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.

Game Design II - Week 7 - October 19, 2012

So this week in our second class we had to talk about audio and design an audio based interactive game in class. A little confusing? I’ll explain how it went. We walked into class, and the professor did not speak, instead he played an audio clip of himself talking about sound design in games. We were then given an assignment to create a sound based game in the class using only audio cues and the people and room around us. I was a little unprepared with this… me and my group members had a real hard time thinking about ideas on how to create this… since we didn’t have tools to work with. At the end of the class, we would decide on one game for the professor to play and if he liked it, we would not have a homework assignment and would receive full marks for participation.

One group member was also my partner in another class I took last year called Special Topics in Game Development, with Dr. Bill Kapralos. In this course we heavily discussed the development of serious games and many other topics relating to them. As a final project, we had decided to create a digital game in unity for the visually impaired. It sounds complicated I know, but we worked together to create a sound maze involving the use of 3D sound cues coming from different directions. The maze consisted of different switches that would give off sound and the player would have to hit these switching and head towards the end of the maze where a victory sound cue would be playing. Though it sounds very basic, we discussed that we would have to keep it simple to due players possibly getting frustrated while playing the game with no vision.

Completing a similar interactive sort of assignment in class was kind of difficult because we only had 30 minutes. We came up with a similar idea where the player would have to navigate to the end using sound cues that each person would emit. Our game wasn’t really chosen in the class because of course, due to us not knowing anyone, nobody even asked us about our game. A similar game to ours was chosen oddly enough, it was kind of strange, I guess it was a very basic idea. The professor sure didn’t like it… maybe it’s because we made him hop over desks? Haha, I guess not. But we as a class were lacking in certain areas such as a reward system and a fun entertaining factor. So now we will have this assignment as a future homework assignment, we’ll see what’s in store next week.

On a side note, the most annoying prototype assignment I’ve seen so far in both game design classes has been troubling me and my group for quite some time now… A wedding proposal level and game. This has really stumped all of us, because it is such a random and bizarre topic to make a game about… I understand it’s supposed to be digital which is a lot worse I feel… our group has decided to create a musical game similar to something like dance dance revolution… but this I don’t think is very good. I’m currently working on a model to be “dancing” but I’m having a lot of issues with the skeleton and animating it… especially to create in such little time after completing my midterms... I was excited for a lot of the assignments we had received, even the upcoming board game homework, but this…. This is something else.

Game Engines - Week 6 - Midterm Recovery...

                There was no class this week simply because of the dreadful midterm. Now a lot of students in this class were probably laughing at what was on it for whatever reason, maybe because they are smarter? Or maybe because they studied harder…I’m going to assume a bit of both. Since I had my 4^th year Artificial Intelligence exam 2 hours before, I knew things were not going to be too good. I had seriously hoped that there would be a fire alarm or something to delay the midterm, but I finished… 8:30 maybe? I feel like I did really bad because there were a lot of simple things that I had just blanked out on, such as simple definitions and math. I was able to get most of the math questions done, and even the question at the end regarding the scene graphs didn’t seem too bad, I think most of my marks are actually going to come from those sections.

                A lot of the questions on the general section were really simple; I had just simply forgotten how to explain most of them, which I think has screwed me over… I am now hoping on a good GDW mark and these blogs and assignments to keep my mark at a somewhat decent level. I think I’m going to take off the rest of the week from programming to complete a lot of my other assignments for other classes, since I’ve really been neglecting those in terms of quality. Medium assignment deadline is approaching… which is really nerve racking since I feel like theres barely enough time to work on them. In my opinion it is a little unfair, I can imagine the students in the current year juggling a huge workload from the modelling class, game design 2 classes (HEAVY WORKLOAD) and whatever else they may have.

               I myself have to deal with Artificial Intelligence, another programming course which is starting to give me some serious trouble… we’ll see how I do when the marks come out? I’m not sure which assignments im going to tackle next, I’ll keep updated.

Game Engines - Week 5 - 23 EXP OBTAINED!

Finished my solar system that I showed you a few weeks ago! I found that upon programming this assignment that this stuff can get really repetitive, and sometimes I really looked for a lazy way out, but that usually somehow requires more work and gives errors. I’ve been able to gain the proper EXP needed to write the midterm, and based on what I’ve been programming so far, I’m not quite sure what to expect on the midterm… I know we were given a midterm review in class this week, but it did not focus too much in general on anything, we were basically told to know everything except a few things like the rendering pipeline. 

                On the plus side, I started the semester not expecting to even be able to write the midterm since I’m such a bad programmer. I received a lot of online help and guidance from the samples provided from the TwoLoc engine. In order to make my solar system work out, I used that sample from the raypicking, that really helped me on getting a mouse function to click the objects with a function called PickObject(), which I recreated in my own program, cheap I know, but it worked! Taking this further, I added a few if statements that would display text boxes based on the object picked, so basically I finished this assignment. It was simply a matter of me adding information on the planets and recreate moons.

                This doesn’t seem bad right? Well wrong, upon creating moons to orbit around the planet, I ran into several issues and ended up staying awake really late for no reason. The simple problem was basically with the nodes and the confusion between all the parenting. My moons were rotating around the sun for some reason which was annoying… upon asking a friend about the issue, I was told that it would be simply easier to create another node for the moon to move around instead of using the planet entities. These nodes would be placed where the planets were. Once this was fixed… everything worked out. What a stupid little mistake I made, but I guess that’s how we learn?