A Writer's journey into game development

Well, yes, we knew it is alive. Unigine, I mean. They have released another version, this time an RC. The most significant change is that now PBR is the default material. The definitive Unigine 2.0 version will be presentad at Siggraph, in august. Considering the boost experienced by Unreal and Unity3d after becoming free (or at least, no upfront payments) and that Unigine lacks documentation and its closed community, Im dont foresee an increase of adoption in short term. Or any term at all.

This could be the motto of our ruling House, lately. Today, we awoke (actually, it was published around midday) with good news: in another step towards Advanced Broadband (2 megabits, which is what all of you, my friends, had in your house 10 years ago), we will have internet via wifi, at 35 spots in all the country, starting on july. The promissed speed is one megabit per client, with the spots supporting from 50 to 100 concurrent clients. My city is blessed with 3 places, one of them, the Cespedes Park, at 10 minutes from my home. Walking, of course. The prices are still out of my reach: ~$2 USD per hour. But cubans are used to live with few, or at least, most cubans are. A few minutes every month is what I need to check my mail in my little Android phone, and even receive or send attachments without spending a salary in phone bills. Previously, the mail traffic was charge on volume basis, $1 USD per megabyte, including the protocols traffic or any attempt to connect to internet b...

At last, I got the first official scene. Had to readapt a few things to make it work at home last night, then repeated the process here.. just to find out that this PC cant handle the load. The scene is not big, but Unity3D cant even move it. Perhaps it is the lights. Now I have a problem. My home PC can easily work with the scene, but doesnt have Internet, and wont have it until next year, if I can pay for the minimum package (256kbs, according to a filtered document). Here, I have Internet, but dont have video card or even RAM to work. The "good side" is that I wont be working here for too long: Ill be unemployed in two, three months max. And yes, the scene looks great.

Sometimes you have to kick yourself in the ass (quite hard to do) and start working. I did it today, and got results: dialogs are back. This is a work I couldnt do at home for sure, I had to use Google for almost everything. Arrays in C#? Google it. Lists? Google again. How to connect a button to code? Google. Underestanding how to parse the new format took its time too. In this year, I have learned how to parse XML in 3 different languages, using different APIs each. Also, I found a weird problem: System.Xml parser return comments as nodes. WTF?! Yes, that almost made me crazy. But Im more relaxed now. The code is  still a big mess trying to get in a decent shape and probably will be for a while. The new dialog format is a bit more complex than the previous one, each answer can have several choices, depending on validation checks, same as NPC lines, plus actions. An action is, well, an action: receive a reward, a quest, remove an item... Not bad for half day of work, includi...

We knew there would be, but now we have a confirmation. Watch the trailer!