vast mega structures, terraforming worlds, loading spaceships with cargo, shooting aliens, researching and finally reverse engineering alien technology.

Currently the Game is not in any truly playable state and is quite experimental with a few bugs that can get really annoying as the game persists.

And now to the purpose of this blog, its purpose is to inform you on all of my progress on the game with change logs and insights into some of the features you can expect from what will be my masterpiece. I will not set any deadlines for any game content to be released, but you can expect a weekly update on all developments I make on the game