Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Starting with a new project

This is an extremely interesting project. For the second time we have a client that does not have anywhere near a set idea of what they want. For this client they may not even want a game. I think they would be happy with even just an interesting virtual world without game objectives in it. But being left with very open options could provide for very interesting ideas from the groups. Overall the project is awesome because of the technology we get to work with. We are going to be the only four groups developing games for this technology. Also the project is grant funded, which means we have a good chance at continuing work for this after the prototype ends. People more easily give grant money out than their own money from my experience.
The other part of the project is the team I am working with. I remember taking note of Jon when we came into the game design class as he seemed to really know what he was talking about. It is still my dear wish to have him on the project team I am on for the really game project. I had also wanted to work with Sagar because he seemed intelligent and inquisitive in regards to game programming. He had come up to me a few times in the past weeks to ask questions, which shows he isn't just here to get through it. So I get a group with two engineers whom I wanted to work with during this prototyping projects course. Then Andrew I had already had a few good conversations with and he really seems to know technology quiet well.
Although the one downside to a team this god is that we have a hard time coming up with an idea for a game. But hopefully they figure something out, all the ideas we have had are good ideas. And any game idea we come up with I think will turn out well as long as we keep it within scope.

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Post Mortem

The project went well overall. I was able to learn some interesting things about game developement and just working on a project in a team. The main thing that I learned from doing this project was that we need to not try to do too much in the last part of the project (in crunch time). Trying to add so many things right near the end ended up making them not very productive. If we had chosen one thing to work on then i think we could have put that one thing into the game and done it well. However trying to doing three to four things for the game in the last few days ended up hurting our productivity for those last days.
Another important thing is that I learned further the importance of a version control system. Even if we don't use a program for it, we should set an exact way we are going to handle version control.

One other thing is that the other engineer did not get involved in the project until alter into it. I am not exactly sure how to make sure we are both working on the project, but at least i will make a consorted effort to have both of us working on the project early.

Monday, September 10, 2012

Third Week

This week was good, which is needed because it is the last week of development.
I was able to load in the level after some time. I had to go back into the fbx loading and bring in the rotation and scaling of the objects. Then when loading them have moai do the rotation and scaling.
I just made a separate collision object for each piece of cheese instead of doing something automatically. For the collision object i figured out I could just take the aabb info from it instead of the geometry. Then for collision detection i just did a point vs aabb. So the game has collision detection and still runs smoothly. I was also able to load in animations. Although i did it in a very inefficient way by having each frame of the animation put in a different picture, then just flipping through the different pictures. This makes the game load about 17 mb into memory but it still runs quickly.
I ran into some strange problems when doing animation stuff though. The game would just crash, at the same point every time, without an error or any reason i could discern. Then i would add a print statement above where it crashed and it would work. So i have a few print statements which i think is slowing down the processing long enough for the data to actually load.

Awesome work by someone to get sound to work, apparently it was just linking directX to that project and then compiling it. But for a bit of work during the final week it looks like we may put sound into the game, at least some. Although he said there is a delay from when you play in the game to when you start hearing it. So that would make it so we can't do a sound by reaction, like every time they hit a piece of cheese. But we can at least have background music.

second week

Second week got a lot done. Was able to get a level parsed from fbx and loaded into the game.
Figaured out that if you have the unform World_Transform then MOAI will put the objects world transform into that variable in the shader. So i am able to have one piece of geometry copied around the level. Still don't have the ability to run a character through the track or to pick up cheese (or have cheese in the level).
I tried to work on sound but it was strange. The guide said you link directX to the project and then compile. However it was able to compile without directX linked, which means to me that something isn't set for it to try to include sound or I just have the wrong project.

next week I'll start to really make a game, Damean said he will get me a level and i'll then work on loading that in and doing collision detection. Then I can start working on features like scoring, menus, animations.