Tame Tahana

Ok now the animations are all ready for the programmer, which they are finding quite hard to get running smoothly. The animations now have Sequence Layers, which allows certain animations to have a higher priority over others.

For example: Run Forward would have level 0 priority, Idle Left would have level 1 and Machine Gun Shoot would have level 2.

Now this seems simple enough but the blending between animations is proving to be very challenging. I am relying on this to be completed to view my animations not only running smoothly but having it also run in Multiplayer aka Co-op mode.

Right now I am "on-call" with the programmers working with the animations just in case they need any help. Other than that I am working on Animations for our credits, check it out at: http://www.youtube.com/user/tametahana

Ka Pai

Awesome, apart from the animation syncing, the networking is almost done and dusted. I just need to fix up the respawning part. Oh and I would love to test the whole reviving a team mate thing but too many class mates are pre occupied with other stuff *cough* Dota *cough*

Tim Bewick - Week 23

I worked on displaying intro screens when the game is started during last week. I also worked on displaying tooltips when your team mates choose skip to night in multiplayer and I made the menus use widescreen textures when the game is run in a widescreen resolution. I fixed a couple game crashing bugs in the AI as well.

Michael Bastiaens -Friday 12th June

"Captains Log 12/06/09"

With the ever looming deadline fast approaching things are starting to get a lil hectic and its time to start thinking about where we are all heading for jobs and sorting things out for said jobs. This week I took part in a video interview which I am very fearful of seeing since im pretty damn sure I said some things that were REALLY high up on the "Most cheesiest lines" list. Apart from that brief bit of excitement work continued as usual. I made a few more sounds and tweaked a couple more. Ive also been tweaking the LUA scripts while testing the game as well as trying to find a few bugs here and there. Last but not least... We finally managed to get the corpses with an alpha texture on it. It was surprisingly difficult and not as straightforward as it seems...thank you gamebryo for that little headache.

Sadly no pictures this week. But on a lighter note... its ROY'S BIRTHDAY!! HAPPY BIRTHDAY ROY!

-Michael

HMMMM

I'd be lying if I said I wasnt worried at this stage. The networking and animations are still not finished and the entire thing is due in less than 3 weeks!!!!

The good news is that both those things are almost done and the rest if pretty much finished. Just need to do a bit of play testing and more bug fixing and that should be us.

I have been helping out with the networking and I have fixed a lot of the minor issues. I am going to be getting the respawning in multiplayer fixed up...touch wood.

And ah its a great way to stay in shape..

So...can I have a job? [insert fake laugh here]

Well, two and a half more weeks to go before we are finished coding...Its getting close. The past few days have seemed to drag on in class and the main reason is that the Incredibuild trial version we had expired. Incredibuild has been a godsend for our class and has cut-down 17min build times to around 2-3mins. Luckily Roy managed to score us an extension and we were up and running again by the end of the day.

We were pretty lucky this week to get a visit from Phil Mayes from Krome Studios in Australia. He gave us some helpful insight into what we, as budding game developers, can expect when we take our first steps into the industry. The fact that he was smiling constantly did provide hope for the near future. He was also kind enough to give us feedback, tips and criticism for our game which was much appreciated. One cool suggestion was making things "sink into the ground." At the moment, when a player absorbs anything in the game, it simply disappears. I had hoped to hide this using a particle effect but he suggested we just make it slowly go under the ground and then remove it. Simple and effective. That will probably be my task for tomorrow morning.

I have been working on the Reaper melee attack and also trying my best to fix a pure virtual function call I've been getting with the AI agents. I have tracked the problem down. One of the things I hate about PhysX is that if you set the orientation of a shape so that it is now entirely inside a trigger volume, the trigger callback does not register that the shape has entered the trigger. The same thing is true for exiting trigger volumes as well. The agents themselves use triggers as sensors. Shapes are recorded as they enter and exit certain sensors so that the agents can steer away from them. Sometimes, not all the time, if debris is destroyed while in the sensor, and the agent begins steering away from it, a pure virtual function is called because the shape knowledge that the agent has contains the wrong information. Getting this to happen has been such a mission.

Anyways, I'll probably continue looking at that problem. I've also got to get the mother attacking when a target comes in range using one of three melee attacks. Fun times ahead....Later days.

Art Update ! -1st Lieutenant

Finally had the time to post all the things I've been doing for the past weeks and for some reason I wasnt able to post the 1st Lieutenant's update that I finished ages ago so I thought that since I'm just finishing our Marketing materials now I'd post this up too. Cheers

Art Update ! UI / HUD

Hi ya'all , been very busy for the Beta and updated all the designs for the HUD/UI, they're all running and implemented thanks to Tim ( who did an amazing job implementing and helping me with everything ) and the constant feedback/help from Will, Roy and Blake. Will keep you updated Cheers!

Tim Bewick - Week 22

We just handed in our beta. This week I worked on getting Kei's new menu graphics into the game using Crazy Eddie's GUI tools which are not very user friendly. I also made the HUD graphics work properly in widescreen resolutions. Today I just worked on bug fixing. We have just three weeks until the gold milestone is due and then we do our post mortems for a week and then that is the end of our course.

Grr?

BETAAA!!! It was beta hand-in today and I must say that I am pretty satisfied with where we are at for the moment. There are a few cool things that are in the game. First is the particles. The particles that are not blantant placeholders look soo cool. The one I am most impressed with has to be the Mortar. When you are chilling out on one side of the level and you see a blue thing being lobbed in your direction from the other side of the level, you can't help but be impressed!

My main focus for a while now though has been trying to fix random bugs and crashes. As with all software development cycles, you fix one bug and a whole lot more end up rearing their ugly heads. This will probably be my focus for the rest of the development. This, and random AI stuff as well, including getting the Mother to swipe at the player when it is near them, and also have the Reaper swipe when it makes no sense to lunge. There are still some issues with animation blending which Im confident can be fixed. The environment artist also wants AI agents to push things out of their way because it looks "cool." We'll see what I can do. Until next time, later days.