I have to admit, it is amusing to read those words, "it may even be 3D!" mostly because I hit that very same roadblock myself just a few years ago, and said exactly the same things about it. Oh, the impenetrable 3D barrier...

Honestly though that sentence does shout incompetence on your part. I can't say I'm crossing my fingers for this project, because I've been there, done that, and failed horribly in the process. But you will absolutely gain invaluable experience one way or another, because you certainly are trying.

By the way, I read through your archives here and discovered your birthday was early December, 1994. That is also amusing, because I was born early August, 1994. Never before have I ever found someone who is almost my age, yet slightly younger than I. It has always been the other way around for me.

Mike's own game studio shut down a few days ago.

http://www.atomicpxlgames.com/

That was a very foolish thing to do.

There was nothing foolish regarding his closing of his "studio," but you personally need to take a look at Matthew 5:33-37.

I'm not sure if you've played the demo/bought the game yet, but I'll give my own retrospective thoughts on what I'm sure you found excruciatingly annoying...

1) The collision system is horrible. That's actually not my fault, and although I had nearly everyone in the GS community on my side and plenty of good arguments, the engineers at Conitec decided that they were not going to replace the horrendous ellipsoid-based system to the standard, a box/cylinder. Of course with my knowledge now I feel confident that I could make my own system that's 100x better, but the code in GRUNTS is old and I didn't have that knowledge when I originally wrote it...

2) The AI. The AI is particularly stupid, but mostly on behalf of the collision code. Any "teleportation" artifacts you see are gliding bugs in the engine itself. I did a lot of debugging to confirm this.

Anything else annoying you might find is a design bug, and I had nothing to do with the design. ;)