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-

New and Improved

After much sweat, blood, tears, and swearing at Photoshop for not doing perfect alpha masking circles, the new and improved version of the main menu is finally completed, in accordance with the concept sketches on the website. Additionally, Nezbot's wormhole and new (although untextured) spacecraft model have been integrated into the project.




Future progress will involve work on the options menu, shader effects for the wormhole, additional work on the construction of a complete wormhole (to form a 'level' or 'racecourse'), and collision detection between the craft and the edge of the wormhole.

Wormhole update

Created 2 models of wormholes, one straight 'pipe' and a turn.

Also completed the main menu screen.

Design Doc?

Yep the Design Doc is completed, as far as im concerned anyway. Might have missed out on a few details i guess but for now it seems complete.

I've sent the completed version out to Xono and Nezbot already for review. The design doc should be on the website shortly after =)

Report

As of today, sketches have yet to be uploaded to website, will do so later as have no access to uni server externally.

Final sketch of main menu will be up, main 'interface' ie. buttons to press to start game have been submitted to Xono.

Website will be updated today and the design document SHOULD be done.

Test spacecraft model done up, no textures yet, but that will come later as the project has yet to be lifted off as a working prototype.

Huzzah!

Well it seems that this new skybox model I made in Maya reads properly in Biturn (a program I use to view 3D models without actually opening up any 3D program) and, I believe, should be able to be exported to fit XnA's greedy needs. -_-

-Added in the textures for the skybox in form of a UV map, apparently standard 'paste-on' textures doesn't read.

Awesome Main Menu!

Finally got a main menu going. We used my leet paint skillz to create the background and the buttons for the menu. I personally think its awesome and my paint skillz are awesome! I think jono wanted to use some other background picture we found on the net but i reckon the 1 i made in paint looks more awesome woudn' u agree? =D


^
vote 1 for leetness ^_^v

Programming Progress

For the next couple of days progress on the programming side of things is on hold in light of other urgent assignments. Currently the project consists of a spacecraft fully controllable by the player (consisting of full 3D rotation, acceleration, braking, and basic friction), a camera tracking behind the spacecraft at all times, and an asteroid that is mainly there to provide perspective to show whether or not the camera works properly.

The next steps will hopefully include a 2D menu system to be presented to the user on game startup, implementation of the skybox once textures are working on it (refer Nezbot's earlier post), and beyond that the wormhole itself and possibly collision detection.

Skybox

Created skybox in Lightwave.

Tried converting to .fbx for XNA use, didn't seem to import the textures... will toy with this further.

Blog site up!

Well after losts of forgetting usernames and passwords, we finally got access to our own blog site to post stuff. yay ^^

-Rudy