Game Engines - Week 4 - Almost there...

                So I’m currently working on the Skydome program. But before that! I have actually made an amazing discovery along with my other GDW group members, we obtained an online pdf book called Pro Ogre 3D programming, and suddenly a lot have things have become much clearer. What I’m really wondering is, why isn’t one of our course books like this? I understand the whole idea of learning on our own, but we should have had some help, especially for people who aren’t strong at programming, I mean I’m sure I’m not the only one?

                This book gave me a nice read on working with sky domes and even billboards, which helped me, gain an idea of how I’m supposed to go about creating another assignment. I’ve managed to obtain the knowledge to create the actual skydome in my program, but I’m not too sure how I’m going to go about animating it… I have an idea that may work derived from my previous assignment and the parenting sample used in our examples. 

UPDATE:

                I’ve managed to get it animating by creating separate nodes and treating the skydome like one of the planet examples, through this I was able to get it rotating along a certain axis which has given the effect of the sky dome animating and best of all! I do not see a pinch in the texture. I believe that is the main difference between using Ogre’s sky dome function and simply texturing a sphere. I also created a plane at the beginning of the assignment to represent grass so that the sky dome scene would not look stupid.

                With the approaching midterm, I am very curious as to whether or not the exam will have programming questions. In order to complete most of my assignments, I’d have to research and look at other examples. Theoretically I understand what’s going on, and I understand most of the lecture material… I probably will have to go over my math for the 3^rd time since taking Computer Animation. I hope the methods and stuff have not changed since I first took it 2 years ago. This is the one side about being behind in this program; teachers change everything every year, so if I repeat a course I’m dealing with a whole new experience level. We’ll see what happens.

Game Engines - Week 3 - Bad Habits

We didn’t have an engine’s lecture due to the thanksgiving long weekend, this I would say is somewhat of a good thing because I assume, and we will just have less material to study for on the midterm? We’ll see, as of right now I think I will be able to successfully write the midterm, though I’m pretty sure I will not do too well. I am a very weak programmer, and the easy assignments of this course alone have actually given me quite a struggle. 

I have successfully completed two of them so far, the first one with the rotating lights, and also the recreation of the robotic arm. This second assignment was a frustrating time because there were a lot of issues with me finding the proper positioning and rotation points for each of the arm parts. The fingers were probably the most complex due to their small size; it’s a lot harder to move positions around when working with small decimal numbers. If I was smarter, I probably should have made everything bigger so I’d be working with whole numbers… but something I noticed was that once I’m too far into a code, I just stick with it, instead of going back to make the proper modifications. Well anyways I managed to get that completed. I now have….9 EXP… just 11 more to go?

Game Design II - Week 6 - October 11

Another week of game design passed by! And for once in this class I’m actually satisfied with where it’s going, this is one of the few classes I can actually enjoy sometimes because we talk about interesting things. I personally hate programming, because I just don’t understand most of its complexity… but areas like level design, and game design in really intrigues me. I remember last semester when I was making level for fun for no apparent reason. Even though the levels I made were for my game, I didn’t actually get a chance to implement them. Little bit of random useless information I guess?

                First lecture we got to talk about reward systems and things like that. It was interesting to hear the different views on what people said in class, but of course my voice was silent. I began to doze off as usual, and thought about New Super Mario Bros 2, for the Nintendo 3DS, and how there’s like barely any reward! Like really? What the heck can one do with an infinite amount of coins and lives? Nothing, but yet this is a super successful game that people get strangely addicted to. I love it, I bought it on the first day, especially since I work at a gaming retail store, I get tempted really easily to buy these simple games. Then I think of my PlayStation 3 account and how whenever I buy a new game, I try my very hardest to get as many of the trophy achievements as possible and complete the game 100%. I do it a lot of the time for almost every game that comes out… I think honestly that’s probably my best reward, the ability to show off and boast when I platinum every Sonic game and all the God of War games.

                Yesterday was a little different, didn’t get to go outside! I heard the whole class didn’t like when we did that… which is really dumb IMO because it forces us to be interactive and have fun and learn something. I was disappointed… BUT then it got even better, we got to do an interactive activity where we basically analyzed different games and I got to do my favourite childhood game. Banjo-Kazooie! This game was probably the best game ever on Nintendo 64. Some of the important things about that game were that it was one of the first 3D platformer adventure games to come out in addition to things like Super Mario 64. It implemented a very colourful environment and an assortment of themed levels, my personal favourite was the one that took place in the winter level. That particular level had all of the abilities used to their fullest and also contained many mini-games… I really want to play it again. 

Following that exercise in class, we had to design another game with random requirements. These ones actually really stumped me and I was completely clueless. To be honest, I cannot even really remember what we came up with… We used a checker board as our board with a checker as a game piece that was to be protected by the player. Our requirements were that we needed to have a Sci-fi game with a game mechanic that involved protecting a location. We were also required to make the game have stars that would be collectable and a game reward with money. That’s pretty much it for today… we’ll be working to finish up our Unity level for the first homework assignment. It seems a lot simpler to create something with this engine.

Game Design II - Week 5 - October 7, 2012

Thanksgiving weekend is finally over and I’ve realized that I haven’t really been updating, so I’m going to talk about last week before I simply jump to this week. 

Last week was actually one of my favourite moments in this school. After being here for four years, the stereotype of game developers being bookworms and computer nerds was broken and taken in a different direction. We actually got to go outside for our second class and participate in an interactive game design assignment, which was super fun.

 Of course this was on the second class day; our first day was a simple lecture that informed us once again on various components of level design… I remember while being in the class not participating and getting that ever so scary ball of death that will probably smack the brown off my face one day… that I was thinking of how I personally want to make super hard levels and don’t often think of myself as the player for the level. I know I mentioned this before, but it is pretty important and can be a problem if I was planning to be an actual level designer. After the Portal 2 assignment where my team and I started making a super complex level, we each got to test it and I realized I was getting more frustrated than having fun, and I never wanted to do it again. This is not something I believe that game developers in general want to push out to consumers. 

For the second time this semester, I had a little reality check when trying to create our outdoor game. Upon entering the class, we were informed that we were going outside; to be honest I thought our class was simply moving to a more useless room like the gaming lab which is very small. We then went outside to the big field area, and we broke into teams of 4 -6, of course due my social status in this game development program, I know nobody, except for the GDW group I was put with. We then received volleyball, a small plastic ball, and some rope; in addition to this we had a set of guidelines.

 A sheet detailing the different roles of the battlefield soldier classes was also given to us, and we had to incorporate at least two of these classes into our game, easy enough. We call it, Ultimate Battle Ball. Here’s what that looked like:

The game layout looked like this:

Our game consisted of a Recon soldier and an Engineer soldier on each team. The main objective of the game was for the engineer to put the small plastic ball in the opposing team’s net. The Recon class represented the goalkeeper, and they would be in possession of the large volleyball. Their job for the game was to protect their net with the ability to throw their ball at the opposing team’s engineer. The engineer was the main goal scorer and would be traveling to the enemy net to try and throw the small ball in the net past the enemy recon.

The rules are as follows:

• Engineer and Recon player are allowed to use their hands and feet.
• Recons are not allowed to leave their net.
• If Engineers are hit by Recon’s they have to stay down for 5 seconds before they can run back.
• The Engineer can only retrieve the big ball for the recon soldier, and can also only possess one ball at a time.
• Recon soldiers can throw their ball to the engineers while defending if they choose to, but the engineer cannot move while in its possession. (this is similar to the rules of basketball while if you’re near the net you can pass and move on pivot points)
• Players can switch roles after ever round.  Each round begins with the small ball being placed in the center and both engineers race to it from their net.

Upon creating this, I was trying to make it more complicated with my group members, but one important lesson I learned was that complex game design can sometimes really suck. When it came to play testing time, I really struggled to play and I was really tired….it was pretty funny. Can’t wait to see what happens this coming week.

Game Engines - Week 2 - Frustration

So this second week of my game engine blogs, I am proud to say that I’ve officially completed my first easy question which now leaves me with 5 EXP… I’m pretty sure I still won’t finish on time for the midterm because these easy questions are providing me with a huge challenge, and the values of them depreciate after each one I complete, meaning in order to write the midterm I would have to complete… a lot, and they’re due next week! Doesn’t help that I have my 4^th year AI assignments as well… The midterms are scheduled on both days and I am very concerned that they are back to back. The assignment that I completed was the first assignment. I know in my previous blog I posted my creation of the solar system with the textured spheres for the third homework assignment, but upon creating this I thought of a very simple way to complete the first assignment and was able to submit that to the TA last Friday.

Currently I am trying to figure out how to complete both the sky dome question, and I have started creating the robotic arm with A LOT of difficulty… I understand this is a programming course, but I’m not too sure why it’s catered to strong programmers, and does not provide enough assistance or help to the weaker ones. On paper, the mathematical aspects that we have been learning in class such as the matrices and all the linear algebra stuff is bringing back a lot of memories of my first year, back when they didn’t really teach much game development associated things… I am at a huuuuge disadvantage, but I did retain most of this mathematical knowledge, so if I do get to write the midterm things won’t be as bad as I think.

My current issue with the sky dome program is that I am quite unsure how to add the animating texture without the pinch factor. By attaching a texture onto a sphere, it creates a pinch at the top and bottom of the sphere, and ever by animation it looks very strange. I was reading online that there was actually a simpler way of creating this in Ogre, but the online help that I’ve been trying to seek REALLY has not been helping me out at all. It’s been giving me ideas that I’ve been trying to implement but I’ve honestly been having no luck with this at all. It’s all so frustrating. I haven’t updated my repository with it yet because I don’t really know what I’m doing at this point… We’ll see what happens... I’m holding off on the solar system assignment as of now because it’s one that can be upgraded and I’m not too sure how that works yet.