The BlueBind team is excited to announce that our new website is up and running! This website is 100% original (no templates) and has been made through the collective efforts of the team along with a considerable amount of work done by L4nt0m and Edge on the layout and functionality of the site.

At this moment we are a little low on content but theres still much to see! First we have our about page containing a nice history of our team and who we are. Following that is our games page where you can find extensive detail on our primary project Barnstormer: 1920. On our teams page you can get to know us and see what makes each one of us special to the team.

Lastly everyone is welcome to contact us though our contact page regarding anything relating to BlueBind, or if you just want to kick back and chat you are also welcome to do so in our forums.


We hope you enjoy the website, be sure to bookmark us and check back with us for we have some neat things coming up.

Jesper (BlueBind Team CEO)
The BlueBind Team

Hey everyone,

As you have probably noticed, this is the first blog in a long time from us. We now have an important thing, about Barnstormer: 1920.

In the feedback on the second beta release of Barnstormer: 1920, there were some people complaining about a bug that causes the player to crash just at the start of the game. We don't know the cause of this, but we are busy investigating it.

Because we have to fix this bug, we would like some people who experience that bug to help us fixing it. So if you experienced that bug, please contact us by sending an e-mail to contact@bluebind.net or sending a PM to "BlueBind team".

Thanks already for the people who want to help us :).


In other news, we are working very hard on getting our brand new website up. You can find it on BlueBind.net, but that is the under contruction page, which looks, well, aweful :P.

We've got a screenie for you tho of the new website:




Also, a nice wallpaper of Barnstormer: 1920:
Barnstormer: 1920 Wallpaper


That was it for now, and please contact us if you experienced the crashing at the start bug.


Jesper (BlueBind Team Leader)
BlueBind Games

Hey everyone. I've got pretty some info on Barnstormer: 1920, because big progress have been made. The first level is nearly finished .

What I will start with is the
Shadow System
I (Jesper) started on a 3d shadow engine for the game, which was supposed to be easy to use and with as few polygons as possible. After 8 hours of work, the engine, and some other shadow things, are working. The shadows look very smooth and it also supports fence shadows, so you wont see a black rectangle when you draw the shadow of a wooden fence (which you can see-through).
It uses a total new engine, and something like it has never been made with game maker. I won’t tell you anything about it, because it is now only for being used by the Reunited Game Development Team, or, as you could also call it, classified . The only thing I will tell you about it is that it uses only 4 vertices to draw the complete, smooth, shadow, while it is still calculated, and not just a sprite we made before. The shadow stuff is based on the position of the sun. The shadow engine is for static objects only btw.

Something we haven't like for a long time, has also been changed. Yes, I am talking about the
Smoke Trail
The very ugly and dodgy, un-smooth smoke trail, is no longer in the game. It has been replaced by a line-trail, which looks a lot better. Some small improvements are still to be done on it, but the main thing is there. The line trail is a bit more futuristic, which is not excactly what was the plan, so we might change it to something else later on anyways.

What do all biplanes have and what is it that ours hasn't got? Yep, the
Propellor
A propellor has been added as you can see in the screenie in the paragraph “Landing”. It hasn't got a texture yet, that still has to be made by somebody. But we do have the rotations fixed .

Realistic smoke and fire are the things you want when the plane crashes. It also has to slide further. Yeah, edge has made it more fun :
Crashing
Edge made a very good crashing system, with nice textures for smoke, flames, a trail on the ground when you slide through the sand, and more realistic aspects on the crashing. It now looks very cool, and you will slide further when you've hit the ground. Also the camera will shake, making it even more realistic. I'm very happy that edge is on the code dept. too


Which plane is on-ground standing still with just it's 2 front wheels on the ground? No plane is, of course. What we also changed is the
Landing
The landing has not changed for physics stuff, but it changed for the graphics. The plane now has an added angle to it, which depends on the speed and the speed it’s changing. So when you land, it will now have a good angle where 3 wheels are on the ground. Here is an image to show you how it was before, and how it is now:


When you turn the rudder on a plane, it will of course also affect the bank. Therefor, we had to do some changing on the
Turning
Also, we added a better system for turning with the “A” and “D” keys. We found, after some research, some nice stuff about plane handling. One of the things was that, when you change the rudder, it will also slightly change the bank/roll, and that it won’t turn as fast as it does now. It doesn’t work completely, so some change will be made to the turning.

The first level was pretty empty, wasn't it? Therefor we also made some changes in the
Environment
The changes in the enviorment are not very big, but they do make the level look less boring (not that it was really boring, but there could just be more things added.. Little bumps have been added in the terrain so the terrain looks less boring, and 2 models have been added too. A shed model and a rowing boat model. The shadows are also something that makes the level more complete, and a lot less boring, even tho you might not think of that when you think of things to make the level complete or less boring.


A game without music is nothing, and how can a game get music without musicians? After the stop of Tgg Teams, it was gone. What was gone? Well, the
Audio department
After some time, edge suggested us a very good musician, called DJ_GLiTCH. We now have an audio department again, even tho it only has one member . He has been on #1 as best musician on several sites, and he even has his own music-site. We are all very happy to have DJ_GLiTCH on the team .

Things that are to small for a whole paragraph, will get a paragraph together. These are the
Other changes
- made some changes in the zeppling exploding script, so that will now cause less fps loss.
- added a little bit of delta-time for the plane where a little bit means that it only apply’s to the speed.
- the plane it’s shadow is now based on the position of the sun too.
- added a compass (only the idea behind it, not the grahpics , just like with the fuel meter.
- probably some more things I forgot about …


And now the thing that you probably all wanted more than all the text and stuff:
Screenshots









Regards,

Jesper (Reunited Game Development Team Leader)
Reunited Game Development Team

Some big news from former "Tgg Team A".

For pretty a long time, there was no sign of life in Tgg Team A, which has a very good reason. Tgg stopped with the forum, the ezine, the teams and the other activities on his forum. Even tho the team was close and fun, he sais for him it wasn't.

The team members, however, wanted to continue on Barnstormer: 1920 and continue with the team. Also, members of Tggf wanted a place like Tggf. Tggf was shut down, and that is why Runivo, Edge and me (Jesper), made the forum Reunited.

On this forum, activities from Tggf are contiued. One of those is the team.

We are more or less continueing the work from Tgg Team A, except that we are working with another system.

One big change is the applying system. As most people who applied more than 2 months after the start of Tgg Teams didn't work much or didn't work at all (which caused exlusion of those members at the end), we decided to change the system to a recruiting system (I think you all know what that means: don't ask us, we'll ask you ;))

Another change is the setup of the team. The team has become far more democratic. After a poll, it was decided that I (Jesper) would become the leader of the team. Everything important is now discussed before a final decision is made.

Also, where we first had the departments Game Design, Code, Story, Level, Graphics, Audio and Testing, we now only have the departments Code, Story&Level, Graphics and Audio.

How will we do the game design and testing, you might wonder. Well, we figured that as we are more democratic now, everyone from the team should be able to decide together about the game design. We also think that if would let the game be tested by the whole team, that would work better.


Basic setup

Hey everyone and welcome to this blog.

Yersterday, we have had the exclusion of lots of no-active-enough members. Because we want active people, 10 people have been excluded from Tgg Teams. This is half of the team, but it leaves a solid team of active members.

To let you know:
• ThatGamesGuy - Game Design.
• Jesper - Code & Graphics.
• Undead - Code.
• DarkDepths - Graphics.
• Habbomerc - Graphics.
• EDGE - Graphics & Code.
• xygthop3 - Test.
• turvas - Graphics.
• joshuaallen64 - Test.
• Gompen - Level & Graphics

As you can see too,the departments Story and Audio are open. As always, you can still apply for the department you want to be in in this topic. As the game has very few sounds, someone who could do sound effects would be very usefull.

Barnstormer: 1920
Progress on Barnstormer: 1920 is not going bad, though it's not going very good either. Some major bug-fixes/additions/changes:
• Joystick support
• Cumulus clouds added
• Sun with lens-flare added (partially by C-ator9)
• Main menu and settings screen restyled (settings screen: joystick setting still has to get the right graphics)
• Stalling and getting out of a stall added
• Added and deleted some changeable settings
• Things fit together more nicely
• Realistic plane explosions (worked on by EDGE)
• ...

So, you might want to see some screenshots.



Regards,
Jesper (Tgg Team A Manager)
Tgg Team A

Hey everyone!

Some update info on Barnstormer: 1920. Something that is, of course, really needed in a flight ( simulator ) game: clouds. After some research on clouds and their appearences, I ( Jesper ) have developed a way of creating realistic cumulus and stratus clouds, which in combination look like the clouds used in Microsoft Flight Simulator X: A Century of Flight.

I will not descibe the way of how to create those clouds in detail here. Maybe in the future, when the game is finished, we can release something about the system we created for it.

So, I started on coding the clouds system. After several hours of work, I had something done. It wasn't good for the fps, but it looked awesome in my opinion.



Then, we had to import the system into the game. That was, unexpected, a pretty hard job. We had to deal with some very annoying alpha issues which were hard to solve.

But it turned out to an overall very realistic look, and to something that has, to my knowledge, never been done in Game Maker in 3D: Realistic dense clouds.




Also, a new member of Tgg Teams, Undead, has added joystick support to the game.

I hope that you will all download the next version of Barnstormer: 1920, and thanks for reading this blog!



Kind regards,
Tgg Team A