Bugs bugs bugs..

I caught some sickness, hence the late blog. I'm back on track now. This doesn't mean that nothing has been done though.

While trying to fix the trigger problem mentioned in the previous blog enty (causing the server to crash because it would reference actors removed from the system), I identified several other issues. Most of them were easily fixed, but one in particular was especially hard to get nailed. It had to do with the way that boost::python converts shard_ptr from python to c++. This is done (when passing by copy or const reference) by creating a new shared_ptr that points to the same pointer but has a custom deleter. This deleter keeps a reference to the python object in order for python to find the python object when passing the shared pointer back to python. The deleter will not delete the pointer itself, but just deref the shared_ptr kept in python. This means that we could not compare shared pointers that we got from python to c++ calls, because they were entirely new ones for each call! This took me quite a while to figure out.

I've also managed to get consistent naming for the scripting and c++ calls, and documented the global functions for scripts.

Projections on the floor works now, but unfortunately they drift a little. Need to figure that out.

Yesterday I drew a very simple animated man in blender. He has the animations: run, stand, beginrun. Now you can control him instead of the tank as requested by Simon. I still need some tweaking before it looks okey though, but it is a step in the right direction.

Simon has been working on creating a set of states for the finite state machine. Especially for the tortoise model. This means that it will patrol a little and attack any players within a given radius. Pretty nice I think. We've discussed how to make it easier to model the behaviour without scripting a lot of states. For now the way to go is to add paramters to the actors that the state can query. From these parameters the state machine can figure out how to behave e.g. aggression = 200 -> go attack.