Game Engines - Week 10 - Final Week

After working all night on Thursday with my GDW group, I managed to finish the AI steering behaviour assignment! This was definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever done, which goes to show why programming is probably not my strong skill. The behaviours that were implemented were Seek, Flee, Arrive, Pursue, Evade, Wander, Repulse and of course Path following. It was hard for me to get the actual code down, but with help, I knew exactly what I had to have going on. Seek and Flee were the basis of the majority of the behaviours. In our game, we've used these behaviours on the ghost of our game. Which if you have any idea what are game is about you will understand who they are.

The greatest challenge I believe for this assignment was implementing the flocking behaviours. In my previous AI assignment, I lost a lot of marks because my characters would not align properly, or even perform cohesion for long. This was presented to the TA on Friday. Due to my lack of sleep, I’m not even sure I was even talking properly, the entire time I was thinking about completing our Game Design II paper prototype, which nobody seemed to wanna do. Now that I’ve gained this EXP I should have gained the full assignment mark. This is the last lecture for the semester, Im hoping we receive a good exam review similar to the one we received on the midterm… a little more detail wouldn’t hurt? I mean what’s the point of showing us everything when you can just say everything? But I guess it’s important that we know everything we’ve studied. I myself find it extremely difficult for these programming courses to study for exams. I generally understand all the theory behind it, but when it comes to coding, I’m stumped. I need some sort of direction, and I’m extremely grateful for the Havok and Ogre3D examples that we were given at the beginning of the year, without them I don’t believe I would have made it this far. It’s been quite a crazy semester but for now this is the end of engines.

 If you’ve been following, hopefully you’ve enjoyed or been entertained by my struggle through this course. Come check out the GDW presentations tomorrow.

Game Engines - Week 9 - The end is near!

Two more weeks of school left for this semester, I’m finding it really hard to keep up with these blogs especially since I’ve been working on the GDW game with my group, at the same time I’m aiming to get a final chunk of EXP in this course so that I can get some more marks. I didn’t really do too well on the midterm so I’m really looking to make a huge impact in GDW and assignments so that I can pass the course properly.

The programmers of the group have been making some crazy progress on our game working with Ogre… I’m SLOWLY getting there as today they were teaching me about implementing different Artificial Intelligence behaviours into Ogre. Now this was too hard to understand theoretically, since I am in the 4^th year AI class, I did a previous assignment for that particular course using Unity3D. This was WAY easier since obviously unity is a simpler engine to use, especially for an art oriented person like myself. I slowly understand how to incorporate the different AI behaviours in ogre. I’ve been working with my group and we’ve managed to learn a few things and have successfully added a seek and flee behaviour in our game. It’s now a matter of time to just move it over and complete one of the hard assignments. 

I was originally hoping to go for the sound programming question since I have used FMOD in the past with regular C++ programming. Little did I know, that things were a lot different, I believe later on in the week I’ll be asking for help from one of my group members since he’s probably waaaay more experienced with these things than I am.