C0d1ng4fun

Vacuum Warriors 3D

2003

This is the successor of Vacuum Warriors. It is still a multiplayer space shoot'em'up but now featuring 3D graphics and a more modern design in general. This was the first significant project where I used and benefited from object oriented design techniques.

During the first quarter of 2003 I developed a new 3D engine for this game. The game and the engine are separate entities but the engine structure and features are chosen to suit the game:

• Octree culling of large objects.
• Progressive LOD.
• Quad grid for faster dynamic world culling and collision detection.
• Sky box space with objects.

I also created a new more powerful particle engine featuring:

• Cone, plane and sphere emission.
• Culling of groups of particles and whole particle systems.
• An editing tool for experimenting with particle systems.

During the second quarter of 2003 I wrote the game itself. It is split into a client and a server which may be standalone or run from within the game. The protocol used is UDP with multicasting. This time I created the game algorithms and communication protocol with great respect to network latency and synchronization issues. This time it worked pretty well.

Unfortunately; once again when it came to do the fine polishing of the game I was completely out of motivation and the project was put on hold (indefinitely).