Developer Blog

It is probably old news by now, but as of a few weeks ago, Brian Kononchik was promoted to co-owner of VGC. Congrats, Brian!

I’m sure you have noticed there has been a dramatic change on VGC’s home forums. And indeed, there has been quite a mighty one.

VGC has successfully converted from phpBB to MyBB! (thanks to Evil Eye)

In other words, we have converted our Forum Software.

phpBB was quite an annoying system to get things done around this forum. Installing mods on it took 15 min or more, simple theme edits had to take place within the depths of our servers, and it wasn’t equipped with the largest essentials a forum would need.

MyBB has this. And we can install mods easily in under a minute. Along with the fact that it’s easy to make theme and style edits. And as such, we felt the switch was the best way to help us and help serve you as the users.

Passwords, and posts have all been retained. And additionally, we have been able to easily remove the more unprofessional elements of VGC (using a forum to display affiliates, using redirect forums to get to other sections of the site, etc)

Anything that you could access via the redirect forums that were once here, can now be accessed via the forum navigation bar.

You may experience a few bugs at the start. These aren’t really a problem though.

*You may login only to be seemingly kicked out
-Soultion: This is a bug that comes with being logged into phpBB at the time of the switch. To fix this, simply log-in, and if it seems that you never even logged in, simply click VGC’s banner.

*Unfortunately, Avatars that were too large in size for the default MyBB (which has now been remedied) were removed. Simply re-upload an avatar of your choice.

*Some BBCodes may be messed up since MyBB’s BBCodes and phpBB’s BBCodes aren’t the same. Posts that used phpBB BBCodes in the past will not be remedied, but you can easily amend your signatures to MyBB’s BBCodes.

*When you first login, you’ll likely be displayed as hidden (you’ll know this if it displays a * next to your name on the “Who’s Online” statistic on the index page) You’ll have to remedy this via the User Control Panel.

Remember that secret improvement I was talking about a few weeks ago? Well, that improvement is Unity3D. As of today it is official that Dark Forces: Zander will be make in Unity3D. Unity3D is a powerful development tool, and should speed up development time tenfold. Check it out at http://www.unity3d.com

I can’t say too much now, but I figured as the Dev Blog hasn’t been updated recently, this would make an interesting enough topic. Here’s all I can say at the moment: VGC is planning something that will increase production time on DFZ tenfold, possibly so much that the game can be released significantly sooner than planned. Yay!

Happy New Years everyone! And best of luck as we start out a new decade.

Hello all, I present the first VGC competition. I want each member here (staff included) to bring people to this forum and get them to join. Whoever gets the most people to join our forum wins. The prizes are as follows:

First Place: A forum-appropriate smiley of the user’s choice will be added and they will be told how to the hidden screenshots and renders will be given to the user. Also the user gets full access to the Staff Tavern, a staff-only section.

Second Place: A forum-appropriate smiley of the user’s choice will be added and they will be told how to the hidden screenshots and renders will be given to the user.

Third Place: A smiley of the user’s choice gets added.(must be forum-appropriate)

When you get someone to join post in this topic saying who you got to join. We will PM the user(s) for verification.

Users who were brought here by a fellow forum user can’t do the above. But so the newly recruited users have something to do: The newly joined user who has the highest post count (not gained by spam or pointless posts) on our forum by then end of the competition will be told how to get to the secret renders and screenshots.

The competition starts now and ends February 3rd, 6:00 PM EST

NOTE: IP adresses will be checked and those who fake bringing people over will be disqualified from the competition and will also recieve a warning.

Ah, tomorrow starts a new year. But it is not just a new year, it’s a new decade.

It is officially Christmas! Merry Christmas! I hope you have a good one!

Good news, everyone! A new version of the main engine we are using to code DFZ came out yesterday. No, we do not have to start over, we just have to import our DLL’s and a few non-problematic technical jazz.

But what does using this new engine (For those who don’t know, we had been using GM7 and U3d 2.1.1, now we are using GM8 and U3D 2.1.1) do, exactly? Well, it runs faster meaning that DFZ should have a greater FPS rate. It also has other cool features like an upgraded code editor, events, yadda yadda yadda. (I have a feeling going into detail would bore someone who isn’t a nerd. )

Anyway, long story short: This new engine will help us make DFZ run faster and better.

Today is VGC’s second anniversary! That’s right, on December 16th, 2007 VGC (then called Pixel Arts) was created.