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    Hours 1 – 5 : General thoughts on SpaceOreMiner, Blender and Unity3d


    2010 - 09.26

    So now is the day after the five hours before 🙂 Looking back at it I think it went pretty well. Downloading Blender and installing it was pretty simple. I even had python pre-installed, so that went without a hitch.  I can see how amazingly powerful it is as a tool.  The draw back being an incredibly complicated UI.  Definitely need to spend some time with Blender in order to get better at it.  Quite pleased at how the models went, though initially I had wanted to get them all done in the first hour.  However, I think this was pretty unrealistic in retrospect.  Will totally need to spend some time on UV mapping the Limar and the Mole after the 19 hours, but so far quite please with the progress there.

    Downloading and installing Unity3d was even easier 🙂  It needs to be activated online where you have the choice of either picking a 30 day trail of the pro version, or an unlimited version of the indie version.  You need to give it an email address as well.  I’m glad I didn’t pick the pro version, I think being exposed to the uber version, then having to downgrade after it would be pretty sucky.  But each to their own, its nice that they have the option to trail it.

    Now about Unity itself.  I am loving it.  Everything seems really simple and really logical.  This is always good.  I haven’t had too much of a problem with the UI at all ( though navigating in the scene view window is a bit clumsy feeling at the moment, but I have a feeling that is my relative newness to it ).  So far, however, everything I’ve done has been pretty generic in nature.  I’m starting the meat of the coding today, will be interesting to see if the speed of progress continues once I am doing more specific things.

    The 19 hour challenge overall is definitely a very interesting way of developing.  Though I know I am mostly writing/recording/talking/tweeting to nothing but search spiders, I am finding it a great way of motivating myself.  However, taking a 5 minute break within every hour to write the blog post and record/upload a video is actually a bit of a nightmare – uploading a video to YouTube completely kills my home internet, and as I am alt+tabbing between unity3d and google, this is a bit of a hindrance to development 🙂  So from now on I will be doing the hour, then after the hour, making the videos and writing the blog entry.

    So there is  a brief overview of my thoughts on the first five hours.  I’m hoping to do another five hours today, but alas, I have some chores that need to be done first, so will have to come back and announce when they are starting later.

    tl:dr; Blender rocks, Unity3d rocks

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    D’oh! Used names


    2010 - 09.23

    Every name which is simple has already been used on the internet … d’oh! Or atleast it seems that way.  As such, I’m going to rename my SpaceMiner to the slightly more obscure sounding SpaceOreMiner.  Not wanting any law suits or what have you not.  I was going to go with RoidRaider … but that gave me funny mental images of Lara Croft with one of those ring type seats.  As such, I am just going to go through the posts and edit them to reflect the name change 🙂

    Edit : Hopefully changed everything, if anyone has a suggestion for a better name, or indeed notices any references to just SpaceMiner, please comment 🙂

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    The Importance of Being Orenest


    2010 - 09.23

    Now that I have decided on a space mining game, the next question is, what shall I be mining? After quite a lot of research on asteroid mining on Wikipedia, I had initially decided on sticking to real ores. Real metals that are definitely found in asteroids.

    Then after some conversation with friends, the overall thought was that just mining known metals might be a little boring for the average gamer. This I conceded, after all Adamantium ( and even more so Adamantine 🙂 ) and Mithril are both fantastic made up ores. As the game itself is a sci-fi game, it allows my imagination to run quite wild with various ideas for ores to be found within an asteroid.

    However, after looking at a long list of made up ores, there was a problem. How did I know which one would be more valuable than another? How do I even know what they are? They could just be made up strings for all I know ( well, they were, but you know … ). Generally, in the game the deeper you would go inside the asteroid, the rarer the ore, but there was no real world value attached to them. I couldn’t imagine if one tonne of kore would be as valuable as one tonne of copper. So I decided to combine both real world and made up ores. The real ones help show how much the made up ones are worth – everyone knows that gold is more valuable silver, and silver more valuable than copper, by inserting my made up ores between these, you can instantly see that Tyronic crystal is worth more/harder to find than copper. Lavatile in it’s ore form is not as rare as gold, but lavatile in crystal form is rarer than gold. Must be some pretty funky stuff!

    Adding the real world ones in different places in the list instantly made it seem more real. These weren’t just random strings now, but had their place in an ore hierarchy of sorts. Seeing real metals/ores instantly creates a mental association – I guess that Dense Yeanite is similar to copper, silver and gold as they are on the same list. So below find my first set of ores for SpaceOreMiner. I would love to add hundreds of them, and then write detailed things about them, but, I have to remember my realisitic goals for the project. So currently, there are only 15. They are in order of value, from least to most.

    1. Copper
    2. Tyronic Crystal
    3. Silver
    4. Kor
    5. Titanium
    6. Lavatile
    7. Gold
    8. Lavatile Crystal
    9. Dense Yeanite
    10. Omicronite
    11. Diamond
    12. Trivonic Crystal
    13. Platinum
    14. Mythite
    15. Talpanite

    Now that has been decided, I will need some physical characteristics, not really aimed at producing lore, more because I need to find some way to represent them in game 🙂 That should be fun!

    tl:dr; I made some ores up.

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