Week of the stable windows..

I've had a very nice weekend indeed. Lots of wow gaming and a little bit of hacking on the game, not much though. I'm now level 28... yay.

I did manage to fix the most severe bug in the windows build. It concerned the time stamping of network packages that got completely wrong because of an uninitialized variable in the client code (shame on me). It took me quite a while to discover that bug, but when it was demolished all network problems disappeared.

What I believe to be the final windows bug is identified and I'm planning to fix it this week. This means that the windows build is just as stable as the linux, and I plan to keep it like that from now on. It's just too cumbersome to make big changes in linux and the at a later point make it build in windows.

I haven't heard anything from the audio and the model guys I got in contact with, so I don't think anything will come from that front. On the positive side, I just discovered a new game collaboration site, primarily focused on content creators. I've added myself as a member in order to get in contact with some people.

Oh, regarding the title of this entry. I'm planning have a specific focus each week starting with "week of the stable windows"... stay tuned for the next entry title.

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.

First shot

World of Warcraft has been eating some of my time, and at the same time I've been preparing a visit to a customer on wednesday . Thus, I've not implemented as much as I wanted to recently. Anyway, got the controllers to work perfectly and I can now drive around in a tank and fire missiles using wasd and space keys. For the missile to spawn at the correct place I had to add size attribute to collidable actors. The size must be available in order to know the relative placement of the spawn point in reference to the shooting actor.

Now that this is in place the plan is as follows:

• Add visual debug support (show axis, show aabb, show obb, show name)
• Make sure console can change/inspect actors
• Scaling of actors symmetrically

These are very simple things, but they really help in the development. The further roadmap is still being worked on but is coming along nicely.

World of Warcraft

As mentioned in the last post, I've bought World of Warcraft. This is really a very nice game and I fully understand why some people just disappears from the surface of the earth after aquiring the game. I have not before played any mmorpg games, but this is just a game down my alley. Unfortunately is has also been taking some time from my game development, but all work and no play makes jack a dull boy :)

Collisions and console...

Got collision detection up and running again, and now improved with a call to actor class' "handleCollide" function. This function can be overridden in scripting, and this way special collision stuff can be done in scripting world. Default collision reponse (such as forces applied) is handled by the class you derive from e.g. if you derive from vehicle the default physics acts like a vehicle.

I also found some time to polish the console. Now it behaves much more clever when handling multi line statements, and also provides feedback to the user when he is typing a multi line statement. Removed some confusing error messages and improved display of return values. Also fixed a bug that caused the terminal to bork when closing console, needing a reset command to work again.

The next missing thing is to handle controlling of an actor. This should also be moved to scripting world. Actually, I have already prepared a lot of stuff for this to work and am not missing much right now. When this is implemented I only need to implement two actors in script and we are back to status quo before the restructure: Shot, Bug actors. Status with a lot of improvements that is.

I am currently installing World of Warcraft. Seems like a cool game, will blog about it later. Until then...