Looong break

It's been a long time since the last post - first due to exams, then holidays. A lot of stuff has been added since then. A curved right-angle piece has been added, but is currently undergoing debugging due to some peculiarities with the FBX format - it seems that more than one seperate mesh being present in a model (which we do to ensure double-sided faces) causes a number of normally unrendered meshes in the FBX file to be displayed, causing wildly unpredictable results. Collision detection has also been implemented in it's early stages, but is incompatible with the new curved piece, and still has serious issues to work out.

Immediate plans for the future include restructuring the code to optimise and take advantage of OO, further developing or possibly even rewriting entirely the flight dynamics, and further work on the formation of a complete level.

Sadly, no screenshots available at the moment, but some will go up soon.

Practice Presentation

Tomorrow is our practice presentation session. Me and nezbot have completed our parts, just waiting for jono to finish his part and send me the final version. Also still need to grab afew screenshots thats still left on the computers in sutherland lab at uni. once i get those i'll pop them into the presentation doc.

I've almost completed the updated version of the design doc too. I'll send the completed version to jono and nezbot when its done. Hopefully this time its got everything needed and hope i didnt miss out on anything. I dunno if we need to put it on the website or not. If nezbot has time then maybe he'll put it up for download.

Anyway good luck to us tomorrow. Our real Presentation is on Thursday at 3p.m. in the Sutherland lab. Looking forward to see what other teams have done too =)

P.S. STARCRAFT 2 FTW!!! http://www.starcraft2.com F**k YEAH!

Pause Menu

The website has been fixed so all images are now viewable. In terms of progress on the project, shaders have been included (images from our experiments with them to come later), the implementation of a HUD including all the major ship stats as well as score and cash, and a fully functional pause menu. Developing these also involved the creation of generic-use classes for printing alphanumeric characters to the screen (a massive oversight in XNA). Below is a screenshot demonstrating all of the above features.

The prototype demonstration is set for Monday. I hope to have completed the options menu and at least most of the HUD by then (some parts can't be made fully functional due to the presence of only one racer).

wormhole, wormhole, more wormholes...

Yeah we got a nice wormhole in the game with proper shaders and effects on it for about a week now. Me and jono keep forgetting to copy the screenshots we take onto our home directory so thats why we havnt posted anything on the blog about it yet. It looks really good in game though, screenshots dont do it much justice. Anyway i'll upload the screenshots of the test wormholes when i grab them off the coms in the sutherland lab.

Also we got a mock HUD going on too. It doesnt do hardly anything at the moment but we got a 2D Gyroscope to work with the ship roll. Its using my nice paint artwork again. Theres also a Speedometer that shows the ship speed. It's still not the final version though, we will be changing all the paint art with nezbot's designs later on so it looks nicer. Once again I'll upload the screenshots of all this when i actually get them off the coms in the lab.

P.S. Jono and I are in a bet to see how much more programming we will get completed for the game by monday (or sunday night). Jono thinks he can get options, pause menu, glowly bars for the hud, moving health, shield, and boost bars, and the rest of the HUD completed. I say he doesnt have that much time left =P just the options menu will tie him down for a long time heheheh...

Website Update

Its been updated quite a bit. Can't seem to access the images externally from uni, Rudy and Xono got any ideas how to fix this?

Options Menu

Done those and sent to both your emails, updates will be in website towards the end of the week.

Correction

Apparently Xono placed the ship facing the opposite direction, apologies for that since "programmers can't tell the front or end of a spaceship" -Geoff, 2007-