Game Pride!

Well, here we are after a weekend of working on the game.

We don’t have enough of a game, this weekend we worked out how to use unity’s physics engine to handle drawing the field and spawning. And I managed to figure out how to get two like blocks exploding on collision, three or more is still a work in progress.

However I have just been told that using the physics engine is the wrong direction -_- I’m going to see if I can prove them wrong, ducttape is king.

Now I need to get the model made, and pray to hell that this week goes according to plan.

ST~

Well, where have we gotten. Chris and I have tightened up the idea for the mechanics, unfortunately there is only so much we can do without a working model as we need to see that the gameplay works before dreaming up shit . I guess this only helps to avoid feature creep

In terms of unity, i’m three quarters through the Lerpz tutorial and ive learnt a lot, apart from some slightly dodgy respawn code. The UI is hell powerful and sadly my lack of scripting knowledge will come back and kick me in the ass.

Days like this I wish I knew PyGame.

This weekend is planned to be a massive work session to get the game to alpha, however a matching color game may morph back into a adventure game. Time will tell… However our inabiliy to make assets would prove to be our downfall in that idea. Hence why we dodged it.

Also the pitch competition shits me off, we don’t have a target to pitch to, I guess this sums up all of Nullabour. Do we go with the sprawling epic of Scott and the Space Elevator, put forward a simple casual game, something innovative using GPS or hell, JellyCat!

God Knows…

Hey Guys,

We have entered the GameJam! (http://www.gamejam.org) with Lightguard and Garlicbug being the co-conspirators at this stage of the game. We’re supposed to have a game out in Unity within two weeks.

Will we make it? God knows!

ST~

So this is something I sent Jon a while ago, just some ideas for the sewer level enemies. Featured: Lawyer bogman, rat on stilts, shellshock tortoise, mafia hitman spider and sad fat flushed alligator.

Oh yeah, and I have a deviantart thing. Schill. http://pgeronimos.deviantart.com

Hey Guys,

This is mainly for members of Game Pride, I’ve upgraded the website to the latest version of wordpress, fixed the avatars and image uploading and turned on users for the wiki.  Therefore if you need to add to the wiki you need to first goto http://www.game.pride.id.au/wiki and then create a user and confirm the email address BEFORE you start writing!

Haven’t fixed the links sidebar, but i’ll get to that.. and the IE bug aswell :p

ST~

What’s happening here?

Well, Wraggs, Michael and Myself finished up GET with flying colors, some more flying than others. Mike’s doing honours, Wraggs is finishing up uni and in theory i’m graduating. The final project didn’t come together as planned, engine held us back {but damn, did it look good!}. But now we’re licking our wounds and moving on.

Game Pride has reformed, Sami has moved on and we now have Josh, John and Wraggs joining the team with Paul supporting us from Greece. We need more mans and more movement, but we’re currently working on a 2d platformer in Torque called “JellyCat” which you’ll be seeing more of, and quite a lot of right now.

And on a final note, I’m off to the Game Developers Conference in Feb. I received a scholarship through the IGDA and i’ll be getting into massive debt and possibly a leg up.  Look out for more updates through this website on Jellycat and GDC!

ST~

Ok guys, I’ve successfully implemented a working scene graph and have attached skeletal entities to it to show that it is working, there will need to be a little tiny bit of work to get textures working with the loaded model but no worries we can forget it at this time. The main thing is that we have a working scene graph. I encourage you all to use it!

This means that all the code in Render() in RendererOpenGL is going to be phased out as I attach and implement everything into the scene graph. The only thing that Render() in RendererOpenGL should possess is SceneGraph::Instance()->Render();

That line only, everything else will be handled by the scene graph.

A commit history is available below:

Committing what I’ve done to the trunk
1) Modified AppModel to pave way for the implementation of our working scene graph
2) Implemented a scene graph with MotionNode and GeometryNode fully working.
3) Attached the use of shaders to each entity in GeometryNode with the use of VisualResources which were implemented to help optimise the rendering of individual entites. Currently there exists one VisualResource object which supports the use of skeletals. There will need to be templating done or the creation of more classes to hold different entities. My money is on the templating as it will be easier.
4) Modified Matrix4x4 as it needed additional methods which catered for the rendering of objects in the scene graph if we ever need to use it.
5) Fixed up a few things in RendererOpenGL (going to remove all the hard coded drawn stuff and start using the scene graph to handle all that)
6) Fixed up a couple of things with the shaders and their classes (minimal)
7) Updated the project exec

We now have a working scene graph! USE IT!

Quick Report, Wraggs and I finished the three day work session on Saturday Morning.  I’m just finishing up the last bits and pieces of the documentation but I am pleased to report that we have worked through ALL of the following.

1) Start drawing up state transition diagrams for AI and game states (this will be helpful when we interact our characters with the game engine. what do we need to do and how? new character is in prison, breaks out, finds treasure room, etc….
2) A description of the Game architecture. Basically what was mocked up last semester except this semester there has been quite a few new additions. Skydomes, view frustum culling for entire scenes, CLOD mesh generation, Lua, Gui Interfaces etc. I’d like a detailed description of everything, including what each topic is. By reading the code you’ll be able to know what I’ve done (the comments are enough)
3) Need to have animation. So Chris start getting a wriggle on with those characters. I’m not too fussed about the Cells or anything like that or as a matter of fact, anything to do with animation now that I think about it since we already have it.
4) Gameplay: Ok, we wont be able to get what you guys desired at the end of this project. It will be impossible from my understanding. Instead we’ll go with the simple I’m a hero youre a bad guy, you die etc.
5) Mock up some stuff for NPC AI using the finite state machine. I also want documentation on its states etc (just as above).
6) Game Design Document. Completed (mostly) and reflecting the students workload (A summary workplan of what was set out and what was done. Basically just look back week by week and note what we did each week for every lesson of GET we went to… shaders, lua, fsm, etc)
7) If the above is completed in satisfactory time then we can maybe pursue other avenues which will make you guys more happy.

Oh, Did I mention that we also set milestones and re-engineered the gameplay idea to be a} Simpler and b} a step between basics and the final version.   Also the game works fine on higher end computers, we borrowed one to compile and run and it ran fine on the geforce, but my radeon still craps itself.

ST~

Yep. Finally! Its been fully completed. I remember some time a few months ago I went and implemented about 80 – 90% of this thing in my game engine only to be hindered by a bunch of run time errors. At that time I had a very good idea on how things should be done but not completely. I decided then to just not worry about it since I already had frustum culled VBO terrain that was loaded from an external file. But knowing me it just wasnt enough. I wanted quad tree formations and I wanted it now!

There really wasnt that many run time bugs to get through, mainly logic problems. That, and I had to create a new class which allowed me to generate my own heightmaps on the fly in my game engine. This is a lot more useful than just loading an external file and using that. Theres the added fun that no matter how many times you load the game now. It’ll always generate a different terrain. Not to mention you can generate three different types of terrain using three different algorithms.

I also went about and fixed up the rendering of objects some more. I still want to get that scene graph finally going but nothing is going to happen until I get some solid work done on my I&J assignment. I’m planning to really get into it this week coming. I’ll try knocking out my part of the design document, then get straight into the design and implementation of the website. And after all thats been set up, just simply work on the coding for the assignment. Should be all good.

And now my log summary of the whole thing:

Outlining changes made to the project…
1) First off. Finally fully implemented VIPM terrain generation in the game engine. Its about fucking time!
2) Modified AppModel to reflect the loading and passing of the new terrain…
3) Modified Vector3 to not include a vector like operation. This was instead moved and is now contained in the Terrain class. It is an embedded terrain specific function call for its own vector struct thats used in the quad mesh.
4) Modified RendererOpenGL to harbour the rendering of the VIPM mesh. Also changed around how things are rendered. (For the better).
5) Modified CurvedSkyplane (minor).
6) Created a new class called HeightmapGenerator which does what its name suggests, that is, creates heightmaps for us from the choice of three different heightmap algorithms. They are: Midpoint, faultline, hill. Does a lot of other cool stuff.
7) Changed Terrain.cpp and .h significantly to harbour these changes. There was also a lot of code that was fixed in order to display the mesh correctly etc.
8 ) Updated stdafx.h to reflect some std::max and min definition problems…
9) Updated vcproj.
10) Updated project exec.

Surprised that it was only that big?

I bet you were. I have a video demo on my skydome stuff but I cant exactly show you what I’m doing until after we get permissions and all that other crap granted.

So I’ll leave the notice here just to notify my team members that theres a video waiting for them if they want to see what I’ve been up to…

Michael

Yep, I’ve updated my profiles on a few sites check em out for a good read on who I am =]:

http://they2t.deviantart.com

http://steamcommunity.com/id/they2t

http://www.myspace.com/they2t

enjoy!