My name is Ca. Ca Star.

So there i was, minding my own business. And that anthony guy said "tonight... you!".

That's okay though... 'cause i had other friends. Friends like Aye Star. Aye was cool, he could figure out where to go.. when something got in the way, he sorted it out. He'd show you the best way; every time.

He and I hung out early this week; getting around things, going places. But then we one day, he and i both tried to get through a thin corridor. It was only as wide as one of us, yet we both needed to get through. He wasn't the smartest kid on the block, and to be honest, neither was I. We could never make it through that corridor.

Wednesday came, as so did a new addition to our team. His name was Ca. He was Aye's brother and unlike us he was pretty smart. He understood the space-time continuum and he taught us to cooperate and with eachothers cooperation, we made it through that corridor. All three of us.

Hello E!

The first week back after the much needed break! We had a big meeting with the whole team about where to go to next, everyone was given a task to do and we set out for the week to do it. I was paired up with Roy on prototyping networked physics. We used Raknet for networking and PhysX for physics simulation which is built into Gamebryo.

I read what very little papers I could find on networked physics and discovered for us the best way would be to have every player in the game look after and handle every one of the physics objects they were directly manipulating and just send that information to every other player in the game, avoiding the use of a server.

This week we had two guess speakers from Sidhe Interactive, gareth and james. They were extremely valueable and gave us much help and information for our pre-production process. I would gladly have them back to speak to us again and look forward to it!

Catt – Catch Up

Got back into MDS this week, I’m finally feeling better. Spent the beginning of the week familiarising myself with the design; like the general concept but I defiantly saw some general design issues. Fortunately we had James (game designer from Sidhe) come talk over the game with us for two days. Defiantly helped sort things out. Other than that, have been helping prototype a cooperative AI system, this is going well and seams feasible.

Tim Bewick - Week 3

I have been working on prototyping and performance testing using bone level of detail with models in Gamebryo. I have found that it is easy to program and it can speed up rendering of a model that uses it quite a bit when using the lower levels of detail. The artists had some trouble at first exporting models with bone LOD but that seems to be working well now so we should be able to put bone LOD in our game fairly easily and it should help keep the frame rate high with lots of enemies on the screen.

Jason - 16th January WEEK THREE

"Dear Diary"

This week i have been assigned alot of research into a wide variety of subjects, these include 1930's Society, Chairoscuro Lighting, German Expressioinst Movies, General Expressioinst Movies, Resource Management and am now working on Sound research, which includes things such as Ambient Sound Effects, Mood Music etc.

I was assigned to break down the weapons of "Gears of War" and the "Rainbow Six" cover system, to understand how they work.

I was also assigned to gather as much refrence of army uniforms, medals and insignias used in the past present and possible future of the military.

Blake Week 3

I got a tone of referance images and videos this week.

I looked at environments and buildings

Also did a bit of concept work for some buildings

Prototyping

It is almost the end of our prototyping period and the prototypes have yielded quite a bit of knowledge into areas from which we were unaware of previously.
The bone LOD's and getting this working through Gamebryo's implementation gave me more than a bit of a headache and scare this week with troubles with the exportation process of models from Maya, fortunately we had our lead artist/technical artist Anthony take some time from his day to make sure that the process got worked out properly. We are now able to stress test the bone/poly and LOD benefits using Gamebryo.
The Raknet/PhysX prototype of which I was personally working on has yielded that the possibility of networked physics on a server basis has been moved out from being a "should have" feature to a "nice to have" feature. LAN play of the game should not be of major difficulty in terms of physics simulations.
The cooperative A* prototype is currently in a decent condition with a robust implementation of the graph and path finding it is not yet fully implemented but I've been told it will be complete by the deadline and the proof of work done has been apparent.
The schedule has needed some reshuffling during the beginning of pre-production, but the documentation will start tommorrow with prototype post mortems.

Design Overhaul

It seems that the scope of the project is still a big problem. James from Sidhe was in today giving the team some pointers and helping us to identify possible risk areas for the team. The day and night cycle for the game seems to be a winner! It is beginning to look like cover may be culled from the game though. It is still pretty early on in the project to make this decision however but looking at the project as it stands, cover may technically give the team an unwanted headache. Prototyping will need to be done before we as a team make this decision but it is something that the team will need to keep in mind. Stay tuned for more updates...

style defined

The art team is working steadily on pre-visualisation materials, research and drawings.


A pre-vis art-style drawing from the art team.

First Week back W00t

So we are into the first week back. The programmers are working on prototyping risky concepts and the artists are busy working on their previsualisation material.