Integrationisation!

Hey all, just a quick update so you know I'm still alive :P

Spent the last week or so touching up some of the systems I've gotten from people. The particle system is now ready to go, and so is the audio system. Of course, I'll be integrating these after the physics is ready to go.

I've spent the last 2 days or so integrating physics. It hasn't been too difficult to do, the main issues have been sloppy code on my part - resulting in memory leaks in my wrapper classes. I've been steadily removing these as I integrate portions of the physics, however, and am making some good progress.

Andrew T has practically finished his mech animations, however there were some miscommunications in general about what was required. I was under the impression that we needed all of the animations in a single timeline, and as such communicated this to Andrew, who did so. Recently I found out that there is a way to export it off separate timelines, so now, as well as feeling like an idiot, I also have a massive animation timeline for our mech. It will still work though :P

There are bigger problems with the animation - for some reason the skeleton won't export properly with the mech itself, which makes animation a little difficult. Discussions with Russel, Michael and Amir revealed a potential reason for the problem - the left leg wasn't connected to the mesh properly. While it makes sense that rebinding this would solve the problem, according to Amir (who I asked to test the solution), it didn't work. Amir has gotten some animations working via simply exporting vertex movements, but this will complicate other parts of the animation (such as attaching weapons to the bones. You can't attach a weapon to bones that don't actually exist...).

At this stage, I'm integrating the physics into a simple test version of the program - a flat plane, and a different mech that Amir modelled, Michael textured and gave a basic walk cycle to. It works quite well so far, except that the mech becomes airborne after walking in a straight line. I am troubleshooting this issue at the moment - I believe it may be some of the speed and acceleration values I've input. I'm also requesting help for this issue on the Havok forums :P

At this stage, I think we'll have something "playable" by end of next week, at the latest. Which is a godsend, since the engine is designed for scalability. Once we have our most basic form up and running (two mechs running and shooting at each other), we can add in the extras quite quickly. The pieces are beginning to snap together :)