The wall walker

The game is progressing nicely, but there is still a long way to go in order to get it to an acceptable state for the milestone this week. The player is moving and shooting, we have sound, AI critters, Mini turrets, and the walls are up, though from time to time the player manages to “pass through” a wall. Hmmm…need to think more on this one.

Sound

Hey there,

For the last few days I've been working on implementing the game's sound. The sound is being set up so that if there are two players then there will be two channels of sound. One channel that plays all the sound that player one can hear and one that plays all player two's sound. Hopefully this sounds a good in practice. We should find out on Wednesday when the play testers come in to play our game.

-Nick

Making headway

Hello dear readers,

Many elements of the game are nearing completion and have started being tested in the game. Two players, sounds, shooting, the core time-travel mechanic, path-finding, stationary shooting turrets, ability for the player to place items on the map, a computer controlled enemy, animations for the time-travel/level reset graphics, keyboard/mouse and XBox 360 controller functionality, 3rd person camera with zoom, collision detection, mines, and the famed temporal anchor device have made an appearance in the game engine today. Though some are not quite in their final form of polished gameplay, it's good to see some visible results from our efforts over the past 3 weeks of development.

The plan is to wrap up most core development on the game Wednesday night, leaving us Thursday to iron-out bugs and Friday to tidy up the game, finish documentation and prepare for submission on Friday afternoon.

Onwards Ho!
Paul

Bringing it togther.

And now we have reached that time to start bringing the "succinct units of functionality" together. I always liked that sentence. It pretty much sums up exactly how code should be.
It seems now the fun things are starting to appear in the game. Lots shooting action, 2 players, visual effects, and this strange thing that the camera does that makes it look like you’re going through hyperspace.
As we work harder to reach our milestone this Friday, we are thankful to have tutors on hand as we need them. Without them I don’t know what we’d do.

Seeing Squares and Circles

Today, for me, has been a day of maths. I was given the task of calculating the rotations for our rotating wall taking into account the position of the collision and the direction the collision object was heading. It didn't take me too long to nut out a solution, however I haven't had a chance to test it so fingers crossed.

I also worked on sphere-square collision. My solution to the problem was to calculate the distance from the center of the sphere to the closest point on a line and then subtract off the radius. Yay Science!!

-IOU One Title-

I started off this week by learning how to implement and code threads. Threads are kind of like tiny little sub-programs, which act together to form a larger program. Threads are given their own small amount of processing time, and can even reserve a little bit of memory for themselves too. For example, most games split off a seperate thread for sound/music. This means that if a game is busy loading (or stalling), the music continues, regardless of what's happening with the rest of the game. The same thing happens with MMO games. Have you ever noticed when your internet connection stalls but everything in the game world keeps on rendering? That's because there are separate threads to handle rendering and internet stuff.

This is all well and good, but its a pain in the aft-end to debug. One thread by itself can be a lot of trouble to manage, and up until now, we've never used multiple threads in our projects. Introducing another thread into the mix is going to be like lighting both ends of a firework...

But you never know, it might go off without a bang.

Here are some of the photos from the team.
More to come I am sure!
Keep posting and commenting.
Steph