[Lumen] Initial progress status.

Hi there ! Welcome to the first status update about Lumen, a project I have with a friend. I figured that a good way to keep the motivation intact would be to periodically report here about our progress with the game.

Oh yeah, Lumen is a game :)

We're using Panda3D, a free 3D engine, and  Python as a programming language. Yesterday, I spent the evening working on some initial tests, and got to the point depicted in the video below.

It's not so impressive, but it was done in a couple of hours...

 So, what do we have right now ?

• A terrain generated from a black and white picture, called a heightmap;
• Automatic simplification of the terrain based on the distance to the camera (Level of Detail, or LOD for short);
• A sphere that you can control with the keyboard;
• A mouse-controlled third person camera;
• Some simple effects like fog;

It's really not that much from a code standpoint, but it helped me get acquainted with Panda3D.

We're not quite ready to discuss the concept behind Lumen right now, but as a first step we decided to concentrate on the control of the character first. That and the basic rendering stuff, of course. I've been following the progress made by the Overgrowth team (Just go and watch some of their progress videos. The game is gorgeous, those videos are awesome and really informative.), and they made a video about character animation which serves as a model for how to go from what I have now to something more elaborate.

So next in line : investigating the use of proper physics (and make that ball jump), and probably improve the terrain rendering a bit.

See you next time !