Week 1 - History Post

Since I've fallen way behind on this, we have a series of history posts detailing what has been done this semester.

At the beginning of the semester, I began my internship at Concentric (3 days a week), which, while short-lived, was interesting. Why am I mentioning this on the game blog? Because it severely cut down the time I had to work on the project! In addition to this, Amir also had 3 days a week at Concentric, which meant we could only actually meet each other on Wednesdays, and also cut down on the time he could spend on the project.

In addition to have 2 programmers lost to internships, Brenden had a full time internship for the first 6 weeks, and Rakitha a full time internship for the second 6 weeks. We were effectively running at half capacity for the first chunk of the semester.

So it is perhaps no surprise that very little was completed during the first week of this semester. Brenden was settling in to interning (but still got plenty of work done on weapons models), Amir and I were coordinating our code, and getting a start on our respective parts of the project (Amir focusing on the Vehicle system, and the rendering, while myself researching how to use Havok, and encapsulating it for our use).

Andrew T made some textures for the low-poly versions of our mechs - however they didn't look all that amazing. As a result, I got him to discuss with Rakitha how to sort that out, both artistically and technically. I know very little about 3D modelling myself (if anyone has seen the abomination of a 3D test of Lucy from Elfen Lied that is on Youtube, that was me), so all I can do is delegate any issues about that to the people who *do* know what they're doing in that regard.

Michael completedf two vehicles over the holidays! I was amazed, he still needed to reduce the poly counts quite severely, but we had something to show for our presentation (other than random code snippets).

The Pod-Vee

The Pod-Vee is effectively a humvee with a missile pod attached (hence its name). It is the enemies' light attack vehicle. While not too dangerous on its own, they will likely be swarming the player, and should be quite a handful when this occurs.

The Pulse Runner

The Pulse Runner is a slightly heavier vehicle. The cannon on its back fires an EMP weapon, designed to reduce the effectiveness of electronics - specifically your mech. Getting hit with a pulse from this will slow the mech down, and reduce the effectiveness of weaponry.

Rakitha had produced an animatic for his cutscene, which was looking entertaining.

Ryder had procured a plugin for our particle system, and was having some difficulties getting it to work, however the effects it produce were above and beyond anything Ogre's native particle engine had shown me thus far. The main difficulties with the plugin were yet to have been revealed to me however...

Rob had redesigned his AI system, yet again. The reason for this was that the old one was too complex, and he was struggling to get it working.

Amir had written a basic Vehicle system, and encapsulated Ogre enough to be usable to us.

During that week, I had gotten a very basic test program up and running, using Havok and Ogre together. It was simply two cubes colliding with each other, but its the first step to getting an actual physics system for Steel Arms.