Game Engines - Week 8 - Working Under Pressure!

                No lectures this week! I’m loving it so far because it’s really giving me and also my GDW group an excellent opportunity to catch up on not only our GDW project, but future assignments. As for the midterm… Things didn’t go too well. I got about the same mark that I expected, 35%...  what a terrible mark, but of course it is my own fault. I’m still going to go with the fact that it was due to me having both my programming course exams within an hour of each other. We won’t be getting our exams back till next week possibly because ofcourse, no lectures.

 In terms of my EXP situation, I managed to work all night, literally, all night, on both my remaining medium assignments. I ended up fixing the Maya Camera from before by simply removing the sky dome line of code that I had. Yes, it was that simple. I’m not sure if that was the cause of it, but it simply fixed my solution for this assignment. My over the shoulder camera idea worked exactly as I had predicted, though it took a lot of time to find the proper position of the camera to my object, it was really annoying similar to the robotic arm. I wasn’t even sure if I was doing it right, but I managed to complete the camera views and the frustums by Thursday. After conquering my third AI assignment in Unity, I had to immediately rush and crack down on another medium assignment, since I highly doubt I’ll be able to complete any hard assignments.

 I spoke to some of my GDW members, and they helped me with ideas on how I could complete the Havok vehicle with the cannon assignment. Similar to the sample that was provided in our Two Loc engine, I had created a scene in Maya with a tank and block walls made from cubes. I had A LOT of trouble with trying to get my Havok stuff working. I knew I had exported it correctly as shown in the previous Friday tutorial, but whenever I loaded it into Ogre, I would get all my objects floating in the air. Now I knew I applied the mass to each rigid body in Maya… what I was missing and eventually discovered was that I had forgotten to update the physics of the scene properly. Since I was going off the samples for help I also obtained the ability to shoot a sphere rigid body at the wall to knock it over. From here on the rest of the assignment was about controlling the cannon and the vehicle itself. These were things that I had done before in the previous assignment… so I got to work, it was probably around 6am where I finished these questions. I finally got my EXP for the final exam. Now I can help my group with models for our GDW game, we’ll see what happens next week.

Game Engines - Week 7 - Camera Control & Medium Progress

It’s going to be a hectic week, still no midterm marks, so I’m a little nervous about my progress in this course. As of now, I’ve been working a little bit on one of my medium assignments. I’m using my already created skybox (sky dome) program to create the camera control program as per the assignment guidelines since all the easy repetitive stuff in project creation is done. As of now I have a grass plane with some of my camera point of views already created. The first one was simply the first person view, which I’ve done just by attaching the camera to my object and moving it with the object. The cool thing about this is that it can also be used in our GDW game for our control scheme. Since our game is a first person adventure we will be using this type of view. I also managed to create the third person control simply by moving a camera behind the object, simple enough, it was still attached to the object so it would follow properly. I’ve managed to also create the cinematic camera on a separate camera this was simply done by creating a second ogre camera and just switching to that one when a specific key was pressed. The cinematic camera was placed in the sky and would view the entire scene and watch the object move around. 

As I now try to add the simple Maya Camera given to us, I’m having a lot of problems. The code works fine and is loading without any issues, but for some reason when I switch to my Maya Cam setting, the function does not work, and nothing happens at all. Not too sure what exactly is wrong with my code, hopefully I can figure this out soon, as I still have to fix up my over the shoulder camera, and also add the frustum boxes as requested by the professor. I’ve thought up several ways to go about creating these. For the over the shoulder camera I’m thinking it’s going to be a lot like our robotic arm assignment from the easy questions. 

I’ve also managed to get a PDF version of the course textbook and the Ogre3D programming textbook, this is really good for me because now I feel like I can completed some more readings of specific areas on my own with the simplicity of digital reading. CTRL+F for the win. Anyways, we’ll see what happens, hopefully by the end of the week I will have my medium assignments done and finally be able to at least write my final exam.

Game Design II - Week 8 - October 30, 2012

Due to an attack from hurricane sandy, something at our school was destroyed and they had to cancel classes for that day, maybe a little overdramatic, but rules are rules I guess. Due to this, our first class didn’t happen at all, I was kind of happy, who wants to go outside in this weather? Not me that’s for sure. I took this opportunity to finish up my second prototype with my group. We all worked from home so it was a little difficult, but thankfully, things like DropBox exist, and it made file sharing and updating a lot easier.

                So working on this wedding proposal game, we’ve decided to go about created a Dance Dance Revolution style game where the player will have to hit arrow keys and destroy arrows before they hit the ground in order to earn points. We kept the same wedding song but we had to use a remixed version in order to keep the time constraints according to the guidelines. I’ve decided for our characters that we would use blocky characters with skeletal animation. Since we’re using unity the animation cycles and stuff can all be created in Maya. I’ve almost finished creating a lot of the human models so far. Here’s what one of them looks like:

                Not exactly the best model, I know, but it will do for this prototype. After speaking to our lead programmers, we’ve actually come really close to completing this… I am really getting sick of this Bruno Mars song though... I figure a lot of people in the class will be using it too so marking this will probably be hell for whoever does it :P. Here’s another screenshot of our game:

Not too sure what else to talk about since we won’t actually be having lecture topics, I assume tomorrow is going to be all presentations I hope I’m not late… It’s also Halloween! My favourite holiday of the year…even though its not actually a holiday. I’m going to be running around campus in my Tron costume. I hope this doesn’t affect my presentation mark.