And ah, its a great way to stay in shape

Hey everyone,

So we have approximately 4 weeks left until Alpha. Which means a feature complete game. Its gonna be tough but a lot can be accomplished in 4 weeks.

Known issues that we have at the moment are PhysX exporters from Maya having difficulty creating custom made convex hulls as well as some issues with Gamebryo's particle system.

I'll keep you posted

go go april

shader test



character progress



first person



high vs low

Tim Bewick - Week 13

This week I worked on the HUD, rendering tooltips that have graphics and text, and I made the animations for the characters activate and deactivate properly when they are supposed to.

Michael -Friday 27th March

"Captains Log 27/3/08"

This week I have been working on the Machine gun type weapon and the also got a start on the sniper rifle. At the moment I am using an all Maya approach to the creation of the normal maps for the weapons to make less detailed objects a little bit more flash. Despite some graphics issues with the computer at the moment im getting through the weapons allright. So enough chit chat and more eye candy.

First up... this was a pretty funky graphic error that was popping up a little bit now and then. Just in case it happens to you just whack space bar and then go back to your perspective window and it should all be sweet.

Next up are some images of the machine gun WITHOUT the funky crazy background error. There are some images of the low poly version as well as a image showing the high res model which was used for the low poly model. I also have the current normal map with the unwrapped UVs but this still needs a fair bit of touching up in photoshop especially when the model is finally textured.

This last image shows my current work in progress for the sniper rifle. So far ive finished working on the barrel for the rifle.

Next week expect....very little because we get our last holiday of our course! So until my next week....Take Care!

-Michael

Hello E!

This week ive been working on getting the menus restructured and workig correctly. I have been creating layouts for the menus and putting early programmer art on them. I have got them linking to one another and poping off and on the stack correctly. I am now working on getting the functionality for the menus written and working, starting with the Lan Lobby menu so we can host and all join a hosted game. Some screens of the menus in their early stages are below.

JASON BUNKER

This week i worked on pass two for enviroment assets, all enviroment assets are almost finished upto pass two.

Next week is our holiday, time to catch up on sleep then first week back i will begin modelling the shotgun, both for the first and third person models.

Rockets, Mines and Explosions...Oh Joy

Hey everyone look at this really cool thing I got working!!!




In this video I can lay a proximity mine near the enemy grunt and then provoke him to follow me, hence running over the mine and exploding. The explosions are done using Force Fields in NVidia's PhysX SDK. I then shot a rocket at a car and blew it away.

Yes the explosions are not perfect and yes they have to be tweaked, but there is plenty of time for that in the coming milestones. I think I can safely say that that one is knocked on the head.

Its been a while...

Wow, it has been a while since my last post..it's been a busy few weeks. The team had their first "Walk-and-Talk" milestone last week which was really interesting. Although the gameplay elements were still a little lacking, the game shows a lot of potential. When you have team members trying to compete in a game of car stacking, finding fun in something that seems really mundane, it can have a positive affect on team morale. This raised some interesting questions too...how can we use this to our advantage? What kind of cool gameplay can we derive from it? These will probably be things that will be addressed over the next few weeks. The easiest solution, and something that is definitely proven to be successful with Microsoft's XBox360 is an achievement system. This could only add more fun to the game.

In terms of what I've been working on, AI is what I've been putting most of my energy into these past few weeks with Jono. The agents are still quite "simple-minded" at the moment, they will follow the player if the player starts shooting at them and that is pretty much all. The planning works really well though. The next step, and what I've been working on, is trying to get some scripting working. This has been quite a task but is almost at a stage where I can get other team members to define some actions and goals for particular agents.

That is eveything I think. Stay tuned for more updates. I'll try my best to be more consistent with posts, later days.

Catch up

The last few weeks have been stressfull with the clock never seeming to turn off. The main tasks I've been working on have been the Menu Systems and the sound. The menu's were probably the task I am most pleased with in terms of the way that the functionality managed to synchronise with Lua so well. The only major issue that came from the menu system was the lack of documentation on the Gamebryo GUI elements. A major flaw in our design in relation to using the gamebryo GUI elements was the lack of functionality in terms of a way to create some form of textbox or listbox. As this was discovered approximately 1 week into the coding of the menu's, (exposing to lua, implementing button functionality and renderering) the flaw in our ananlysis of gamebryos capabilities hit my time pretty well not due to a difficulty in converting the code but to trouble with building the Crazy Eddie Graphical User Interface into our project. I feel my experience and skillset when building and intergrating new middleware is good but CE threw a curve ball with the amount of dependencies required to build their libraries into a static lib (They release their static lib to import in their DLL). So therefore our project gained the expat, Freetype and PCRE libraries as well. The task ate my weekend but it was nice to only require about an hours worth of code tweaking to go from not linking or running with CEGUI to being able to use our menu's.

The Networking requirement of my tasks I've been able to set onto the backburner for a while now that I'm no longer working from a branch in SVN. Its much easier to edit changes quickly with the networking and manage any issues with the current build without requiring to reintergrate and rebuild the Trunk against the networking Branch.

Started working on the sound system this week and am able to get my sounds and sound engine to process while attached to our scene graph meaning we can update with the sound positional and velocity data efficiently. Unfortunately not a single peep has been made from my headphones these last two days.... and I'm still unsure why. I've dealt with FMOD before and have found dealing with their engine and docs nothing but a pleasure. One of the holdups as to why the sound took longer than a day to imlement was that I attempted to build against a LIB in Gamebryo that is not included in our version of Gamebryo "DOH", but after writting out the code to link this library I was left with a very over-the-top implementation of a sound system.... that don't work :(

Have taken on a few other tasks mainly to tidy up our codebase and work on bugs we have in our Mantis server. Bugs dealt with by me were the level shutdown and reload so that the player can exit a game and restart without exiting the application, The refactoring of some code in our environment class to seperate out our scene loading from the actual environment manager, while doing this I was able to also solve an additional problem with not all physX object we were loading containing a sorter on their void* userdata(I Think) so that our game won't crash when gameplay elements collide in our physX world and try to tell each other how to act.

ART STUFF

Hello everyone... I'm back, better and stronger than ever :D, for this week, aside from the task of creating the Scientist, 1st Lieutenant and the Grunt, I'm also resposible for the UI/HUD and here's the 1st Pass. Me, Tim and Roy worked on it oh and Josh for the High Poly Monster logo.

START MENU

HUD DESIGN 1


This week would be an awesome task as I'll create the 2nd pass for the Scientist, 1st Lieutenant and the Grunt so watch out my space....Cheers!