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.