Double Dude Studio

Is what I did lately. In other words, I’m looking for a nice color palette for the game, so that it both reads well and conveys the atmosphere. The idea is to take something Wipeout-ish futuristic and make it a little bit rusty and used, so that the emphasis is more on the gritty dogfighting and not the smooth flying. Here are three color versions of a placeholder map I’m quite satisfied with. I’ve also changed the light walls seen in the trailer to dark ones, as they took the focus away from the fights inside them.

It’s a constant struggle between making everything just brown and gray, these colors being the safest, and spraying strong color everywhere, like later Unreal Tournaments did. I think Brink has a pretty nice palette, but I don’t like how its menus’ graphic style clash with the content of the game – I’ll try and avoid that in Hullfire.

Collision response is finally finished and I think I will concentrate on graphics and GUI instead of physics for now. The main reason for this is Trajectory which I want to port into the engine as soon as possible and the game makes no use of rigid body dynamics.

On the left you can see how collisions are handled now, some simple textures are also included.

Erik Neumann’s site ‘My Physics Lab’ helped me a lot, together with an article by Chris Hecker.

Some might have noticed the much better framerate of this video compared to previous ones, this is due to me getting a new gfx card, so this will be my standard recording quality from now on ;)

The physics part of the Double Engine is being developed, and today I believe to have finished collision detection between polygons of any shape. As you can see on the video each polygon consists of triangles, and all vertices are tested against an edge of another polygon to see if they are colliding with it.

In this example a vertex of one polygon (the circular one) collides with an edge of the other one (the triangle). Red point is the colliding vertex (and thus the point of collision) and the red line is the edge that collides with this vertex.

Disregard the collision response, it’s there just to show that detection works, it’s not supposed to be realistic yet. Realistic collision response will be the next step and I plan on having a complete rigid body physics engine.