| Submitted by , posted on 23 November 2001 |

Image Description, by This is several screenshots of my game. Its a great concept, with truely 3d gameplay added to a classic...almost a new genre I would hope! I'm proud of it, and it really is my game. I've done virtually everything for it top to bottom: coding, sounds (I use quack for these, they deserve a plug, a great little program), some modest 3d modelling, skinning, and animation (Milkshape 3d, again a plug), textures, did I mention coding, and I've attempted all the business garbage too...ick! I got some of the textures, and all of the midi's from free sources on the web, so many thanks to those talented individuals as well. None of these assets were specifically made for the game though, so it was still quite a bit of work integrating them. The game was featured in the student showcase and the indie games festival last year (thanks guys), under the name Break Away 3D. I've since switched the title to...Orbs of Attrition.
The game started as a directx self tutorial, and the orignal version was a modified dx6 sdk sample, free cookie for whoever guesses which one! First I said, let there be light, and there was light, and it was good. Then evening, then morning, the first day. Then there were small animals (mouse control), followed by physics and noise and such. Somewhere along the line I decided it really was a lot of fun, sat down, did a proper design document, and rewrote everything from scratch. It was my first piece of really beautiful code, laying things out, object orienting, and organization really paid off. At the end things got a bit ugly, just getting everything in and making it work on those silly voodoo 3's.
Features: This isn't quake 3, but there is some good stuff in there. Nice fast particle system, versatile scripting system, environment mapped bump mapping (thanks ATI), VERY real physics (phd in engineering paid off a little), networking, shaders, animation, adaptive ai, multiple skill levels, swell level transitions with no load times. I have also done some exciting work with the user interface-you've never seen menus like these, I can play with them for hours. I am VERY proud of the scalability, you can play on a 2 meg, 1st generation 3d card, and it gets better, faster, and prettier all the way up to todays best hardware. I also have done some animation with the level instructions, stopping everything ever so briefly, and just a bit of motion in the right spot really does a great job of coercing people to read the messages. I have some of the dx7 code modules (input, sound, particles) from the game source available on my web site, www.ba3d.com .
I hope to jump into the exciting world of e-commerce with it in the near future. I'd really appreciate it if a few of you guys could try things out and do a last run beta before I upload it anywhere else. Please don't distribute the demo beyond this, a better one will hopefully be the product of your great feedback very soon (never, ever put code on the web too early, you will get support questions from it forever!). For iotd only, www.ba3d.com/secret.html . I'm especially interested in getting feedback about win2k, voodoo 3's, and matrox g400. I've had a few problems, and don't have access to the hardware to do a proper debugging session myself.

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