Not even long hours of E3 prep can deter the Flying Lab Software staff from writing devlogs:
Heidi reported on her graphical optimizations and getting visual sail damage working:
Last week I changed the way we display sail damage. We used to place "holes" in the sails at the location the cannonball hit them. While this was accurate, the "holes" looked exactly like what they were: programmer art. Fortunately our new artist swooped in and provided us with stuff that didn¹t look like complete . . . er, stuff that didn't look as bad. So we now have sails that actually look damaged, and not like someone threw chocolate donuts at them.
You can read Heidi's full Devlog here.
Grogbeard began coding the boarding combat system:
The drunken pirate stirs? It?s been a busy month. My initiation into the codebase involved doing banking, which was a nice way to break the ice. The great challenge for me, as for any new programmer coming into a project, is climbing the learning curve both of the basic technology and of all the existing systems. These things are second nature to the devs that have been working on them from day one, but have provided me with plenty of challenges.
Grogbeard's full Devlog can be found here.
Rusty stayed up very late to oversee the final polish on the E3 build of the game:
And Rusty's full Devlog can be read here, and visit the official Pirates of the Burning Sea site here.
It?s 12:20 am Tuesday morning. I?m sitting in my office with Misha, Joe, and Rev, as we wait for another build to finish. E3 was originally supposed to be a leisurely show for me where I checked out the games, met with potential overseas partners, and generally had a lot of fun. When NVIDIA came to us recently and asked us to show in their booth, all of that changed. First, we were at the end of a milestone that was focused on gameplay, not graphics. Code tends to decay if not lovingly tested and used, and when you toss in a new build of Alchemy, our 3D engine, you wind up with a lot of strange graphics problems. Parts of ships were lit incorrectly at night, sails were intersecting one another, and all of our particle effects were broken when we got the new version from Vicarious. Fixing all of these, as well as upping the general quality of our graphics, has taken a little under two weeks of frantic effort.
