Status update

I've been on vacation the last week, so haven't had much time to hack. Anyway, I used some of my relaxing time to think about the design of the new AI framework.

I have several things that should be possible: Easy extensible through scripting, possible to define AI through XML scene files, possible to handle AI in c++. I thought a lot about it and think I've finally found the correct design. So now it is time to hack, yay.

I've also used some time to get steamwinter running on a clean windows install. It seems that every person that have tried it so far have had VC2005 installed + some other tools. These come with a bunch of DLLs that tanxoid need. The package I had created did not distrubute these DLLs. To make things worse Microsoft decided to create something called Side by Side DLLs (SxS) that should make the DLL hell disappear. Well, the solution they came up with it not exactly elegant, and I've been fiddling around with DLL manifests and the like a lot to get things to work. I still haven't verified that it works yet, since I need a clean Windows install, but a friend has a clean install and I'll get him to test it as soon as possible.

I just cannot understand why people are so excited about VC2005... I really think it sucks donkey balls big time.

Graphics

I've been ill for about a week now and not fully up to speed yet. This also means that I haven't been able to do much investigation about the AI.

Yesterday Blender 2.43 was finally released, yay. That inspired me to try to convert an actor "Enemy Sack" created by our concept artist Daniel Laursen into a 3D version. The start of the low poly version is displayed below (click for full size). The high poly will probably make use of the new sculpt mode in blender 2.43 :)


Btw. wow = lvl 20 => cat form :D

Updates...

Just fell over this gaming framework. It uses mono (novells open source .net implementation) and seems pretty nice: http://unity3d.com . And it is a danish project, which I think is a plus of course ;)

I managed to get interaction, with in-game actors, through the console to work. Pretty cool I think. E.g. in the server console:

s = connect("localhost", 12345)
r = s.remote()
p = r.lookup("Player")
p.addForce(Vector3(0.0,50.0,0.0))

Will connect to the server and apply a force of 50 upwards on the player actor ie. making it jump. Too easy :P

On the other two scheduled tasks: For now I've decided to not allow scaling of Collidable derived actors. This is because the collision engine can get confused if you change size in the middle of a collision. Furthermore, I would have to recalculate vertices if the collision format is mesh. Maybe I'll decide to support scaling Collidables with box and sphere collision formats, since they are easy to scale. But it is not of high priority right now.

The other task was to add visual debug support. As it turns out, the best way to implement this is to do it purely client side. I really want to do this right the first time, so I'll have to think it over a little first.

I got inspired by playing so much WOW the last week. I think the way they render caves in the game are much cooler that the way I currently do it ie. they take the camera into the cave where you can see the roof. I provide a top down view looking through the roof from above. The WOW way gives you the impression that you are in a cave and not simply watching a character in a cave. So I think this is the way I'll head as well.

And here it begins...

I've been thinking about having my own blog for a while. I just wondered who would go read it. Who would be interested in any of my stuff? I don't no. But now I will start this blog for my own sake, just too keep track of what I've been up to. It will probably be mostly programming related things. So if anyone is interested in this, it's now online. Heck, most blogs work this way don't they ;)