Been working on the level for the 4 weeks since my last post,

all objects now have phx on them and you can destory parts of the buildings and walls

Good Times

This week has been good times, i have finished all LOD for my assets, including the Shotgun, and have begun modelling a extra asset, with the possibilty of more extra assets on the way.

Also begun doing some testing of all assets in the level and wrote down any chrash errors and passed them onto the programmers.

Particles and Networking

So we have particles working, and the networking is on its way.

Tim Bewick - Week 19

I spent most of Week 19 working on tooltips that tell the player how to control their avatar when they first play the game. I made them so they only appear to tell you how to do something that the player has not done before. I also fixed the avatar's jumping and worked on the loading bar.

Whats left to do in 3 weeks.

Fortunately not that many tasks, unfortunately those that are left are giving us headaches. We finally got some networking going, just need to smooth out some of the animations and physics with our friend mister linear interpolation. Then tweak mother giving birth, AI path finding, a few animations, a few particles and fix a few bugs.

Its gonna be mean, the game is really fun.

Art Update ! LOD

Some quick update ya'all :P here's the LOD for both Scientist and 1st Lieutenat, I just realised that I havent posted the 1st Lietenant so watch this space later. Cheers!

Man I'm Beta!

The team has just finished week two of a five week period before beta hand-in and the pressure is starting to mount. During this time, the main focus for the team has been to try and fix features that have been implemented so far as well as getting the gamer experience properly implemented.

My task has been the AI routing. This has given me a lot of trouble over the course of this project. The main challenge has been the fact that the environment is almost completely dynamic. I have been running into cases where the AI agents will almost always get stuck running to a waypoint because the path that it calculated has become invalidated. At the moment, AI agents are using a combination of pathfinding and steering behaviour. This kind of works but I still need fallbacks incase something wrong happens. Some suggestions have been given to me from peers, Darius, and Jon, our new GD Tutor and resident go-to guy. Here are the approaches that I will be trying over the next few days:

- Keep track of waypoints that have been successfully traversed. If the AI agent takes too long to get to its next waypoint, have it backtrack. Add a working memory fact that will change the cost of the edge that could not be traversed so that future AI agents will avoid going that way when pathfinding. Once the fact has expired, reset the edge cost back to the correct cost again. By setting a time limit on how long that edge cost can stay modified, it should stop the edge cost from being invalid for too long (NB: The time limit probably would not be needed if the environment was not dynamic....then again, the agents would probably not get stuck either).

- Place trigger areas around the map that could be problematic for simple pathfinding. If the agent gets into this area, have them perform some action to minimise the possibility of it getting stuck. For example, there are stairs in the area where agents tend to get stuck. I could place a trigger area at the bottom of the stairs that could make the agents jump to the top rather than just walk up it.

- Have designated areas in the map where AI agents can return to where they can easily get to certain areas in the level. If the agent gets stuck, have it try to get to one of these areas where it can begin its search again.

At the moment, I am leaning towards the first one. I'll be back with my progress in the next few days. Keep posted, later days.

Michael Bastiaens -Friday 15th May

"Captains Log 15/5/09"

This week ive been working on creating LOD groups for the enemies and their weapons and such. This process also included creating different resolution textures which was a relatively straightforward task. Once I finished this, I started working on improving the current sound library in order for me to start editing and creating new sounds next week. The last thing I worked on this week was a last minute request to create a new and improved spawn marker which has since taken up a higher priority and so I was working on the spawn marker for the better part of today. So the following are images of this weeks work and next week there should be a textured spawn marker and some new sounds which means that there wont be that many pictures next week. So until next week!


-Michael

Jason Bunker

For the past several weeks i have been working on creating LOD versions of all my assets, all assests now have two levels of LOD, which are all ready to begin being exported.

I have also been building several test levels for programmers, and making changes to them at the programmers requests, which i enjoy because it gives me a chance to get some experiance with the Gamebryo Scene Viewer, but the asset viewer can get annoying.

Screenshot one is of the shotgun with three levels of LOD, the left is 1000 tri's and a 512x512 texture, LOD 2 is 500 tri's and 256x256 resolution texture, and LOD 3 is 25o tri's and a 128x128 resolution texture.

The second screenshot shows one of the quick levels i have created for programmers to test stuff.

Tim Bewick - Week 18

During week 18 I worked on tooltips, I added made the avatars use more of their animations, I made the avatar's character controller change its size when the avatar is crouching.